The Revolution of 2019 began, curiously enough, in fall of 2019 when Mary Lou Johnson, the nine-year-old daughter of a ranching family outside of Casper, Wyoming, came home from her sex-ed class at Martin Luther King Elementary with a banana, a packet of condoms, and a book called Sally Has Two Mommies. Her mother Janey Lou, a political reactionary, took one look and began screaming. “Goddamit! Goddamit! I’m not going to take it anymore!”
She grabbed the shotgun, a nice Remington 870 loaded with double-ought buck, and headed for the school.
Historians would debate just what led the surrounding population spontaneously to join her. Much of it seemed to have something to do with the schools. One father reported that he snapped when his daughter came home during Harriet Tubman Week, and he asked her about Robert E. Lee.
“Who?”
Another father, objecting to students who wore low-hanging pants, said, “It’s supposed to be a school, not a frigging proctology workshop.” A common concern was that in a fifth-grade class on Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, and Transgendered Rights, the teacher had criticized Primate Privilege, saying that animals had rights too. She then gave the class a pamphlet called Mommy Says Moo. Wyoming was cattle country. Local wives were wroth. They thought it an invitation to infidelity.
There then followed the now-infamous Near Death March, in which the entire faculty of the school was run across the Montana line by infuriated citizens wielding cattle prods. These, dubbed the Poor Man’s Taser, were then turned against anyone associated with the federal government. “The bastards won’t leave us alone. I’m gonna tase’m where the sun don’t shine. They’ll sail back to Washington in one hop like a damn electrified bull frog.”
The uprising, which had started locally with Janey Lou’s shotgun, began to spread both geographically and in its content. Apparently people were fed up with a lot of things. Nobody in government had noticed.
It is now agreed that the catastrophic events which followed occurred in part because Washington, which was celebrating American-African History Week, simply did not recognize the depth of resentment in the country. The city traditionally was inward-looking. Few knew exactly where Wyoming was. Their sources of information were chiefly talking heads talking to each other about each other.
By unfortunate happenstance, the Supreme Court had just issued its landmark decision that public display of the Bible contravened the constitutional prohibition of the establishment of religion. Mere possession, the justices said, would not be sufficient to trip the prohibition and lead to prosecution, but “a reasonable reticence in display” should be practiced. It was agreed that the Holy Book could be carried in a sealed bag with a child-proof lock. That this happened during Moslem Heritage Week further fueled ire among the intolerant.
The Court’s ruling had ripple effects unforeseen in the capital, as most things were. When the rebellion metastasized to Rosa Parks County (formerly Jackson County), Virginia, forty miles outside of Richmond, they were shocked. The provoking incident occurred in Sojourner Truth High School in a rural and not very Reconstructed county.
Specificallly, Johnny Loggins, in the tenth grade, had been issued a condom and, in the back of his African Civilization class, was discovered to be praying for a chance to use it. This also constituted an establishment of religion. He was arrested by several of the thirty-five police patrolling the corridors and remanded for psychiatric evaluation.
Runors flew, fanning the flames. The Democrats, having elected the first black president and then Hillary, the first woman, were said to be looking for a transvestite for 2024. In respect to 2032, the ominous word “trans-phylum” floated about. The people of Casper feared they might have a President who said “Arf.”
The insurrection went viral thanks to the internet. Incident followed incident. In Brooklyn on Sixth Avenue, seven teens between the ages of 21 and 28 beat to death a 95-year old white veteran in a wheel chair, shouting “Kill Whitey!” and “That’s for Travon!” and “White dude bleed a lot.” The chief of police undertook a thorough investigation. He reported that there was no evidence of racial motivation. Jesse Jackson said it was unfortunate, but white men in wheel chairs needed to learn not to attack black teenagers.
After an enraged mob of R-Cubed—the movement was now calling itself Rural, Retrograde, and Right, the Three Rs—had surrounded Columbia Teachers College and burned it, Washington recognized that things were getting out of hand. Reporters asked why the arsonists had, well, arsoned Columbia. An irate woman screamed:
“My kid is fifteen, can’t read, and doesn’t know who Thomas Jefferson was but he’s had three different classes on safe anal sex. I didn’t raise him to be an analphabetic butt-plug. Excuse me. I need to find a professor.” She left, brandishing her ball-bat.
Her assertion was not entirely implausible. A recent poll by the New York Times had showed that 87% of college freshmen, or freshpersons, couldn’t find the Pacific Ocean on a map of California, and fully 54% didn’t know what “Ocean” meant. (“Didn’t she sing with Grody Kate and the G-Spots?” asked one female junior.) Others couldn’t identify Jesus Christ, Mother Theresa, or George Washington, but were “sure or almost sure” that they were racists.
Washington was soon surrounded by R-Cubed insurgents, many of whom proved to be well-armed and with military experience. They soon revealed their true colors as homophobes. Rampaging, they burned gay bars such as Moby Dick and The White Swallow, shouting, “We don’t care where you stick it, but we don’t want to hear about it.” Much squealing and a mass exodus followed.
Surprisingly, it was Maxwell Birnbaum, inevitably know as “Ol’ Burn and Bomb,” who led the hous- to-house fighting. He was not a soldier, or ex-soldier, but a classics professor from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. As the Three R’s fought their way through Arlington in the Virginia suburbs of Washington and reached Key Bridge, key to the city itself, Birnbaum told a reporter, “Twenty-five hundred years of European civilization, and we’re going to give it up to people whose Mothers Say Moo? Like hell we are. Did trilobites scuttle the Cambrian seas to bring us Clitler? Hillary, I mean. If they had known, they would have stopped reproducing. I won’t stand for it.”
The rest is well known. Congress in its entirely was slaughtered, and hung upside-down from lamp posts though, unlike Mussolini, they were not emasculated. It was pretty much agreed that they had taken care of this themselves long ago.
Peace returned. Janey Lou put away the shotgun, and made lunch.