by Kirby Olson (March 2018)
Night, Georges Braque, 1951
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edia was 26. Thin, and addicted to fashion, she had been eyed rudely by Uncle Boris at age 10. She had not forgotten. She was a #Metoo rocket going ballistic. Boris himself, one of the last men kept alive, was in an observation tank, on view 24 hours a day from Media’s VCR monitor, which sat on her desk. Imprisoned with six violent rapists, he had been raped an average of once per twenty minutes since his internment. Media smiled grimly. At last she was safe, and it was Uncle Boris’ turn. She reigned from the top of Seattle’s Space Needle, like an eagle in her aerie, glancing now and then down upon the city for a sign of the male gender. She took a Winchester repeater from a case and drew a bead on a male pigeon. It dropped in the Seattle Center Fountain.
Media ordered in a list of the latest prisoners to be executed. After examining the list, she nodded grimly. 70,000 men daily. Soon the planet would be expunged of iniquity. She kissed her page, a young femail of eighteen, on the mouth and fondled her crotch. The womun thrilled to the caress of power. President Media held the world in the palm of her hand. The femail felt a faint blush, and was dispatched on an errand, as Media put her feet up on her mahogany desk, and popped jellybeans from the desk jar.
The Resistance Builds
A leader emerged among the rebels in outer space. While most men hid in the bushes or wept silently under whatever shelter they could find, remembering the olden times of family life, Jason Statler made the men laugh. He spoke of how they had to make a stand and would illustrate this by saying, “For the world is unsteady on two feet, when what it needs is three.” At this, he would unfold his magnificent four-foot phallus, and pogo-stick along, using his two feet merely for balance. Then he would pick up his nubile twenty-year-old and kiss her pretty freckled mouth. His love, as he called her, could run thirty miles an hour and throw a spear at nearly one hundred miles per hour. She was a thing of steely speed, whose look towards anyone but Jason was one of haughty contempt. With Jason, she smiled weakly, remembering their last roll. Around these two, the men gathered, and slowly a sense of assurance and security returned, as they roasted space monsters over a pit and told stories of Jason and the Argonauts.
Media’s temper boiled. The outer planets of the galaxy had been polluted with men. Her scouts had returned with full-reports. Several light-months away, men continued to make love with women. It was an abomination. She prepared an expedition of feminist leaders from all around the world. They met, and each offered 20,000 soldiers for the war to end all wars. Esperanto was adopted as a uniform training language.
Jason Statler held an interplanetary war council among the survivors who were based on twenty planets. They would call themselves the League of Dickheads, and work together to stop the Amazons. All agreed. Giant invisible strands of superglued tinsel were strung between moons and planets, so that only those who had a map could fly safely between them. They then disguised their anti-aircraft guns as giant breasts, so that the Amazons would be psychologically disturbed by shooting their own gender.
Months passed before the alien armada arrived and began to collide with the Galactic netting. The losses were serious. Nearly two-thirds of the ships were destroyed within the first five minutes. Media was furious, not only at the loss of ships, but at how it would look in herstory.
The screen on her computer pulled up the enemy commander’s profile. Jason Statler, 39-year-old greengrocer from Hoboken, New Jersey. Twenty-year-old concubine named Atlatla. Furious at the last detail, Media called an emergency meeting of the remnants of her armada. From now on they would tip-toe through this portion of the galaxy, using scout vehicles to feel their way through the invisible blockades. Herded closely together, they made their way single file towards Ygdrasil, the enemy’s headquarters.
Suddenly, they were attacked by enemy ships. There were immediate losses. As Media’s ships tried to scatter, they again met invisible barriers, and blew apart. Her own ship, the mother ship, could sit stock still in space and repel all attackers. But the others only had guns in front and back and were defenseless against attacks from above and below. They needed maneuverability in order to wage war. Some hid beneath the mother ship, but this only made the mother ship vulnerable from beneath, so Statler’s men flew missions at her underparts, and stung her with unanswered laser weaponry. The battle would soon be over. Media hit a smart bomb, blowing up Statler’s advance ships which constituted 96% of his air force; but also sacrificing what was left of her own scout ships, while also blowing the galactic netting to smithereens. She was now free to maneuver. She prepared to torch Ygdrasil with hydrogen bombs but was afraid, lest her ship be unable to make it back through what was left of the invisible netting safely. Media had a great destiny before her and could not afford to let a minor mopping skirmish on the outer boundary of her empire finish her biography. She would be laughed at in Heaven by the likes of Napoleon and Hannibal, placed among the goofball generals of light opera wars with a dunce cap on her head at the big celestial supper parties. She needed informants with excellent knowledge of these parts in order to return safely. The battle would have to be in close, hand-to-hand, until Statler’s pitiful remnants surrendered.
Her ship still held 20,000 units, hand-picked for small breast-size and keen eye-hand coordination. By using the most male attributes as a guide to choosing her soldiers, however, Media had sacrificed women’s intuition. As her soldiers goosestepped in unison from the ship, they were immediately met with a hail of small-weapons fire. Several thousand of the women died before they could locate the attackers and launch a counter-offensive. When the counter-offensive came it was devastating. Outgunned, Statler’s men were trapped by a blizzard of metal which left all but a few for eternity. Many who survived were so badly shredded, the ants crept towards them.
Statler’s last stand was made in a copse of trees. Media’s forces urged them to surrender, as they were not confident that they could attack this force and still keep a male or two alive to help them get through the invisible webbing back to Earth. With a bullhorn, Media announced the folly of Statler’s position. From nowhere, Statler’s concubine came screaming at Media and unleashed her spear. Ten women bodyguards leaped in a line in front of Media and the spear flew through their breasts. Their breasts were so small the spear continued on its deadly flight. Finally, Media’s eighteen year old page stepped in front of her commander and took the spear in her ample breast. She stopped the spear, but died. The power of the phallic signifier is such that even when thrown by a woman, its devastation is awesome. With no other weaponry, Atlatla was seized and brought aboard the ship for torture. Media whipped her ass with a rose branch until she responded as to how many of Statler’s men were left. There were 69.
Media asked if Atlatla knew how to negotiate through the invisible webbing back to earth. If she had known, Media would have torched Ygdrasil with the hydrogen bombs. Atlatla protested that she knew nothing, and Media believed her. In a male-dominated society, women never get to share sensitive information. To save Atlatla, Statler had to surrender. Black hoods were slipped over the men’s heads and they were brought aboard the ship, to be used as living sperm banks.
Media then forced her army to look at the men’s naked genitals, while she monitored their pulses. If their hearts raced, the women were put to death. There had to be a reason she had suffered such great losses in her first real battle, and that reason was there were too many male-identified women on board. Two-thirds of them were killed. Thus purified, the ship limped back to earth in the grip of eternal feminist night. Media went to see the valiant enemy commander. His sleek blond Apollonian body appealed to her, as did hers to him. They were both great leaders. They could not help but imagine the stout children that would come of such a thrilling combination. Genes spoke more loudly than ideologies. They melted into a love embrace. She took him inside her, and stars as if from the universe’s first explosion went off in her mind. She knew love.
“Take me, take me,” she whispered, marveling not only at the shallowness of her ideology, but also at the carnage she had caused in service of it. She discovered a whole new side of herself which had until then been suppressed by her own propaganda.
With the news of Media’s massive losses, and then rumors of her coupling with the last male commander, Earth revolted against the feminist death grip, and the feminists lost control. Nearly a billion feminists were put to death as war criminals in the ensuing aftermath. Male-identified women riddled every woman suspected of being anti-male with machine gun fire. As it turned out, many women had hidden men from the holocaust just as some throughout Europe had hidden Jews during the Second World War. Revels began with thousands of women dancing with and celebrating with the final remaining men.
With his natural leadership and good looks, Jason Statler was every woman’s dream. Once again, peace ensued, as all became united through the idea of Jason. Statler then said, “Media caused it.” Seizing Media by the shoulder, he broke her neck at the top of the spine. Then he married my great grand-mother, Atlatla, and settled down to raise a decent family.
Today perhaps the story of this holocaust has receded in memory to the point that it is merely an academic subject. But what we don’t remember, we are condemned to repeat. Too many people died in this senseless ideological struggle for us not to understand its lessons. Of Statler’s three children, two were too traumatized to bear children. I alone survive of Statler’s and Atlatla’s line. We must learn that happiness resides not in my loins or yours alone, but in the joining of them.
_____________________________
Kirby Olson is a tenured English professor at SUNY-Delhi in the western Catskills. His books include a novel (Temping), about an English professor who starts a circus in Finland; a book of poems entitled Christmas at Rockefeller Center
More by Kirby Olson here.
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