"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
for 10 November 2000. Updated every WEEKDAY.

The lights are going out all over America. With the insanity of the electoral college system now revealed to a tired nation, Americans are searching in vain for a way to vent their frustration with this obsolete, patrician voting system.

Among the vestigial but still spirited remnants of the online community, however, frustration is building against The System itself. Accusations of a stolen election, counter-accusations of high-level skullduggery, incitements to race war: All are flying in the wired fifth estate. The right-wing cranks — er, that is, true patriots — at Free Republic are rapidly taking their rage to the next level. Declaring that it is "Time To Take Up Arms to Defend Our Liberty," the Free Republicans have already seen through The Man's ruses and are ready to start mixing it up Jacobin-style. "In other countries, it's at this point that the shooting starts, and the blood begins to flow in the streets," writes an outraged J.J. Johnson. Another zealot quotes George S. Patton at his most fiery: "You are here to fight. This is an active theater of war."

Sure, we've seen plenty of goofy calls for digitized revolution over the years; innumerable BBS appeals for armed uprising have vanished into the haze of flame wars and MLM spams. But with the Republic held hostage by shadowy bean counters, with dot-communists and digital Birchers united in ire, with Bush and Gore presenting two of the unloveliest alternatives in history, with a Daley involved in vote counting, can it be long before the Balkanization of the American Nation reaches the boiling point? Suck has obtained the cyberevolutionaries' battle plans, and this is our nightmare scenario for what will happen in the next American Civil War:

courtesy of The Sucksters

pictures Terry Colon