Recovering Weirdo Congressbum Thaddeus McCotter Wrote A Short Story! It’s Not Very Good!

Greetings, prose-act nation, and welcome to Doktor Zoom’s Fanfic Corner. Today, we’ll be sampling some awesome fan fiction from around the web. Our first selection is from a site that doesn’t usually run fanfic, Tucker Carlson’s Internet Tendency. It’s by aspiring TV sitcom writer and Tea Party rockmeister Thad McCotter, whose author tag describes him as “a simple country lawyer from Detroit and a recovering Congressbum.” Ha-ha! Self-deprecating humor will win the reader over for sure!

While McCotter hasn’t specified what fictional universe the story is set in, it wouldn’t seem out of place in the worlds of Revolution, Red Dawn, or perhaps The Turner Diaries. It’s a fairly routine post-apocalyptic political “what-if” story titled “In Aeternum,” which is of course Latin for “Forever.” When are first-time posters going to learn that tossing around Latin all willy-nilly suggests pretentiousness, not gravitas?

In any case, the story goes something like this (and of course, spoiler warnings apply, insofar as something this predictable can be spoiled): Tomas, a 13-year-old child soldier forced to carry a gun in the “Grand Army of the People” in an unnamed “war-ravaged land,” slips away from his camp to try to supplement his meager belongings by illegally looting the corpses of those who were executed by the rebels. We get few hints of where and when the story takes place, only that it is set in a jungle, and that the revolution is devoted to

Birthing a new nation where no one was poor required everyone doing their duty. Those who did lived; those who didn’t died.

We also find out that Tomas is at a camp where “enemies of the people” are executed and their bodies tossed in a mass grave:

Its rim brimmed with the criminal elite’s corpses — monopolists, intellectuals, artists, priests and other irredeemable deviants blind to the nation’s “New Dawn.”

Where could this place possibly be?

Anyway, climbing down into the pit, Tomas tries to steal the shoes off of a decaying body; one comes off easily, but while trying to remove the other, he pulls too hard, the corpse’s leg snaps in half, and Tomas falls backward, hitting his head on a rock. Badly concussed, he notices a piece of paper in the corpse’s mouth, removes it, and recognizes the body as that of a poet who “refused to be re-educated before he got shot.” Tomas recalls the poet’s shooting as “the camp’s most memorable execution — except for the girl.” [Ed note: IS IT SARAH PALIN???? IT IS SARAH PALIN RIGHT?]

Woozy and bleeding from the back of his head, Tomas decides to rest “for just a moment” and read the dead man’s letter before sneaking back into camp, even though he knows “the captain” will soon wake. Tomas reads the poet’s letter, a declaration of undying love — almost certainly “the girl” — and its text is interspersed with Tomas’s memories of seeing “the girl” and her infant shot by a firing squad and tossed into another mass grave. The poet’s letter laments his involvement with the revolution that ultimately killed him: “Oh, Maria, what would we be if I’d loved a person not a people?” [Ed note: Sadly no.]

The POV shifts in the final section, as we see “the captain,” who has just shot a sleeping Tomas, wearily order a private to push the boy’s body into the pit. The captain glances at the love note and dismssively pockets it, and the story ends as the private asks him, “Find something, Sir?” The captain simply replies, “Toilet paper.”

Let’s start by checking off a few strong points of this fic. McCotter avoids a few of the pitfalls — heh-heh — of the postapocalyptic genre. There’s no Mary Sue character, and no overt speechifying about how the unnamed culture became the dead poet’s society. It doesn’t get bogged down in speculative details about the tactics of the revolution, or of the resistance. There’s no slash, thank god, no “Off with those pants” moment. And even though we were expecting it, there’s no blown-up Statue of Liberty to club us over the head and say it was U.S. America all the time! Even so, it’s clear that this is a tale of what will inevitably happen when people making over $250,000 annually are taxed at the same rate they were during the Clinton administration — we remember the death camps then, don’t we?

Also intriguing is McCotter’s decision to give the only named characters Latino names: Tomas, Maria, Jorge, José. We are unsure whether this is for the sake of ambiguity — “Oh, maybe it’s not the USA, but instead it is Central America!” — or if there’s a deliberate intention to suggest that lazy Messicans will revolt and take everything from the productive class, creating not a redistributionist paradise, but instead a hellish nightmare where no one has anything… Who are we kidding? This is the Daily Caller.

We don’t want to waste too much time on this thing, but now you know it exists. We wish Mr. McCotter good luck with his writing! Remember, Thad, give us characters we can care about! Next up, we’ll take a look at the latest installment of a far better fanfic, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and then, as always, we’ll close with some My Little Pony Rule 34. I don’t know why you people keep requesting that.

[Daily Caller]

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