The Clan of the White Lump was prepared for anything, or so they imagined. Their oh so profitable war budget exceeded the war budgets of all their major allies and enemies combined. Among the fervent, every man, woman and child was armed to the teeth as well, with Rugers, Smith & Wessons, Sig Sauers & Glocks, AR-15s and even the occasional bazooka. If a man of color, a non-Christian, or a family with an accent made the mistake of wandering into their neighborhoods, they were ready. If their own children died by the thousands because of the hundreds of errant shootings among them, so be it. After all, it was their patriotic duty to shoot first, ask questions later, and sacrifice a thousand Isaacs every year for their deities, Mammon and the NRA. That no messenger of God ever showed up in time to halt the sacrifice never surprised them. Such was their faith.
They didn't trust education. They negotiated, instead, down the barrel of a gun. And the Leader of the Clan of the White Lump excited their little willies, abandoning all reason for bombastic threats and impunity to the charge of incessantly lying. He was The Alpha Male, they proclaimed, above the law, above the truth, above accountability. Many Judases reached for their whistles, but the Beta Males of the Clan of the White Lump quickly excommunicated each in turn. Alt Jesus blessed Dear Leader and in His Grace they were comforted.
That the cabal surrounding Dear Leader profited so immensely was not their business, or so it seemed.
When the invasion finally came, it was insidious. The invaders were microscopic, and the weapons needed were exponential math, conditional probability, virology, and a smattering of both Keynes and Camus. Trillions in war materiel, billions in arms were hopeless in the face of a series of math problems needing honest and moral and mature leadership and a merely professional level of project management.
While leaders around the world found the resources and the wisdom and the moral maturity among their people to fight back, the Clan of the White Lump turned inward angrily, blaming, as they always did, anyone who dared pull back the curtain on their fake Wizard and declare him a fraud, and blaming the educated for once again, inevitably, making them feel so very foolish. Dear Leader did what he did best, lash out at enemies, foreign and domestic, inciting the Clan to risk their lives in his defense. Many of the loyal Clan ran into the streets with their Smith and Wessons and AR-15s, searching, desperately, for an enemy to shoot. But with the exception of a black jogger here and a black nurse sleeping in her bed there, a doctor and nurse standing between them and the hospitals in which they were saving lives, their enemy remained, agonizingly, invisible.
For they had long ago met their enemy, and it was them, and thus as invisible to them as the virus, itself. You see, self-reflection had long ago been cast out as a challenge to their faith and their unfettered and permanent view that they were, and would be to the very end, exceptional.
