A DISTANT THUNDER

by H. A. Covington

  As far as preparing for the coming revolution, that was pretty much Carter and Adam’s job. Adam had made good use of his time in the army, and the two twins were planning on making good use of theirs when they went in. The rest of us were your basic litterbug, computer spam and spray-paint unit. At least two nights a week we went out and did all kinds of hateful and horrible things, and we had a great time doing it. We moved and distributed leaflets, pamphlets, and other printed material in a hundred different ways, from slipping leaflets into newspapers in racks to be sold to sliding business cards with a Tricolor on one side and a slogan on the other into junk food containers in the grocery stores. We got into the high school computer lab and sent out tens of thousands of e-mails all over our district through various dummy accounts and anonymous servers located offshore, everything from complete copies of White Power to nasty little one-liners impugning Leon Sorels’ ancestry.

  Our crew of teenaged Jerry Rebs did one psychological warfare attack against the local power structure that to this very day I still think is an absolute hoot. It was Rooney’s idea; she could be charmingly malicious. It took us two weeks of covert labor after hours, wearing surgical gloves so as not to leave fingerprints. We mailed out two thousand form letters to the upper echelons of the town of Dundee and Lewis County, written on a purloined copy of Ole Stolen’s letterhead, printed on a high school computer, copied on the school copier and stamped on the school’s postage meter. In this carefully composed fake, Hizzoner our beloved mayor rambled disjointedly on and on for two pages like he was drunk or on crack, and finally declared his adulterous passion for a very prim and PC married civics teacher at Dundee High, a really arrogant and obnoxious feminist we all hated. He even included a little love poem for her:

  Who is it that hath burst the door, Unclosed the heart that shut before, And set her queen-like on its throne, And made its homage all her own?...My Birdie!

  The ridiculous poem was my idea. In my self-chosen course of eclectic and eccentric historical reading I had always liked true crime stories, and it came from the Adelaide Bartlett murder case in 1886, written by a Church of England minister who fell for a slut who poisoned her husband with chloroform. The damned thing reads just as awful and puerile today as it did in Victorian times. When it was read out in open court at the trial, the Reverend Mr. Dyson was laughed out of his pulpit by the whole country and had to emigrate. The little jingle stuck in my mind and I thought it was so funny that I started looking around for something contemporary and devilish to do with it. So far as we knew, the mayor and Ms. Constanza had never even met, much less had an affair, and no one ever called her Birdie. But you’d better believe she was Birdie from that point on.

  You see the essence of psychological warfare as opposed to the shooting kind? You destroy the target’s mind and his will to continue instead of his body. There are times when it’s better to make a public fool out of an enemy than to kill him and make him a martyr, and risk him maybe being replaced by someone who’s more competent and more dangerous. That whole letter was bogus from beginning to end, a practical joke by teenagers, and yet it completely ruined Stolen and caused the liberal bitch to have a nervous breakdown. Stolen spent the next month yelling and hollering in the newspapers and on local TV and radio about how it was a hoax and his enemies were out to get him, but no one in Dundee ever quite took him seriously again. Ms. Constanza tried to ignore the whole thing, but all the while everybody in town was snickering behind their backs, making little bird calls and flapping their hands like bird wings, leaving Big Bird toys and birdwatchers’ books on their desks for them to find, playing “Bird Is The Word” over the school intercom, you get the picture. Ms. Constanza had no sense of humor at all to begin with, and it drove her totally nuts. The flap led to so much recrimination and confusion and investigations and hoo-ha that she left at the end of that term, and Stolen’s credibility as a civic leader was severely shaken as well as his self confidence, which was a plus for the NVA when we started shooting up the town and making things go boom in the night.

  Revolution is bloody and deadly, but it can also be more fun than a barrel of monkeys if you play it right.

  Above all, the Party encouraged flag actions. One flag is worth a thousand words, once you can be sure that everyone in your community knows what that flag stands for. Once they know, people need to see it everywhere. We had hundreds of Tricolors made up out of everything from crepe paper to plastic to silk, and we stuck them up everywhere, sometimes running full-size Tricolors up the flagpole at the post office and other buildings and steel-strapping the lanyards to make sure the flag stayed up for at least a couple of hours of daylight. We had Tricolor stickers, with or without slogans, some just on gummed paper, some in vinyl with a kind of super-glue that Carter made up in his workshop that had to be sandblasted off wherever we slapped them up. We made sure that blue, white, and green color scheme was imprinted in everybody’s mind: we had Tricolor stickers, business cards, leaflets and of course many cans of spray paint.

  Lest all this sound like kid stuff, you need to remember the times. The things we did were good practice for future NVA operations, because they were plenty dangerous. Slip up on a sticker raid and you ended up in the same prison along with the comrade who shot a spic and with almost as much time on your sentence. In the eighteen months prior to 10/22, over two hundred people in the Northwest received prison sentences ranging from five to twenty years for various hatecrime counts ranging from Federal felony littering to Federal felony vandalism to Federal felony criminal mischief, and of course anything that was done on a school or university ground or a place of employment, whether you were employed there or not, was covered by the Dees Act. During that time six comrades were shot dead by the police in the act of distributing unlawful literature or spray-painting. The youngest was twelve years old. Their names are on the Wall of the Martyrs on the Capitol Mall in Olympia. ZOG also tried to get us on anti-tagging laws originally brought in to try and stop Mexican and nigger gangs from spray-painting their gang symbols and art work all over public transport, then when that wasn’t strong enough it became “criminal conspiracy” to cause mental anguish to our poor little dusky brethren. The hell of it was, we really didn’t do all that much racial slurring, for psychological reasons. We understood that spray-painting nigger on walls didn’t really resonate with ordinary people. It looked petty and childish. Most of the impromptu redecorating of the landscape we did was the standard blue, white, and green stripes and something like “Mexicans Out, Whites Back To Work,” “White Freedom” or “A Northwest Nation” as a slogan.

  All that having been said, these nocturnal escapades were some of the best fun I ever had. Not to mention the fact that they served as dates with Rooney. Our relationship had developed on lines which were very odd for the time, when adolescent boys and girls viewed one another as targets, competitors, trophies, or sex objects. You couldn’t really call it platonic, because the illegal political activity created a kind of intensity that merged with normal teenage sexual tension and became a real psychological high. But I was perfectly happy to be a comrade-in-arms, and she always gave me to understand without a word that I was someone special to her, that I had been chosen, and that one day it would be time. I was so sure of this that I was never in any way jealous of any of the other guys my age who were involved in our Party unit. But nothing was ever said. How can I explain this? You just didn’t talk about things like that with Rooney. There was always so much more important and much more interesting stuff going on. In one way this was very good for me. Most teenaged boys back then, and today as well I suppose, spend most of their time pre-occupied with their dicks. Nature of the beast. That part of my life was taken care of by my initiation into the Wingfields’ extended family, and so I exercised my mind instead, which is a very lucky thing for a young man to have occur in his life.

  I don’t think that during my entire high school period Rooney and I ever actually went out with each other, alone,
on any occasion that was purely social and not racial in some way. I have to admit, I was really disappointed not to be able to take her to the senior prom, but not only did the Wingfields frown on dancing for religious reasons and because it made white kids act like niggers, but Rooney scoffed at the idea herself. “Lord, Shane, can you see me tryin’ to dance!” she cackled in good-humored derision. “I’d look like an oil derrick in a tornado.” So on prom night I brought Rooney a corsage anyway, and Ma pinned it on her denim jacket—she was allowed to wear jeans when we were out on a tickle—and she wore it all that night while we tossed Party newspapers on lawns and in driveways all over Chehalis and then sprayed a huge Tricolor onto the wall of the Shelton fire station while the hook and ladder crew were out on a call. We sat on the sea wall and watched the dawn come up over the mountains behind us and light up Dundee harbor together, and I got another kiss. That was our prom.

  I remember saying something as we watched the sea about how beautiful our Homeland was. “It will be even more beautiful when we’re free,” she replied.

  Then it was back to littering and vandalizing for a while. But by this time the rich men in Lewis County were getting seriously worried about all the blue, white and green graffiti on the local hoardings and underpasses. Especially all that “Mex Out, Jobs In” stuff. The pale peasants seemed to be getting ideas above their station. Frightening words like “living wage” loomed in the rich mens’ nightmares. Well, comparatively rich, anyway, although our county’s business upper crud was pretty small potatoes by Seattle or national standards. Profits at the sawmill, the cannery, and the paper mill seedling plantations might even be threatened if Hispanic labor somehow got the idea it was unwelcome in nice, friendly, liberal and diversity-celebrating Lewis County. This blue, white and green motif was starting to upset their braceros and madrugadores, and the rich folks’ housemaids and nannies were becoming scared to go home at night for fear of the evil gringo racists they saw hiding behind every tree. The pale-skinned natives were restless and must be sternly chastised, taught respect both for their betters and their betters’ dark-skinned pets.

  So they called in a special FBI Civil Rights Task Force with cart blanche to cleanse all of Lewis County of horrible, wicked racism, and that is how I had the unedifying experience of meeting Special Agent Bruce Goldberg for the first time. But maybe before I talk about that I should tell you about how I met Red Morehouse. Yeah, I know, I’m jumping around, but you said you wanted stream of consciousness. The Goldberg story isn’t important. A Jew is nothing, just a Jew. But Red? Now there was a man.

  One of the things the Party did very early on was to encourage our best people to go into certain professions which might prove to be of use at a later stage of the revolutionary struggle for Northwest independence. High on the list among those professions was teaching, and since teachers were paid some of the crappiest wages in state government for one of the highest stress and highest bullshit jobs going, there were never enough to go around, and even in a devastated economy, jobs in education were plentiful. Especially in more rural areas of the state, where the pay was far lower than Seattle or even Dundee, but where the students were still largely of a certain pale complexion. Exactly the places we liked to recruit. Even in an economy that was on an iron lung, teachers could be sure of a job if they were willing to keep quiet during school hours, live on a peon’s pay, and put up with several tons of politically correct crap per day in order to get at a few good and receptive young white minds with the racial message.

  Martin “Red” Morehouse had set up an unofficial after-hours school for those of us white kids at Dundee High and also some from the middle school like China Wingfield, who were interested in actually learning something, in finding out about the true history of our race and the way things really worked in society. We called it the Chowder Society, Red having asked us to avoid any specifically Aryan or subversive names for it. We would meet in the homes of various Party supporters, but especially often we’d get together in the Wingfields’ back building, a corrugated iron structure that was kind of half barn and half garage. It had an upper floor where Carter had set up an actual schoolroom with desks and a blackboard and a stash of forbidden books carefully hidden in a specially built, concealed locker in the event of a raid. There was no curriculum as such for the Chowder Society. We would talk about current events or some piece of anti-white, politically correct crap we’d just gotten in school from the official history teacher, and then Red would pull out one of his books, or sometimes a copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica 1925 edition he’d found somewhere, and he’d tell us the straight dope.

  There were about a dozen white kids from Dundee involved in the Chowder Society at any one time, and on a good night maybe seven or eight of us would show. This was that one exception I mentioned before to the small team rule. For many years, Chowder classes were the largest white gatherings or meetings I ever attended. I never served in a Flying Column, so I reckon it wasn’t up until the newly-formed Northwest Defense Force was massing for the attack on Portland that I ever saw more than a hundred of us in the same place. Even my cell block at Auburn FDC only had about fifty Volunteers in it. Sometimes the Chowder class no-shows had to work, as happened when I myself was pushing broom at Burger Doodle, but in some cases the kids’ parents found out what was going on and got scared and made their sons or daughters stop coming for a while. Odd when you think about it. They would rather Kevin or Jennifer hung out in the park with the skateboarding dweebs chugging on malt-liquor forties and smoking dope than attend unauthorized and politically suspect educational events where they risked learning unpalatable truth and might end up using their heads for something besides a hat rack. Better a trashed-out doper or a pregnant slut than an evil racist Nazi. No kidding, there were parents who actually held that attitude.

  I’m sure the school administration knew what was going on, but they were puzzled as to how to deal with it. If they made an issue out of Mr. Morehouse’s little hobby and tried to fire him, that would mean bad publicity and a descent on the Dundee public schools by the news media and by heavy liberal bureaucrats and psych mooks from Olympia to denazify everybody in sight, with all the accompanying sound and fury. Those paper-pushers had experienced quite enough of that during my little set-to on the playground with Bobby Fernandez, thank you. Even worse, Mr. Morehouse might hire a lawyer and sue. He was a member of something called the American Association of Scholastic Inquiry, which was pretty much a Party front group for our teachers that for some reason didn’t seem to have branches anywhere but in the Pacific Northwest. At that time the AASI was considered legitimate if politically suspect, and it was believed that the Association might have enough money to hire a shark. Incorrectly believed. No one had any money in those days, the Party least of all, but the very sight of an attorney’s letterhead sent people screaming into the night in terror. Lawyers were a contamination who destroyed lives and laid waste to whatever they touched.

  Technically speaking, there was nothing outright illegal about people simply meeting in someone’s house and having a private discussion about history or literature, but it got the liberal administrators’ sensitive antennae quivering. They were pretty sure that this wasn’t kosher in any sense of the word. Information and ideas were being exchanged between people who weren’t supposed to be interested in ideas, and that makes any tyranny nervous. All communication in the United States was supposed to flow from the top down through the authorized media, that we might know the will of our lords and masters as to what we should think and believe. Occasionally the flow might be from the bottom up in the form of market research in order that the corporations might make money, but never from side to side where the establishment had no control over the content and was unable to set the parameters of acceptable discussion. Hence the millions of dollars spent and the thousands of Feds employed in monitoring web sites and private conversations in internet chat rooms, although after the infamous Matt Hale case in 2004 no one
in his right mind used them for anything politically incorrect. This monitoring of private intercommunication was one of the more or less publicly admitted reasons for the inclusion in the Dees Act of the section that prohibited the “creation of a hostile work environment through the exclusion of minorities and women and gay persons from social interaction in the workplace.” Amurrica didn’t even want its white wage slaves gathering in corners in the break room or the smoke hole and muttering to one another unless there was minority informer present.

  In the end the school board handled it in typical bureaucratic fashion. They pretended it wasn’t happening, sent each other memos to cover their asses if it blew up, and prayed that if that happened it would be on someone else’s watch.

  Red Morehouse was another first for me, the first live American National Socialist I ever met, although it took me a while to figure that out. He didn’t go around in a brown shirt, he didn’t goose-step or wear a Hitler moustache, his hair was of normal length and neatly trimmed, he had no tattoos, and he didn’t click his heels and yell “Heil Hitler!” all the time. Red was an innocuous-looking older man with hornrimmed glasses who more often than not wore a Mr. Rogers-style cardigan, but he managed to look scholarly as opposed to geeky in an epoch that didn’t recognize any difference between the two. Over the next couple of years I discovered that he knew the Old Man personally as well as most of the top echelon people in the Party, including names that would later become household words, like Winston Wayne and Corby Morgan and Tom Murdock. But I learned these things through casual conversation. Red didn’t name-drop. He didn’t preach or try to argue anyone into his particular NS point of view. Red believed in planting seeds and letting them grow gradually.