Evil Genius (Part 5)

Author's note: This section, and subsequent sections, contain a couple footnotes. Superscripts and footnotes are not something the blogosphere handles well (or at least I don't know how to use them) so where applicable you'll just see a regular number in parentheses and then the note will be at the end of the post. Just didn't want to confuse anyone. On with the show!

Part 2: The Aftermath

Chapter 1

Ivan was not prepared for this, and the shock of that alone was almost enough to knock him over. He was never unprepared. Never. If there was one thing he had been known for since his youth it was his deliberate, meticulous, almost obsessive-compulsive attention-to-detail planning (some would argue that there was no ‘almost’ about it). The very idea that there was a contingency that he hadn’t planned for kept him awake night after night. He simply couldn’t sleep until he had convinced the rest of his mind that he truly had every angle covered. But now as he leaned back in his reclining leather office chair that sat behind the blood-splattered desk of the White House’s oval office, he reflected back on the events of the previous 6 months and wondered how he had possibly failed to account for this.

After vanquishing Captain Invincible(1) everything had pretty much fallen into place just as he had planned. He quickly revealed to the world, via an internet video that was quickly picked up by the major networks, that his nuclear surprise in the U.S. heartland was by no means a solitary phenomenon. He divulged that he had over 100 other nuclear weapons at his disposal, all strategically hidden beneath major population centers throughout the world. In truth he had only about 40, and about half of those were not exactly positioned amidst large urban throngs (unless one considers Fruitland, Idaho to be a burgeoning metropolis). Nevertheless, no one was in a position to dispute his claim and, following a brief demonstration, an accurate inventory became the furthest thing from people’s minds. He had always had a particular disdain for L.A. and the greater Southern California area. Not necessarily for the shallowness and greed that it represented; he was actually a big fan of that aspect. It’s just that he’d always hated the motivations of a group of people who, it seemed, wished to spend as much of their time as humanly possible standing around getting cooked by the sun. He decided that it was really just a tremendous service to increase their ultraviolet radiation exposure by a few thousand orders of magnitude. Sure, they might all be cadavers and piles of ash, but man did they have a nice healthy tan!

After incinerating the city, he quickly discovered that although the capital of the U.S. might be listed as Washington D.C., almost everything that mattered to most of the general population occurred on studio lots and in recording studios in the City of Angels. Even after the death of Captain Invincible, there were a lot of people that found it surprisingly easy to ignore him. They considered his presence a problem for the politicians or possibly the army, if it came to that. The most important thing was that it certainly wasn’t their concern. After all, they had families to feed, bills to pay, and sports to watch. They couldn’t be expected to drop everything and worry about the health of the country and the world every time a super villain got his hands on a few dozen nuclear warheads. When every news show in the country was broadcasting his video, a lot of people simply changed the channel or headed out to the movies. But once that mushroom cloud ballooned over LA, everything changed. Once people realized that the one movie they had waited for all summer was now in fact never going to be released, all future episodes of Lost were just that, and that Us Weekly had just lost its entire subject matter, everyone found it suddenly very hard to be distracted.

So naturally they did the thing that, as Americans, came most naturally to them. They started blaming people. Namely, anyone and everyone that would listen, or at least pretend to. With tremendous efficiency the blame recipient would then waste no time in calmly explaining that they had in fact done all that they could and it was in reality someone else’s fault because either a) it really didn’t fall under their jurisdiction or b) someone else had not provided the support that was desperately needed at the critical hour. This process was repeated ad nauseam until it reached a high enough level where the individual being blamed was sufficiently insulated from public outcry that they could safely proclaim that it wasn’t at all their fault, and anyone who thought it was could go straight to hell. At which point the proceedings would begin again with another low-level blame target, and round and round it went in that phenomenon of modern civilization whereby a problem gets tremendous exposure followed by seemingly endless debate and in the end absolutely nothing is accomplished.

People first began to blame the Soviet Union for not taking better care of their weapons arsenal. After all, most of the world’s nuclear weapons that were presently unaccounted for originated with them. This had shades of actual logic, and in fact it was right here at the start that the general population was closest to blaming the right people, at least in terms of actual responsibility. However, given that the Soviet Union had been disbanded for the better part of 20 years, this left everyone a little less than satisfied. Given the choice, people find it far more preferable to yell at someone that at least has the capability of yelling back. This is not at all out of a sense of nobility that it is not right to attack those that cannot defend themselves, but instead probably arises from a rudimentary understanding that those no longer in existence cannot be sued, voted out of office, or lynched. It would be a bit like the citizens of Atlanta still screaming at General Sherman for burning their town to the ground during the Civil War. Given that many citizens of Atlanta still actually do scream at General Sherman to not burn their town to the ground, it would probably be in the best interest of the greater Georgian population to reread this paragraph.

After the Soviet Union scapegoat turned into a dead end, the next target became the Decatur power plant that Dr. Destructo had infiltrated and where Captain Invincible had met his doom(2). First the head of security was paraded out to answer questions of how the Doctor had managed to infiltrate what undoubtedly should have been top notch security. The head of security responded that he was merely an administrator at the plant and that the job of plant security had actually been fully transferred to municipal law enforcement several years ago. Then the local Chief of police came out to say that due to budget cuts they had been unable to upgrade security equipment since approximately 1986 and had even had to let their best trained and consequently highest paid guards go in favor of mainly 18-year-old high school dropouts that had somehow managed to pass a GED equivalency exam.

Next the mayor came out to answer questions about why the budget had been cut so severely, and he responded that it had been on referendums that the citizens of Decatur themselves had proposed and voted for. Since most of the residents of Decatur had been incinerated, this was not at all a popular response. The fact that it was the truth did not dissuade those offering a dissenting opinion. Many accused the mayor of dancing on the graves of those dearly departed and of being a corrupt good-old boy (he was 27), who had no education (he had a B.S. in Psychology from Southern Illinois and a Law Degree from Northwestern), and anyway he was the one responsible for what referendums ended up on the ballot (he wasn’t). However, sensing a dead end here (at least until the next election), the metaphorical angry mob of less-than-ethical journalists and blame-mongerers went off to find a way to tie the state legislature and, hopefully, the governor into the disaster.

At the same time that this was going on in Decatur, all across the country people wanted to know what their local government was going to do to make sure that this catastrophe didn’t happen there. How good was the security? What progress had been made on finding out if there was a nuclear warhead under their town? Was marshall law being declared? Did all citizens have the right to arm themselves? When was Bravo going to be back on the air? This line of questions followed the Decatur blame model as well, until finally communities in every state across the country were ready to bring their grievances to their state capitals and Washington D.C.

But by that time, there was no state or national Representatives to hear them. Dr. Destructo had disbanded them.

(1) - When you have been the cause of death of a super-hero, and especially one you consider to be your arch-enemy, the appropriate terminology is always “vanquish”. Only if one wishes to trivialize his importance is it acceptable to use “dispatch”. This is not advised, however, if his death has been achieved only after multiple attempts, as it has the undesired effect of making you appear weak.

(2) - In this context, “met his doom” is also acceptable