Broken News: Murderous junta out of ideas, just being mean

ROGDNSZ--A civil war that has ravaged the Borovian countryside for years continues to show no sign of abating. The ruling military junta, the People’s Socialist Front, has been both oppressing its people and waging a bloody battle against the rebel Borovian Liberation Army, with the beleaguered citizens in between. But as news comes out of this breakaway Eastern European country today, a new story is being told: One of petty vindictiveness and attitudes that can only be described as “mean.”

“It’s odd,” observed Yaktok Smensh, local villager and pig fat renderer. “You used to never make eye contact and kept your head down whenever you saw a group of them together. You could have been grabbed and sent to the work camp, the death camp, the rape camp, the t-shirt camp, or even drafted into the army, or worse. God help you if they were drinking. They might kill you on the spot. In those times it was best to stay inside, lock the doors, and hope they didn’t come knocking.”

“Now? It’s different,” he continued. “I was walking from the store the other day, carrying my daily ration of pig testicle and bark bread. On of the PSF soldiers just walked right up to me and slapped the bag right out of my hand. He then remarked that I ‘dropped my food’ before walking back over to his buddies and laughing his ass off. They were all laughing. I felt three inches tall.”

The information is much the same all over Borovia. One report had a village woman ridiculed for the style and cut of her peasant dress when an armed cadre of soldiers chanted, “So last year!’ at her. One report from the capital of Krogdnsz told of a colonel forcing attendees of a local market to switch shopping bags without any regard for the meals they were trying to cook. One sergeant-at-arms even went so far as to repeatedly step on the back of a man’s shoes on his journey home from work at the heavy industrial factory.

“It’s getting worse,” said Bortof Grinkalonov, mayor of the Erglodz municipality. “I mean not worse in the sense that they’re back to the killings and kidnappings, but they’ve been escalating their petty slights against the populace. The other day, I park my car near city hall so I can go to work. Just like any other day. I see one of those punks walk up and spit right on the hood, so I told him, ‘One of these days people are going to stand up to no-goodniks like you’ and went inside. When I came back out at the end of the day I see the little shit had keyed the side of my car. It was a cherry fucking Yugo, perfect condition, with sweet ass alloy rims. You know how hard it is to get royal blue car paint in this country? I’m going to have to paint it poop brown or pea green, just like every other goddamn thing in the Fatherland!”

Observers are at a loss to explain the junta's shift in strategy. After years of bloody oppression, the populace had grown to expect a level of senseless ultraviolence in their lives, but none could have foreseen the emergence of wedgies, noogies, and titty-twisters as agents of political fearmongering.

“Fuck man, we’re out of ideas,” revealed Sub-Commandant Irglova, creator of the new strategy, dubbed Project O’Reilly. “Do you know how hard it is to come up with horrific tactics on our kind of budget? I mean once you keep shooting people over and over it kind of loses its pizzaz, not to mention the munitions cost. I mean how can people learn to fear you if all they see you do is kidnap your children and burn down your village over and over again? It gets old after a while; they tend to tune you out. You’re hacking into their grandmother and they’re spaced out, thinking of something else because you did the same thing to their other grandmother last month. Sometimes being a prick is the best way. There’s so much more to do and you can really get into their heads in a personal way that mass killings doesn’t do. You really miss the personal one on one terror with the mass killings. Isn’t that always the way?”

Already Irglova and the Director of the Weapons and Tactics Division, Martin Ool, are conceiving of new……weapons….and…tactics. “Most of these soldiers we recruit are classroom bullies and young street toughs,” explained Ool. “They already know most of these tactics, hell they’ve pioneering and field testing ‘em since the 4th grade. So working these tactics back in is just like getting back on a horse. They have a comfort level with this type of thing. I mean you have to teach these kids how to kill, maim, and raze, but they already know how to demean, abuse, and humiliate. Hell, they’re teaching us.”