Viva la Resistance!

Goode evening, everyone. Before we get into it, I’d like to start off with a few quick acknowledgements.

First, I want to thank all of our secret leaders for being willing to attend this town hall meeting and address your concerns. I’ve been a part of a lot of other secret resistance movements in my time, and believe me when I say those other secret leaders woundn’t have been willing to stand up and face the kinds of questions that I know many of of you have come to ask!

And thanks also to all of you for taking the time out of your busy schedules to show up to what I believe is our biggest town hall meeting yet. You guys are amazing, and I know I speak for all of the secret leaders when I say we wouldn’t even have a resistance without your commitment and dedication. You’re the people who make all this worthwhile.

Finally, I’d like to thank Mel and Alice Schlacter for letting us use their beautiful home for this meeting, and to Marge for bringing her always wonderful jello salad and bundt cake. Can we get a little applause for Mel, Alice, and Marge, everyone? Thanks.

Now, before I open the floor up to everyone — and believe me, we are absolutely here to hear you, this is your resistance after all — I thought I’d try to save time by addressing some of the most asked questions that we got in response to our Secret Resistance Town Hall Meeting eEvite blast. So, here goes.

In the spirit of give and take, let me start off by stating unequivocally for the record that, yes, there is certainly room for criticism regarding our most recent plot to overthrow the government: Operation: Arrow-Head. Looking at it today, with the benefit of hindsight, I can see why the strategy of sending a small, untrained teenager girl armed only wth a bow and arrow to defy a literal army of commandos with assault rifles and tanks at their disposal might seem… well, let’s say ill-advised. What many of you are unaware of to this day is that Kaistana, the teenage girl we sent out with the bow and arrow, had moxie. She was the kind of plucky girl whose tomboy good looks and can-do attitude could start a literal revolution. And she just might have, had she survived for more than the few seconds she did against the admittedly better prepared and better trained soldiers.

Did we know Operation: Arrow-Head was a long shot going in? Sure. But if one small girl with a tiny bow and arrow and a big heart had defeated even a few tank battalions with the help of her equally attractive and untrained friends, think of what that would have done to boost next year’s membership drive! “They can’t kill a symbol!” was the rallying cry the secret leaders shouted over and over as we dressed Kaistana for battle and hacked the government propagan-vid feeds so that the world could watch. Except, of course, it turned out that they really could kill a symbol. Pretty damn quickly, actually. So, lesson learned. Still, the name of Kaistana will go down in history as one of the great heroines, whose sacrifice led to the eventual overthrow of our evil and despotic enemies. As will the names of Cleopata, Delorina, Susanillia, and Amberavacada, the previous Operation: Arrow-Head volunteers who were also quickly slain before her.

Speaking of which, I know that many of you here today are parents. If any of you have any daughters between the age of thirteen and sixteen that you think might be especially adapt at drawing millions to her by way of charisma, please see one of the secret leaders after the completion of the meeting.

Oh, and that reminds me. This bit isn’t on the agenda, so apologies. But I wanted to take one second to say that it appears that the evil government counter intelligence officers have figured out Operation: Give Them The Bird. As a reminder, Operation: Give Them The Bird is our secret plan of having all resistance members communicate hope by painting stencils of the titmouse bird with the word ‘RESIST’ in all capital letters underneath on their front doors.  We’re uncertain how government operatives figured this out. Regardless, we are now strongly encouraging everyone to wash these stencils off when they go home tonight, or risk possible execution. The secret leaders will contact you all in the next week with a new bird that will symbolize our resistance — perhaps the blue-footed booby, or the red-billed ox pecker — and we can see about freeing up money in the budget to have new stencils made.

On a related note, many of you have complained about the need for the mandatory Members of the Resistance Dress Code. Please know that all of the secret leaders hear your concerns about the code. In a society where the basic necessities of life are scarce for those not in the upper social strata, we understand why you might be hesitant to invest in long, designer-made leather trench coats. We understand as well that in a world like ours where pollution blots out the sun over our towns, that expensive, high-end sunglasses might seem a luxury you can ill afford. At first blush, these are all reasonable objections.

However, please remember that when you’re out on the streets, you’re representing the finest, coolest, most cutting-edge resistance movement of the past century, and that means that people expect you to look the part. It’s what we in charge call marketing. No one wants to join a resistance movement that looks like it’s on its way to sell life insurance to senior citizens. But more than representing the resistance, you’re also representing the good people at Hot Topic and The Sunglass Hut, who have been official sponsors of the resistance since its inception.

Moving on.

We’ve also been getting a ton of questions about Operation: Be The Book You Want To See In the World. As you know, as of last year the evil regime made books illegal and created the Ministry of Shirtless Muscular Firemen to come into our homes and burn any books they find. Operation: Be The Book You Want To See In the World is our way of trying to save those books for future generations. We’ve been signing up countless volunteers to memorize a classic book, and then taking them to live in the country where they’ll spend the rest of their lives wandering about aimlessly reciting those books for future generations. (Assuming those future generations arrive before the volunteers die, obviously.) It’s a pretty straightforward initiative, but it seems to be creating a lot of issues. So now that we’re all together, I’d like to quickly clear up the repeated issues and questions that we get about this initiative on a daily basis.

First off: I’m sorry, but from now on you need to be the book you are assigned by the resistance leaders, not a book of your choosing. Right now, for example, we have twenty three human copies of The Da Vinci Code wandering the countryside, and fifty seven human copies of Eat, Pray, Love. To be perfectly honest, when we put Operation: Be The Book You Want To See In the World we were kind of envisioning people lining up to save the classics — you know, Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, and that lot. So please take the book you’re assigned and save it for the future. Will that mean someone has to be a human copy of Pilgrim’s Progress? Yes, obviously. But sometimes war requires terrible sacrifice.

Also, and I can’t believe I even have to say this, but if you volunteer to be a human book please refrain from changing that book in a way that you think makes it better. If William Faulkner had wanted to have Harry Potter be a character in The Sound and the Fury  — I’m looking at you here, Gary Wimple — then I’m sure William Faulkner would have written Harry Potter in the book to begin with. Likewise — and out of respect I’m not even going to name names here — I’m sure that if Emily Bronte had thought paragraph after paragraph should be dedicated to the size and shape of Heathcliff’s, and I’m quoting here, “rigid, glistening manhood,” then she likely would have said.

Finally, I wanted to give you heads up — a teaser, if you will — of an upcoming operation that we think will finally turn the tables on our evil fascist government forces once and for all. I’m not going to give away too many details now, for obvious reasons. But I would like you all to close your eyes for a few minutes and imagine the scene I am about to describe to you.

Picture the the deserted main roads of the capital city at midnight on a cold but clear November night. Now imagine all of the members of the resistance showing up there at the same time. But here’s the thing: we’re not armed. That’s right! We don’t have one single weapon, or shield, or really any kind of self-defense whatsoever. But you know what we do all have? Identical halloween masks.

And we’re all wearing these masks at the same time, so that the government forces will have no doubt who is and who isn’t part of the resistance, and doesn’t have to go looking for us. But here’s the kicker. We’ll all walk up to the armed shock troopers that do our evil leader’s bidding, and then… we’ll just stand there.

Like I said, we’ll go over the precise details later. but I know I speak for all the secret leaders when I say we’ve been over and over this new plan, and we can’t think of one single flaw in it. I think this one is really going to be the one that puts us on top.

And with that, I want to thank all of you on behalf of the secret leaders for supporting the greatest resistance history has ever known. Now I think it’s time to open up to floor to all of you.

So, any questions?

Image credit: Screenshot of Hunger Games trailer, via Youtube.