George Boreas · Fiction
The Woke Iliad
A comic epic of the culture war
The woke and the based battle it out in a hilarious revamp of Homer's Iliad.
Helen, America’s Ambassador of Woke, has been abducted on the orders of the Moldovan President Bagrayev, the most politically incorrect head of state in the world. The outraged Americans, led by the conscientious General Womack, invade his small but nuclear-armed country. To gaslight Bagrayev and avoid triggering the Armageddon, they assemble a coalition of allies and sneak into Moldova overnight with a thousand submarines.
Once at war, Womack must avoid escalation of violence at all costs. He must manage his opponent’s volatile personality as well as the bickering identity groups within his own ranks. Both sides must find a way to deal with ruthless social media psyops and with perfidious captives and defectors.
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From Chapter 1
Helen was celebrated as the least agreeable woman in America. She had won the Victim Pageant nine years in a row. By year ten, she was the billionaire founder of a business empire that included media networks and fashion lines. She owned palatial properties on all three coasts. They were managed by crews of servants who had too little personality to feel victimized in their own right, so they could focus on handling their mistress’s immense, brash, but brittle self-esteem so that it never, ever teetered or tipped over and shattered into a million little pieces.
Helen’s celebrity was such that the government created a special public office for her – The Ambassador of Woke. They even provided her with security detail for life, just like they do for former presidents.
Every spring Helen led the week-long Shaming Conference in Washington DC. The event was attended by the President and fifty senators. That was followed by a three-day Woke Summer Conference, which featured a twelve-member Permissible Entertainment Committee for indoctrinating and legislating against summer fun for any who still knew how to have it. Every 15th of October, the peak of nature’s rutting season, she presided over the Festival of Dis-Erection, a gaudy procession in which, perched on Venus of Willendorf floats, she assisted in the ritual flogging of the genitals of that year’s worst male offenders in various categories of toxic masculinity: mansplaining, flirting, overachieving, and such like.