A hawk and an eagle sat in a tree overlooking the Potomac River, watching an astounding starling murmuration involving tens of thousands of birds.
“That is amazing!” said the eagle.
“I never saw anything as harmonious as these murmurations,” said the hawk. “A murmuration makes the best case for God.”
“I always wanted to be part of something like that,” agreed the eagle. “It seems to be done out of pure joy.”
“I wonder if we could join them,” said the hawk. “Or would we disrupt their perfection?”
“Would we even know what to do?” wondered the eagle. “Would they be afraid of us and scatter?”
“Well, let’s find out,” said the hawk and they flew directly into the murmuration as it swooped, swirled, dove, soared, turned directions over and over and continued its monumentally coordinated marvelous performance.
The trouble was, it wasn’t a starling murmuration, like the eagle and hawk thought, but a CIA mockingbird murmuration. So as soon as the hawk and eagle got closer they were bombarded by thousands of loud incessant screams and squawks:
“Putin’s a madman! Assad gassed his own people! The vaccines are safe and effective! Russia made an unprovoked attack on Ukraine! China is provoking our aircraft carriers and fighter jets in the South China Sea! Vaccines do not cause autism! Aluminum has nothing to do with Alzheimer’s! Fluoridated water makes children smarter! Cuba sponsors terrorism! Trump colluded with Putin! Nicaragua oppresses its people! North Korea is run by a madman! There are no Nazis in Ukraine! They’re nationalists, not Nazis! Ukraine is winning! BDS is antisemitic! Criticizing Israel is antisemitic! Palestinian olive groves are antisemitic!”
Eventually, the mockingbirds stopped using complete sentences and just shouted single words which they all could focus on and, through repetition, everyone knew exactly who to hate and how hard to hate: “Gassed! Madman! Safe! Colluded! Buy! Trumpster! Communist! Effective! Unprovoked! Authoritarian! Antisemite! Booster! Buy! Buy!”
“This is crazy!” exclaimed the hawk. “The CIA really perverted this great holy thing!”
“We have to get out of here!” said the eagle.
They tried to fly away but found they were sucked into a vortex and couldn’t escape. There were layers and layers of mockingbirds surrounding them.
Just then a Hollywood mockingbird screamed above all the rest: “We have to save the Chinese people from Communist tyranny – by destroying China! Bolivia is squatting on our lithium! Azov is like America’s founding fathers!”
The eagle could tell that the hawk was about to strike the Hollywood mockingbird and he said, “Wait, he might have a point about Azov and the founding fathers, just sayin’.”
“What?”
“Slave owners, red man exterminators, ethnic cleansers, European white supremacists… the US was Nazi before Nazis were cool.”
“I don’t do nuance,” said the hawk and he flew up to the Hollywood mockingbird, ripped his throat out and flung his coked-up ass into the river.
”Goddam that felt good!” said the hawk.
Then a morning talk show mockingbird chirped: “BDS is antisemitic!” and the eagle ripped open his chest, seeking to eat the heart but, alas, he didn’t have one. So the eagle bit off his head and threw him like a bowling ball into some other mockingbirds. “This is great! Why did we ever wait so long?!”
So the hawk and the eagle continued decimating the murmuration until the Potomac River was filled with dead and dying mockingbirds. Now it gives me no pleasure to dwell on the terror, pain, agony, extended torments and horror that the CIA mockingbirds experienced as the hawk and eagle pecked out their eyes, hearts and other vital organs, before throwing them into the river to slowly drown. So I’ll say no more about that.
There was one mockingbird left – a fake leftist named Macdeath – who started talking to himself:
“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in more scamdemics, mandates, poisons and restrictions. All our yesterdays of ‘my body, my choice’ have gone the way of dusty death. Out, out unvaxxed, out of society and public discourse! I’m but a walking shadow of my 1960s self who questioned authority and cared about civil liberties and the Nuremberg Principles, suspicious of corporations and resisting social control masquerading as medicine and ‘health.’ Not a poor player at all but now a remote worker of the managerial class who the uncool messy working class delivers food to.
“Yet, I strut and fret my hours inside my remote cage, worried that I lost all credibility. It isn’t acceptable that a bunch of deplorables cared more about freedom and bodily autonomy and had stronger minds and more courage and integrity than we leftist poseurs did. That does not compute! My God! how we were let down by the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, the hillbilly pool parties down south and the jam-packed college football stadiums! Ah, well…
“We can’t admit we believed tales told by idiots, signifying a grave new world of unelected supranational bodies – controlled by billionaires – replacing democracy and national sovereignty. We can’t admit that a hideous freak billionaire will control what goes in our bodies or our ability to travel. We can’t admit we got scared, stopped thinking and gave up our minds and bodies to an industry based on the non-science of vivisection, all for a giant experiment which is still going on. We can’t admit this failure or people might start looking closer at our last 50 years of failure to unify the working class.”
“So heavy!” said the hawk. “He’s really in his head.”
“Sounds like he’s been reading Co-Dependent Some More.”
“That or The Four Disagreements.”
“We should take pity on him,” said the eagle. And with that the eagle flew at the fake leftist mockingbird, gripped him in his great talons, tore off his head and spit it into the bloody hell of the river. “I’m taking his body back to the nest for the fledglings!” he said to the hawk.
“Waste not, want not!” said the hawk. And they went their separate ways.
“You brought home a dead fake leftist? What’s wrong with you!” said the irritated mom eagle.
“I could give you the world with a picket fence around it and you still wouldn’t be happy!” said the dad eagle. “Nobody would put up with you but me!”
“I’m still waiting on that picket fence – don’t you know that all these fake leftists are double vaxxed and boosted and crawling with spike protein and you want us to feed these mRNA time bombs to our children! Jesus Christ, why didn’t you just bring us home some DDT!”
The dad eagle dropped his head and said, “Oh, right, the mRNA… I forgot about that.” And he threw the headless brainless carcass of the fake leftist out of the nest. Still, the dad eagle wanted to fight back a little:
“You know, the hawk and I must have killed 50,000 CIA mockingbirds in about two hours. Some would give us a gold medal for that.”
“There’s as many gold medals around here as there are picket fences,” said the mom eagle. “The old ways are the best. There is a perfect diet for every species – for us bald eagles, it’s fish, now go get some before they start dying because of the mess you just created. You and that other genius may have just polluted our entire food source. He doesn’t give a fuck – he’s eating voles. It’s us who are screwed. We might have to move and build this goddam nest again. Why is he your friend? You’re the national symbol — act like it!”
“Um… I don’t know. Let me go get dinner.” He paused on the edge of the nest. “You know, about three hours ago, I was a happy eagle, contemplating the wonders of the universe.” And off he flew.
And they did end up moving to south Flori-duh where they were relatively protected from the Pfizer left. They did have to live in close proximity to some anti-Castro Cubans, land developers, sons and daughters of Venezuelan bankers, Central American death squad members, roadside zoos, Juan Guano, Ukraine’s Zelensky, former commanders of Azov, Lucifer himself and, most depraved of all, Zionist billionaires. The nicest people in their neighborhood was the Sinaloa family.
But mostly it was happily ever after. As best he could, the dad eagle gathered some scrap pieces of wood and arranged them in a kind of “half-assed fence” (as the mom eagle called it every day) around the edges of the nest. But mostly it was happily ever after.