DOC AMERICA and the THOUSAND HEADED INSURGENCY!

We OPEN with a long shot across the unpeopled waste of the desert erg. It is night, and a high gibbous moon haunts the lifeless, ever shifting dunes like the impossibly forlorn dream that is freedom in this Jehovah-forsaken part of the globe. On the distant horizon, we see a feebly flickering light.

We TRACK IN, slowly, our camera lingering on each lifeless stone, on every desolate stick, on each individual sun bleached bone, as it travels slowly over the desolate wasteland. Finally, we draw in close to the tiny patch of bravely wavering light, like a tattered remnant of a once proud banner still clinging to an ancient flagpole. We see it is a lantern, its failing rays shining dimly through a poorly glazed window in the side of a sand brick hovel. This miserable speck of shelter against the raging elements is both pitiful and noble; valiant and wretched, for while it shows the eternal defiance of man’s upraised fist against all the wrack and hindrance merciless Nature can bring to bear, it also bespeaks the horrible benighted ignorance of some woebegone and savage camel jockey, laboring crudely with sticks and mud in a mire of primitive… primitivism… or something, anyway, whoever lives here obviously cries out in desperation for some advanced culture to save them from their own poverty and the eternally recurring cycle of tribal hatred and xenophobia and intolerance that holds them fast in an unending dark age of… unAmericanism. Yes.

As we have tracked slowly in across this horribly alien landscape where no sane person would ever dwell or marry or raise children or even linger long enough to eat a corn dog unless they were somehow trapped or sent here to serve their country in its glorious mission of selflessly spreading democracy across the planet, which is totally different and cool, we hear the endless desolate moaning of the eerie desert wind. It is punctuated, then entirely replaced by the sharp, brutal sounds of hard wood impacting against flesh. Then we hear a series of savage, bestial grunts of sadistic satisfaction, in time with each new impact, and then, finally, the moans of pain and pleas for mercy of some pathetic, helpless, hapless victim become audible to us as well as we draw closer and closer.

Now we track through the mud hovel’s crappy little window and see the interior of this so-called ‘building’. Inside it, a person in some kind of stupid looking Arab-tent/robe thingamajiggie is being slammed against the wall repeatedly by a burly, mustachioed guy in a foreign military uniform. The brawny guy is wearing a red beret and his chest is covered with the kind of cheaply impressive pot metal medals and garish, poorly manufactured ribbons that a child might buy at K-Mart to facilitate a military Halloween costume. As this slobbering goon hammers a nightstick again and again and AGAIN into the head, limbs, torso and groin of his sobbing victim, though, we can see from the demented gleam in his eye that he truly, pitifully takes pride in the faux splendor of his self awarded decorations.

We FOCUS on the victim’s face, over the assailant’s heaving shoulders. The individual features are an ever shifting mosaic, representing every victim of Middle Eastern tyranny since the dawn of time, or at least, since the last war in Iraq, anyway; constantly sliding and shimmering like a mirage of cool, sweet water in the burning desert. First we see an elderly Arab woman being horribly beaten by this wretched worthless thug of a man, then a small child, then a beautiful young woman, then a be-bearded tribal elder, then a middle aged man – the features shift each time another vicious blow is rained down upon the victim’s body. This is not simply one victim, but all victims; it is Every Victim – helpless, pitiful, needy, crying out for American interventionalism.

ARAB VICTIM: Aiiiiieeeee! Please, can no stalwart democratic hero save me from this oppression! Where is my John Wayne? Where is my prairie son?

SADDAM: You fool! I am your Glorious Leader and I will despoil you as I will! I will ignore your inalienable rights as they are merely myths of the decadent West! No one shall save you! Soon I will have you and all your children constructing nuclear weapons for me in my mobile labs and then I will ruuuuuuuule the world!

SUDDENLY the crude door to the shabby hovel is thrown open, and a long shadow falls across SADDAM and his VICTIM: A voice – a deep, manly, voice, with just a hint of a Texas drawl -- booms out:

VOICE: I b’lieve the l’il lady asked you to take yore hands off her, pardner.

SADDAM whirls, his eyes going wide with shock and… is it fear? Yes, I think it is.

SADDAM: ::gasping:: No! It CAN’T be –

ANNOUNCER: But it is, Butcher of Baghdad, it IS! Your reign of tyranny is at long last over, as finally you will answer for your crimes to humanity’s greatest hero -- ::trumpets blare:: DOC AMERICA!!!!!

A brief flashback sequence ensues, showing George America, Jr., as a young boy, doing the mental and physical exercises devised by his genius father, George America, Sr., which are designed to maximize his athletic and intellectual potential and turn him into a true superman! As George Jr. matures, honors and awards accrue to him like sticky popsicle sticks stuck to the side of a shaggy dog. Athletic trophies, advanced degrees, scholarly awards, military medals – we see a montage of George Jr. receiving all these honors, and then, of course, him leading his awesome team of brilliant adventurers into action across the world, fighting tyranny at every turn.

Now, back in the present, the evil SADDAM draws an American made Colt .45 automatic from his belt holster and points it at DOC AMERICA.

SADDAM: Swine! I broke your father, just as I will break you!

DOC AMERICA: Yew shouldn’t’ve mentioned my daddy, yew polecat.

DOC moves forward, effortlessly dodging SADDAM’s bullets, then grabbing SADDAM’s wrist above his gun hand and punching SADDAM hard in the face.

SADDAM: Ungh! ::sprawls to ground::

DOC AMERICA: BAM! That was f’r my dad, yew dirty nogood terr’st, you! And this… this is f’r America!

DOC pulls out an M-16 and empties several thirty round clips into SADDAM’s jerking , quivering body as SADDAM screams and spasms and blood geysers everywhere. Ricochets from the bullets whine around the room, destroying the chipped plates and dirty clay glasses belonging to the ARAB VICTIM. A few stray rounds even punch through the extremities of the ARAB VICTIM herself, but, hey, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, and when the omelette is freedom, well, that’s a pretty big omelette, buddy.

ARAB VICTIM: Oh, Doc America, however can I thank y… AUGH! OW! YARGH!!!

Suddenly, Doc’s two constant companions hurtle into the hovel behind him. One of them, Brigadier General Colin Blodgett Powfair, otherwise known as PUNK, is a light skinned black man of muscular build in an American Army uniform. The other, Captain Donald Marley Rumsfield, otherwise known as RUMMY, is a dapper, dashing fellow immaculately dressed in a thousand dollar suit. Each has an Israeli machine pistol in one hand, while carried beneath their off arm, each has an unlikely pet. PUNK is carrying a long eared miniature donkey he refers to, hilariously, as ‘Hillary’, while RUMMY is carrying a similarly miniaturized dromedary he has named, hysterically, ‘Dune Coon’.

PUNK: Sir yes sir! The mobile weapons labs are all undetectable, sir! We’ll need cooperative assets on the ground to fully locate the WMDs, sir!

RUMMY: Twit! You couldn’t find half a buttock if you had overlong apelike arms to search for it with! Not that I’m saying you do! No racism here, isn’t that right, Dune Coon? Sir Yes Sir, let me interrogate the indigenous asset, sir! My zero point focus new military will strike with laser like precision once target coordinates are fully gridded, sir!

PUNK: Jimmy crack corn and I’ll crack your spine, you bastard! No former flyboy faggot is going to tell me how to deploy my heroic infantry forces!

PUNK and RUMMY lunge towards each other, faces transfigured in the furious glares of men about to haul out trout-scalers and go dowsing within each other’s torsos for sweetbreads. It should be noted that beneath their façade of congenial hatred for one another, each man vitriolically loathes the other, and were it not for the gentle but firm discipline administered by DOC AMERICA, whom each of them of course worship abjectly, in a totally manly way, of course, they would long ago have killed each other in an orgiastic frenzy of mutually directed abhorrance that has nothing to do whatsoever with rechanneling any kind of homosexual longings each might feel for the other. NOTHING WHATSOEVER. So don’t even think about that.

Abruptly, the dirt floor of the mud hovel between the two manly men erupts as DOC AMERICA puts a burst from his M-16 into it.

DOC: Back off, my lovable lackeys! AS YOU WERE! You’re gonna scare this pore dumbass A-rab here. Now, ma’am, I see you need medical attention. I’ll have my trusted lieutenants here escort you to where we’ve established a humanityarianesque refuge place.

PUNK: Doc, you mean…?

RUMMY: Of course he means, dimwit. Although he, and we, will deny any knowledge later. Come with us, ma’am, we’ll escort you to the field hospital at Abu’Ghraib.

ARAB VICTIM: ::whining:: Abu’Ghraib? I don’t know. I have a bad feeling about this…

PUNK: Who are you, Kirk’s Probably Gay Son? C’mon, you.

RUMMY: It’s all right, ma’am. You see, you have a disease… the disease of Islamofascism! And at the field hospital, we can use the latest techniques to cure that condition, with surgical precision!

RUMMY and PUNK escort the still feebly protesting ARAB VICTIM out. Meanwhile, DOC AMERICA turns to face the camera. At first, his shoulders are stooped, as if beneath the crushing burden of leadership in such a sad, immoral, liberty-denied world.

DOC AMERICA: And so it goes. One forthright victory for democracy – but evil still lurks everywhere, in the darkness just beyond the light, waiting only for its next, best chance to strike. Sometimes… sometimes I feel so tired.

DOC looks up, into the camera. His shoulders square as he fixes the viewer with a gaze of steely resolve.

DOC AMERICA: But I… we… can’t give up. We can’t give up on these poor, oppressed, freedom loving peoples, who’ve never had any freedom and who love it all the more dearly because of that. We have to stay the course. And when the course grows rocky and rutted and overgrown with poison ivy and those nasty little vines that always seem to trip you right at ankle level, well, we have to find a new way forward. And that’s why I’m speaking to you today.

DOC’s voice rises, becoming an irresistible siren call to all true believers everywhere, fueled by a charisma more rightly belonging to a god. Yes, that’s right, I said it – a GOD! His voice seems to be everywhere, not just in our ears but in our hearts and our minds and our very souls, and his brilliant golden eyes, flecked with strange, swirling, almost hypnotic motes of red, white, and blue, transfix the audience as a cobra transfixes a mongoose. No, wait, that sounds kinda creepy. As a snake charmer transfixes a… no, that’s no good, either. Well, he transfixes all of you, mesmerizing all of you with the sheer raw force of his indomitable will, but you like it and want more. You know you do. Don’t deny it.

DOC: Now, some people… I won’t call them traitors, but, you know, that’s what they are… are talkin’ about changin’ direction. Cuttin’ and runnin’. Before we’re finished, before we’ve accomplished our mission, to bring democracy to these poor cute li’l raghead people who ain’t never had none. So I’m askin’ all you true Americans out there, or, at least, 20,000 to 60,000 of yuh, to show y’r support for the greatest nation in the history of the world and come on down and sign up for Doc America’s Freedom Rangers. It ain’t the military, no sir, although it’s like the military, what with all the honor and the patriotism and the glory, and, y’know, the marchin’ in straight lines and what not, but it ain’t the military, no sir, it’s not. It’s just a chance for all a you decent Christian God fearin’ real Americans to show your stuff an’ help fight the terr’sts overseas so we ain’t gotta fight ‘em at home, yessir!

DOC pauses, and smiles, and leans forward conspiratorially.

DOC: Now, just ‘tween you ‘n’ me, pard, this is a secret organization. You go down to the military recruiters at yore local mall and you tell ‘em you wanna sign up for th’Army or th’ Marines –

PUNK: (from outside window) Not that faggot Navy!

RUMMY: {from outside window) I’ll KILL you -- !!!

DOC: -- that’s right, th’ Army or th’ Marines, an’ be sure to use the special code phrase ‘I want front line duty!’ Yore recruiter will know what that means, and yew’ll get special treatment, and get signed up for a totally voluntary stint that yew can quit anytime yew want, in Doc America’s Freedom Rangers! Where you’ll, y’know, travel around America stayin’ in first class hotels, typin’ on expensive laptop computers, speakin’ to young college students an’ such and doin’ y’r patriotic duty and never goin’ anywhere near Iraq ‘r any other hot zone, nossir! Just like me, Doc America!

Female voice: (from outside window) I don’t get it. How stupid does he think these people –

Male voice: (from outside window) Shhhhh, we’re live!

DOC: R’member – you ain’t really goin’ in the military. An’ you can quit any time you want! But it’s a secret group, so you gotta go to a’ Army or Marine recruiter an’ use the special code phrase “I want front line duty!” An’ they’ll get you squared away! They’ll teach you the special secret handshake and give you the secret decoder ring and issue you your secret wallet I.D. and you’ll be part of a secret legion of loyal Americans fighting the terr’rists all unbeknownst to the world you are sworn to protect!

DOC walks out of the hovel, casually tossing a live grenade over his shoulder back into the hut. He grabs hold of a dangling rope ladder and is lifted up into the sky, just like when Scooter Lindsie and his dad rescued Buckaroo Banzai from the Red Lectroids. JUST like that.

DOC: See ya next time I give out th’ Medals o’ Freedom, pardner! Yippee!

Behind and below DOC, we see the hovel explode gloriously. As DOC is lifted higher and higher into the night time sky, a line of American Pave Hawks can be seen, each dropping huge payloads of heavy explosives on the site of the former hut. As the explosions rip out through the night sky and the fiery rose of freedom blooms in the desert below, we can hear DOC whistling “I’m A Yankee Doodle Dandy” over the thunder of the helicopter rotors carrying him away.