Insurrection Resurrection

About the Book

Man is born free, yet is everywhere in chains.  How did this happen?  Insurrection Resurrection provides an answer.  In this dark satire, founding father Thomas Jefferson mysteriously appears in modern America to incite a second American Revolution, out of revulsion for contemporary politics.  It’s a tale of Alice in Wonderland surrealism, Catch-22 farce, and Atlas Shrugged philosophical controversy.

The antagonist is a tyrannical politician known only as the Head Honcho.  He controls the puppet strings of the U.S. government with the guile of Nixon, the subterfuge of J. Edgar Hoover, the scandal of Clinton, and the mystery of the X-Files’ Smoking Man.  He’s a ruthless, power-mongering juggernaut who continuously pursues reelection with animalistic Neanderthal fervor.  He believes in government of the politicians, for the politicians, and by the politicians.  He spews out innocuous slogans, unkeepable promises, contradictory positions, and pompous deceit.  He’s embroiled in a ceaseless witch-hunt for a mysterious rebel known only as the Insurrectionist, who is actually the resurrected Jefferson.

The protagonist is Freeman, a career bureaucrat who plods along as the Head Honcho’s public relations stooge.  Apathy and purposelessness haunt him.  He unwittingly becomes associated with Jefferson, who gradually enlightens him about the absurdity of today’s politics.  Through the unique perspective of the “resurrected” Jefferson, it becomes apparent that the current American government is as corrupt and oppressive as the British monarchy we revolted against two centuries ago.   Astonished by the opulent lifestyles of American politicians, the enormity of the federal government, and its utter disdain for ordinary taxpayers, Jefferson organizes tax revolts, exposes corrupt politicians, and recruits citizen militias.

The Head Honcho counters with propaganda, censorship, murder, and war to divert attention from his malfeasance and a comic series of governmental malfunctions.  Blood begins to flow in a crimson river all around him.  His behavior exemplifies a government run amok as he violates civil rights and turns the bureaucracy into an engine of surveillance to hunt down the Insurrectionist.  His surreptitious cover-ups, obstructions of justice, and deceptions lead to a constitutional crisis and a public tidal wave of revulsion.  He creates a new state religion called Ismism, a generic philosophy with zero principles, all of which are politically correct.  This gives him lots of room to maneuver while avoiding clashes with facts.

To stave off mounting rebellions, the Honcho enacts the Insurrection Act, which gives him wartime powers to apprehend and prosecute suspected rebels.  The Act exemplifies the unadulterated goal of all governments, which is self-preservation at any cost to individual liberty.  Still, the Insurrectionist eludes him.  Freeman becomes aware, through his friend Jefferson, that the American experiment has edged, day by day, month by month, year by year, away from its original premise, and now threatens the American people with a bureaucratic leviathan more imposing and intrusive than all previous examples put forth by history.  It becomes clear that when government makes peaceful revolution impossible, violent revolution is inevitable

Utterly despondent, the Honcho reminisces about days gone by when kings were kings, serfs were serfs, and everyone politely stayed in their place.   He travels back in time to England in 1775, where he becomes the tyrant King George to try to prevent the original American Revolution from happening, in order to make America a more hospitable place for tyrants in subsequent centuries.

Unfortunately, there’s so much inertia behind the American drive for independence from British bureaucratic oppression that he’s powerless to stop the revolution.   America’s violent revolt creates humanity’s first separation of church and state, and establishes hist

About the Author

Jim Keena was born in 1957 in a Western Michigan farming community. Early in life, he absorbed the works of accomplished authors by reading hundreds of novels, and his fervent lifelong study of politics and philosophy inspired him to become a scholar, a patriot, and a radical for Capitalism. He was a National Merit Scholarship finalist, and graduated summa cum laude from the University of Detroit. Jim worked as a senior executive in the automotive and computer industries during a 20-twenty year career that took him to the East Coast, the West Coast, the Midwest, and Canada. In addition to Insurrection Resurrection, Jim writes poetry and articles for trade publications. He has six children and three grandchildren, and he and his wife Audrey now reside in the Detroit area.