American Insurgent (5th Anniversary Edition)

By Adam Maciejewski

Stanley is your typical American high school student in 2000. He loves video games, has trouble talking to girls and half-heartedly searches for a college. But the attacks of September 11th, 2001 change the course of his life forever.

As he tries to understand what happened, he follows his first love, Hope, in joining an extremist group in college. As he rises in the ranks, he begins to question his Hope's motives. Follow Stanley as he tries to escape imprisonment and save America from itself in this satirical novella.

AMERICAN INSURGENT is the story of one boy trying to fight for the soul of America, even if America doesn't want to be saved.

This 5th anniversary edition of the novella originally published in 2012 features a new forward, a reader-chosen cover and an unpublished alternate ending.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adam Maciejewski
• Release date: Jan 5, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370878727

Adam Maciejewski

Born in Buffalo, New York and educated at SUNY Geneseo in English literature and education, Adam Maciejewski writes political thrillers, literary fiction and even dabbles with magical realism. To him, writing is both an escape and a challenge. There's nothing better than taking a reader's breath away with an unexpected twist or stunning turn of phrase that sparks something in a reader. When not writing or reading, Adam loves spending time fishing with his two boys and making memories with his wife.

Book preview

American Insurgent, 5th Anniversary Edition

By Adam Maciejewski

Published by Adam Maciejewski at Smashwords

Copyright 2018 Adam Maciejewski

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Smashwords Edition License Notes

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Table of Contents

Forward

Prologue

Summer 2001

September 7th, 2001

September 11th, 2001

September 12th, 2001

September 13th, 2001

September 6th, 2002

September 11th, 2002

September 13th, 2003

Sewer Retreat

September 13th, 2003 again

Present

Present, but Reliving the Past

Present, Awaiting Death

Present Day, Hope Brings Death

Final Moments

Final Moments - Alternate Ending

About the Author, Contact Information

Forward

Though only five years have passed since publication, ten years have gone by since I began writing what would later become American Insurgent. I began writing it the year I graduated from my undergraduate work at SUNY Geneseo and continued through: my engagement, first house, marriage, three different teaching positions and one new president. It’s understatement to say that I have a sentimental attachment to this work. Yet, it was the bleak pessimism of the George W. Bush presidency - my high school and college years - that formed the raw material for American Insurgent. I felt as if we were lurching forward uncontrollably, and in that process spinning entire lexicons of acronyms that served mainly to keep the American public similarly spinning: WMD, DHS, TSA, Downing-Street Memos and Git-Mo. When President Obama was elected in 2007, admittedly I walked across the street to a friend’s house and drank a bottle of champagne with him on his porch to celebrate what we perceived as total victory. Mission accomplished, if you will. Yes we can became Yes we did eight years before the President gave that turn of phrase at an outgoing speech.

Yet, while the president had hopes of reversing the military-industrial complex that had swelled under George W. Bush, the political realities were far too adverse and the United States never seemed at a loss for enemies. As was the case in many other progressive eras, the Obama years were marked with dour realism shot through with honeyed days. I was young then, but not naive. We were moving forward and upward sure enough.

Near the end of drafting this novel that optimism made American Insurgent’s completion more difficult than I expected. Cynicism and anger can easily be focused towards what one believes is righteous indignation: soapbox ministries. When things progressed I was running out of that writerly fossil fuel. It’s due to this that the ending is ultimately optimistic. Stanley truly believes the truth will exonerate him and that it only takes an open ear and mind to see that he was not culpable. That wasn’t the ending that I originally imagined. That ending is what’s included here in the 5th anniversary edition. There’s no redemption for Stanley. While he does finish broadcasting his side of the story, the inevitability of his fate only manages to disappear momentarily. The full force of the domestic spy complex is brought to bear on our protagonist in a way meant to reinforce the futility of protest in the George W. Bush era. To be sure, the alternate ending that is included in this edition is less satisfactory because as readers we want hope, if even there’s only the slightest opening through which to grasp it.

In many ways I could easily see this novel being fueled today by the political divisions that divide us today. There’s much to be made of Stanley’s hatred and avoidance of the other side. And that’s a vital link missing in today’s American experience; interactions with with our others today. Stanley conveys this xenophobia in his opening monologue and it feels current. Only nowadays we could even include Democrat/Republican divides wedged further along by President Trump and his maul of a personality. Whatever your political ilk, its obvious that he is choosing to further polarize rather than unite America. It’s been said that American’s true national symbol isn’t the bald eagle, but the pendulum. Wait long enough and we’ll swing back. This was another hard lesson to learn as a politically active American: you can’t have you way for too long. Though the Obama years felt - for me - like the correct turn for our nation to make, for some they were too much. The current administration is more evidence that we never like to go too far in one direction for too long.

If there’s one thing American’s love, it a good enemy to whom we can lay waste. It can feel good too hate - that’s our great secret. Anyone is welcome but we just might paint a target on your back while you move in. It is this impulse to hate an enemy that both pushes us on and makes the reader cheer Stanley on to battle Insurgent.

As the feelings that led to American Insurgent were experienced while coming to grips with the complex political realities that is the American experiment, I hope that after this novel you too have had an experience that is both rich and varied. Mostly, I hope that this work opens a space for you to discuss what is going on in our country and what your part should be. Enjoy!

-Adam Maciejewski

December 22nd 2017

Prologue

If you're watching this, there isn't a moment to spare. My barricade won't hold long against Hope. When Homeland Security bags me and I disappear, receding into the national memory banks; absorbed into our collective amnesia, these facts will be struggling lights in the dusk of my life: I was there when the towers of LOST CAUSE were bombed, but I did not try to kill any one. I was there when American Insurgent was born, but I am not him. I disagreed with the extremity of our nation's momentum, but I am not a terrorist. I am a patriot.

There was a time when I wouldn’t have considered my life worthy of chronicling. However, when I’m arrested, I can point to this video stream and say I am not the homicidal wing nut I've been portrayed as. Unlucky. Weak minded, certainly, but not guilty. If I’m lucky, someone watching will contact a law school flunky from the ACLU to work my case pro bono and they might exonerate this innocent bystander who allowed himself to be swept up into one movement or another like a twig in a stream. Regardless of what National News Network reports of themisms from LOST CAUSE, the lines are no clearer than the visions of a drunk at three a.m. groping for any solid object in their brittle crystalline peripheral. Thief/survivor, victim/perpetrator and patriot/insurgent alike. They, we, have allowed the leveling of even the most polar of dichotomies. Therefore who I am is indistinguishable from that loser I was those years ago, watching stories of human rubble fall/jump one hundred ten stories to avoid the anticipated fate of non-existence imagined as worse than pain on the aptly named attaches of 9-11. And there I was, dithering about colleges. Maybe that’s why I found the Insurgent spellbinding at first. He was definitive in a world where you couldn’t find one truth about who was attacking us, but one for each cable news network. There was a bullet shot from a gun straightness about his truths and a lustful gratification in his antics.

Now the question is, when I stop broadcasting my story and tear down my impromptu barricade of this room, who will be there to great me - Hope? The military? I suppose the pertinent part of my story starts in the middle, like any good tragedy.

Summer 2001

The months before the attack, I was visiting colleges trying to figure out how to get out of leaving home for four years. You see, the thought of leaving all the comforts of home for an academically challenging program in whatever degree my parents picked for me just wasn’t appealing. That, and I nearly wet myself just looking at a co-ed, let alone see one walking through a dorm hallway with just towels on. But, of course, since Mommy and Daddy wanted me to get a PhD in work-ology I had to oblige them in visiting at least one campus. Really, it was the threat of taking my PS2's power cord that got me to hustle over to Colombia's campus with dad.

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They’ll never accept me here. I whined, sidestepping another member of the campus tour, bumping into the dorm room's dingy brown doorframe.

Your grades are just fine Stanley. Upper quartile even. Off handedly commented my dad, hoping the tour guide would hear and be impressed. He even winked at the poor girl as she was explaining the best way to get to the dinning hall from here. Seeing as her expression was somewhere between a Romero zombie and vegetable, it dawned on my father that she didn’t give a shit.

Blushing, I mumbled, I meant the students.

Walking through the campus on that August day was like seeing another dimension overlaid on my own. College just wasn’t on any of my plans. Playstation, Mountain Dew and contact rewetting drops to fight eye fatigue – those were my only plans. The dorm rooms reminded me of cable ready tombs for two. Hell, in one room if I stretched my arms out and took a big breath I could span the width of the place. The only feature of the campus tour that felt comforting was the crows. You see, while the whole campus was warming itself in a mild August breeze bringing the smell of summer’s last breaths – brine from the nearby ocean, hot dogs from the welcome tent and sunscreen –