The Woke Iliad

By George Boreas

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.

Read now to find out how this most modern of conflicts will end, stuck as it is between the hyper-violence of nuclear holocaust and the hyper-sensitivity of wokeness.

 

 

EDITORIAL REVIEWS:

 

"A whip-smart revamp of Homer's epic, The Woke Iliad by George Boreas is a carnival mirror reflection of today's global chaos and a savage critique of political and social correctness, which doesn't hold back... While the prose is occasionally over the top, and the allegorical writing can be heavy-handed, the sardonic tone is consistent, biting, and undeniably amusing. This frightening vision of an over-woke future will have readers laughing out loud, but also weighing their own behavior through the author's farcical lens."

- Self-Publishing Review, ★★★★
 
"A satire on contemporary 'woke' progressive politics and its bêtes noires, The Woke Iliad is very funny. There are too many one-liners to mention here... The fight scenes are hilarious. And of course, yes, the whole thing is wrapped up by a 'woke' version of the Trojan horse, but I'm not telling you what that is. You'll have to read the book for yourselves."

- The Bookbag, ★★★★
 
"Boreas's readers will appreciate the rolling action, sociological savvy, and rollicking humor that pervades The Woke Iliad, an imaginative look at how we humans might evolve in a slightly skewed future time."

- Feathered Quill Book Reviews

• Language: English
• Publisher: George Boreas
• Release date: Feb 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201423070

George Boreas

eorge Boreas is a Canadian expat living in Shanghai, China. He was born in the Balkans. He has a professional background in engineering and business, and he now teaches economics. He moonlights as as an amateur boxer and a writer of short stories, novels, and essays on René Girard's mimetic theory.

Book preview

Part I

"Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships,

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.

Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies!

Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again."

- Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus

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.

Sex with intent to reproduce had been a crime since the end of the Second American Revolution. Since then, reproduction was viewed as too patriarchal to be left in the hands of private couples, though it was not a common offence: most adults were not interested in disrupting their cosmopolitan lifestyles with the oppressive responsibilities of rearing children.

To breed the next generation of citizens, men who desired to procreate had their semen extracted by automated pumps in the Ministry of Procreation laboratories. The semen was swabbed in vitro onto the ova of American women. The fertilized eggs were inserted into the uteri of third-world child-bearers for growth, birthing, and infant nursing. Finally, the children were handed back to American couples of all gender combinations. The parental burden was greatly alleviated by the caretaking and ideological conditioning the children received in the country’s education system.

There had been talks simply to get the children premade from the third world – in other words, to adopt them – but the idea was abandoned after a study from the University of Chicago suggested that when such children grow up, swaddled and spoiled as they may be by the unquestioning acceptance of the society around them, their loyalty to American values might be diluted with affection for the cultures of their genetic origin.

As the US Ambassador of Woke, Helen worked with many underdeveloped nations. This was a charitable role with a mission to bring light to backward cultures. Without taking anything away from her natural charisma, it must be admitted that the American military’s big guns greatly aided her in her humanitarian missions. They helped bring dozens of nations under the enlightened wing of the Land of the Free. Yet, it was an incident in this ambassadorial role that began the conflict that we are about to relate.

Some ten years before Helen had become a celebrity, the country of Moldova, deep inside Eastern Europe, experienced a most extraordinary turn of fortune. Previously, it had been the poorest country in Europe, landlocked and forgotten between Romania and Ukraine, a lost orphan of the Soviet Empire. For decades it was the least known country in Europe and possibly the world. The Moldovans themselves were not sure if their country even existed, or if it was merely a backwater province of Romania, a refuge for Ukrainian mobsters, or perhaps still a vassal of Moscow. Some argued that it was all these things at once.

This all changed when a Moldovan construction company, a state-owned enterprise under the country’s president Viktor Bagrayev, unearthed a man-made cavern in the mountains. The discovery was made as they were clearing the ground to build a gymnastics labour camp for four-year-old girls.

The army showed up immediately to investigate the curious underground find. They discovered a vast Soviet bunker housing hundreds of nuclear missiles. The weapons were still functioning, still wired to control systems, still connected to the power grid, and still in hatches pointed at strategic targets all over the world. The targets were mostly the capitals and big cities of any country that mattered. The Moldovans only needed to wipe down the dust and blow off the cobwebs, and the system was ready to launch at the press of a button.

The Russians forgot about the system precisely because it was the top of top secrecy. In the last days of the Soviet Union, only seven of the highest kingpins of the nomenklatura knew of its existence and true purpose. As fate would have it, they all died in quick succession in 1992, amidst the chaos and distress of a crumbling empire. Three were killed by oligarchs, two died of vodka overdoses, one died when his Lada’s brakes gave out and the car flew over a cliff in the Caucasus, and one died of a heart attack after smoking eighteen packs of non-filter Volga cigarettes in a single day.

The Soviets had had Chukchi tribesmen brought in as forced labourers to build and maintain the underground bunker. They were chosen for their adaptability to long periods of sunlight deprivation – their homeland was on the far eastern shores of the Arctic Ocean. They were told by their elite overseers that the rockets were giant dildos built for the amusement of a local strongman. The Chukchi believed it, partly because of their ignorance of military technology, partly because the story aligned with their preconceived notions of European masculinity. When the Soviet state collapsed, and they were released back to their polar hometowns, they swore to each other by the Chukchi blood oath that they would never tell anyone about their forced labour experience. Maintenance of dildos is completely inappropriate work for Chukchi men, and if their people back at home were to find out about it, it would bring about irreparable dishonour.

The discovery of the bunker by the government of President Bagrayev changed Moldova permanently and thoroughly. The country was now a nuclear superpower, a completely and utterly independent nation, able to do and say as they pleased knowing that any foreign force that dared to transgress its sacred borders would run the risk of getting barbecued by hydrogen bombs. They were also a small enough nation for the government to micromanage the populace and ensure its seamless unity.

Moldovans had always been a brave, proud people, who had never bent to aggressors, but now that they had nuclear weapons, their defiant, romantic spirit soared to new heights. In the first international press conference announcing his country’s newfound power, Bagrayev was very blunt: The Americans can now kiss our ass! So can the Europeans, and so can, as a matter of fact, the Russians. Screw all y’all, we are free now!

Shortly after discovering the nukes, Bagrayev’s government annexed the rebellious province of Transnistria, which had been a de facto independent microstate comprising the narrow strip of territory between the left bank of the Dniester River and the border with Ukraine. The province hadn’t been recognized by anyone except the Russians, anyways. With the Bagrayev government’s newfound power, those pesky Transnistrians quickly gave up on their self-governance and got with the new system.

Moldovan public displays of bravado went a long way in convincing foreigners of their willingness to resort to the nuclear option. Bagrayev would show up in public wearing the nuclear button around his neck, on a diamond-studded necklace, and tease journalists about pushing it. Once he did push it at a news conference, and when everyone began to scream, he laughed and said: It is joke, relax! You first need to turn this key here. You see?

The international community tried to summon the man to the United Nations Assembly in New York City to explain some of his more insensitive public statements. Bagrayev responded to the email request with an email of his own, which we reproduce here in full:

Man, I got no time for no dam [sic] United Nations! Have you ever watched a UN speech – to the end I mean?! Me neither! That shit is boring! Screw the UN assembly, we will bomb them too if they get uppity. Stop emailing me about this nonsense, bro.

The USA tried to get the Russians to reach out to Moldovans and talk some sense into them. After all, Moldova had been a part of their former communist empire. But the Russian officials could only shrug their shoulders and shake their heads. Their chief diplomat tweeted:

Despite common negative stereotypes about Russia prevalent in the West, our country has a centuries-old tradition of enlightened and balanced diplomacy, and Moldovan impertinence shocks us as much as it does any other civilized state.

Then it was the Europeans’ turn to try their hand at charming the Moldovans. They sent a hereditary British lord to Moldova, hoping that strongman Bagrayev may be impressed with the man’s patriarchal swagger. However, the lord’s mission only ended in scandal – he was almost killed when his hotel’s staff spiked his tea with an overdose of laxatives.

Asked to explain what had happened, the Moldovan government spokeswoman stated that the hotel staff were merely trying to help. The gentleman looked and talked as though he hadn’t passed stool in three weeks, she said.

Finally, in desperation at their lack of options, the US State Department approached Helen with the idea that she should go to Moldova as the special ambassador, so she could interview Bagrayev in person and try to establish a beachhead upon which to build constructive dialogue. Shortly after stumbling onto its nuclear arsenal, Moldova had booted out all permanent foreign embassies on its territory – all four of them.

Back in the United States, Helen was dreaded as a debate opponent. She had never lost an argument to anyone. Most pundits who had the misfortune to come down on the opposite side of a debate with her ended up getting cancelled. Seeing how she had crushed so many man-balls in her illustrious career, the Americans figured she may be able at least to create a dent in Bagrayev’s.

Helen arrived in Moldova a couple of days before the interview. She was shown around the capital city of Chisinau, accompanied by an official tourist escort, as required by law for all foreign visitors. A TV crew filmed her having some fun at the local shopping mall and visiting a state-of-the-art mashed potato factory.

Her interview with President Bagrayev was broadcast live on NBC. So confident were the Americans in Helen’s debate skills that they decided to forego the usual confidentiality of diplomatic missions and to put Bagrayev in the hot seat in front of live cameras, where they hoped he could be goaded into saying something self-incriminating or offensive, and thus embarrass him in front of the whole world.

The interview was held in a baroque hall of the Presidential Palace. The walls and ceiling were painted with naked cherubim and Greco-Roman warriors. The two interlocutors were seated directly opposite each other, but at a respectful distance. The president was manspreading in an elegant, upholstered chair, wearing a blue-and-black tracksuit with horizontal yellow stripes running from shoulders to elbows. He was a baby-faced fellow of middle years, possessor of a massive head, broad shoulders, and a considerable gut. His facial expression communicated a mix of easy confidence and painful indigestion. Ten steps behind him stood two motionless bodyguards wearing the same tracksuits as the president, except theirs lacked the yellow stripes. One guard was standing on each side of a pair of twenty-foot-tall white doors carved in wooden bass relief. Helen, to accommodate her voluminous girth, had been provided with an upholstered sofa; it and the president’s chair were both placed on a resplendent Persian rug.

Helen kicked off the interview on a friendly note: Mr. President, I came here in the hope of establishing a meaningful connection. After all, Moldova is not that isolated. As a matter of fact, I’m personally involved in the US-Moldova trade: one of my fashion companies imports used potato sacks from your country. We use them to make our designer dresses.

Of course, said Bagrayev. We are happy to provide potato sacks in exchange for Supreme brand vapes and fanny packs. But I must have you understand, Moldovan people do not need Supreme merchandise. We don’t need any trade with anyone, really. Trade is kinda gay. It implies dependence on others. Weakness. We only do it as an extra thing - for fun.

Sure, it’s in the very nature of trade that it be voluntary, concurred Helen. Otherwise, it would not be trade, but extortion, right?

Right. And you Americans know all about extortion, ha-ha! laughed the president.

You’re right! America’s history is steeped in extortion, racism, sexism, exploitation, slavery, and genocide. We are proud of constantly acknowledging that in our country. Don’t you think that all countries should be acknowledging these universal crimes? Don’t you think that it’s a basic gesture of participation in the modern world?

Moldova never did anything wrong in its entire history, said Bagrayev. Our nation is glorious.

But how can you say that?! Helen was taken aback. There’s endless evidence that your country, right now, is engaged in racism, sexism, and violence against its minorities.

Look, you can call us whatever you want. Sure: I’m racist, sexist, fascist. This isn’t really the question that I need to address. The main question is for you guys: what are you going to do about it?

Helen was visibly shocked: What are we going to do about it! Listen to yourself! How can you say these things! You should get sued! You should feel lucky if a social justice mob doesn’t rip you to shreds!

What mob? In Moldova, public opinion is on my side. I have a 99.98% approval rating. And the 0.02% was from the clan of my in-laws; they did it only as joke, ha-ha!

Well in America sir, your opinions are abhorrent!

What? Did you just call me a whore? Fatty.

Abhorrent means… never mind! Helen lost her patience. Mr. President, I know you may feel like you have unlimited power, and that you answer to no one in this little kingdom of yours, but if I were you, I would be worried about the reaction of the international community.

Okay, so America – or ‘international community’ –, Bagrayev used air quotes, would then have to invade Moldova. Let’s see how that goes, with our thousand nuclear missile tips staring you down.

Don’t you have a conscience though? Don’t you care about the poor, the people of colour?

"I don’t care about the people of any colour other than my own, poor or rich. Any more than they care about me, at any rate. I’ve been to a few poor countries and quite frankly, I wasn’t impressed. In fact, they disgust me. If my country was so poor, I’d fucking kill myself. The idea of asking foreigners to love me instead