Crowbar's Cover Blown!

Well, I guess it had to happen eventually....

Have you been wondering why your friend and mine, the infamous and ever-violent Crowbar, simply disappeared off the map for the last year or so? She didn't forget us, if that's what you thought - instead she's been in suspended animation, watching the landscape, and observing the Valerie Plame-ing of the Resistance Force.

It all started nearly two years ago and is a longer story than I am able to fully relate here. The thumbnail version is that one of the most virulent and destructive operatives of the Dark Side(TM) forces - otherwise known as a Probation Officer - had reason to begin to notice Undercover Operative Cake Wafit's activities. Every now and again we in the Resistance Force are compelled to run risks of exposure when the Friendly Neighbourhood courts require written documentation of our presence in a young woman's life. Obviously we would prefer to avoid committing anything to writing (she says as she types this little story out) but sometimes injustices of such magnitude are about to go down in Youth Court history that we are left with little option but to add our two cents. The two cents usually look something like this:

"Hey, we know your handy-dandy little pocket Gestapo, Probation, has told you this young woman is irredeemable evil incarnate and should never again see the light of day, but we've had a slightly different experience of her. Here it is, for your consideration....so maybe don't lock her up for the duration of written history, um-kay?"

So Crowbar employed this tool (in the cloak of her Cake identity) during a particularly egregious miscarriage of justice, being driven mostly to obscure the fact that the aforementioned Probation officer - we'll just call her Troll Doll - did not do her job. Barely noticed her job, in fact...

In the short term the Letter-to-the-Kindly-Judge strategy worked quite well. Miscarriage of justice aborted, young woman released, indefinite incarceration averted. Troll Doll, however, had noticed Cake Wafit on her toxic radar and held her personally responsible for the Court's newfound awareness that she was essentially phoning in her job and insisting youth be held in secure custody until she got around to offering an opinion on them. An interesting approach, but one that does not exactly meet the standard of 'acceptable reasons to incarcerate'. Perhaps she got in trouble back at the Dark Side(TM) Home Office - we really don't know. All we've been able to divine is that Troll Doll began to systematically dismantle any ability of Cake's to do her job.

First, she outed her. Started asking awkward questions about 'just who is this Cake Wafit, and why doesn't she report to me?' Started shipping young women Cake supports to prisons outside of this city (some more than 10 hours away) as soon as she found out that young women were calling Cake while locked up. Started telling prison staff that Cake was trouble, and insisting she not be allowed to participate in meetings pertaining to the many young women Cake interacted with.

It went on and on....suffice to say, it was more than a little disconcerting, and it certainly began to take a toll on the Resistance Force and our ability to sneak into the Dark Side's Re-education Centres unnoticed.

Some other changes compounded the problem. The Dark Side, in all their cleverness, decided to begin incarcerating young women in an inaccessible city several hours outside this jurisdiction. While the Dark Side(TM) facilities in this city are enough to make Winston Smith's skin crawl, those further afield are not only equally psychologically intense, but they are also unrelieved, in that no sane outside person has access to them. When you're locked in the enemy's prison and secluded with the enemy's thinking, it becomes more and more difficult to know that there is any other reality to be had. Cake - and people like her in smatters of Resistance Forces around the globe - would allow a little bit of sane-world to sneak in through the doors of the Thought-Control fortress. It wasn't much, but sometimes it was just enough to help the imprisoned remember that another world lived outside the walls, and they might join it again if only they could survive long enough.

None of this, of course, could ever be acceptable to the Dark Side, whose existence depends on being seen and obeyed as The Only Way, The One And Perfect Truth. Thus a great deal of Dark Side energy and time is devoted to undermining the influence of Resistance Forces, if not flat out eradicating them. This is best done by removing that all-important thing: Access. If'n you can't access the kids, you can't let 'em know they're not nuts, you can't help 'em hang on to who they are through the unrelenting weight of Dark Side Thought-Control. So put the kids somewhere that no one can get to them, shroud them in layers of concrete walls and kryptonite bureaucracies. This is actually a favoured tactic in penal history to ensure prisoner isolation and total control, and it is as effective now as ever it was.

It was effective within the Crowbar Resistance Force also. Between the Troll Doll's whisper campaigns and the new distance imprisonment policy for youth, Cake slowly began to see her cover erode. Suddenly people knew who she was when she showed up at the Dark Side Reeducation Centres, and they were loathe to let her in. Suddenly she couldn't get a (Dark-Side-Approved) pass for a young woman to come to a counselling appointment. Suddenly she couldn't get a call through to a young woman in jail if her life depended on it (through the Dark-Side-Approved Contact List).

We won't bore you here with all the many machinations that followed, or the past year's attempts to repair that which Troll Doll so effectively laid assunder. Suffice to say that our little Resistance Force was dealt what looks to be a near-lethal blow. Cake was outed, Con and Cult wandered about with no leader, no longer knowing if there's a Resistance Force to secretly fund or recruit people into. And Crowbar? That's the worst of it all. It seems Crowbar has had some kind of psychotic break and is languishing somewhere in defeat. In the past, when the rest of the force became demoralized, Crowbar got mad and laid waste to the Dark Side operatives in her path. Now she just looks up every now and again, shrugs and says, "Looks like they won". She might fiddle with her weaponry or gaze at it nostalgically, but she hasn't smashed anything in a long, long time.

What does this mean for us, kids? Is this the end of the Resistance Force Blog? No more communiques from Crowbar H.Q.? No more tales of intrigue and subterfuge?

Well I, the last remaining staff person kicking around Headquarters, am resolved to try to come back to you and let you know what I'm up to at least, but it probably won't be the same. None of the old activity occurs in here, the fax machine is gathering dust, and the days are less remarkable. Even so, I'll keep sending updates for as long as I can, and just hope that someday soon the front door will crash open and Crowbar will be towering in the doorframe, clutching a tire iron and a baseball bat, growling "Ok, enough moping - it's time to go get the fuckers".

Until that happens, I remain sincerely yours in exile.