They all know.

They are so sure of themselves and their reality.

You are a conspiracy theorist, a nutjob, a crackpot in a trailer with a tin hat. They are The Critic, an urban expert on existence, sitting pretty in a high-rise apartment [a real house!] wearing the hottest new clothes and watching this wonderful world they live in play through on a brand new plasma-screen TV. They have it made! While you sit in your dimly-lit hovel-on-wheels and type away at some ugly-ass old 486 computer on a dial-up line they are chatting up some downtown party girl and getting cute IMs from their ex on their Blackberries. Here you are trying to start your old pickup with a snort of ether and they're walking to their Premium Luxury SUV, clicking the remote starter and sitting in luxurious leather seating. How utterly humiliating.

"You are spouting off nonsense. DailyKos, CNN, Huffington Post, hell even Fox News isn't reporting the jibberish you're going on about! What are you on? Obviously its the moonshine you've been distilling from that old AMC Matador radiator you found in the swamp, ain't it Jeb? Here you are talking about FEMA camps and all this other kook nonsense while there are other things going on that are REALLY happening, like Global Climate Change and Dancing With The Stars... Free Tibet! I bet you're getting another hubcap-full of that paint stripper out right now while the more civilized folk queue up and ask for a Venti mocha latte with a dash of cinnamon, light on the cream, maybe a dash of vanilla... What can I say? Some of us are more sophisticated than others, tee hee hee."

The Critic knows all about you, who you are, what you think and believe. Bitter, clinging to your guns and your bibles, foul-smelling, beer-bellied, narrow-minded, bigoted, inbred, crazy as batshit Palin-lovers, scared of black helicopters and UFOs. My goodness something must be done about these monsters! I know, let's go onto the internet and fight them tooth and nail on their own forums! "I, the all-knowing and well-informed MSNBC subscriber and big-time American Idol fan, shall bring light unto these toothless hicks so that they might better understand their lowly existence... Praise be unto me! I am the closest thing to a god that these backwoods fucks will ever experience, hallowed be my screen name..." [:: hits send ::]

It's all good. They sit back in their chair, smugly reveling in their cleverness. The cute blonde Vegan girl from the health food store texts them back, they go to the hottest club downtown, go back to his apartment and have sex all night long. The life of an internet provocateur is like the life of a secret agent, but without the Walther PPK [guns are bad, after all] and there's nothing more manly than telling a bunch of morons that they are wrong about the government's plans, fucking retarded fucks - "no offense to retards, of course!" they mutter whimsically - Life is fucking beautiful.

Morning finds the world crashing down upon them. Awakened by screaming and horrible noises, they bolt upright in bed, They rush to the television and turn it on to find that horror has once again gripped the nation... The ticker at the bottom is scrolling at a rapid pace, displaying all sorts of ghastly tolls and numbers, and as the hours pass they watch this circus progress further and further from sanity. Officials, authorities, newscasters all start chiming the same mantra, the carefully orchestrated trap that the "ignorant tin-hat rednecks" kept speaking of has sprung, and The Critic is seeing his world as he knew it fall to pieces. Furiously he begins to think of what to do, where he can run to... And then the sound of his neighbor's door being kicked in snaps into his consciousness, followed by a burst of gunfire and tortured, gurgling groans. The boots and ruckus begin to come down his hallway...

"Compliance" becomes a word that the cynical man despises. The memories of the M-4s shoved in his face, the harsh and uncaring treatment he had as he was ripped from his world, and the brutalities he faced on his way to camp still come to him in the night but he has become too embittered and numb to scream at them anymore. Standing in the line to get his daily rations with the other males, watching as two men are torn from fighting and dragged to solitary confinement, looking down in shame and silence as the mass of broken men shuffles forward, he finally gets his two bites worth of food and shambles to the table. The ghosts of his former life appear every once in a while - The once proud professor of his, weeping silently several tables down, that prick from accounting that he hated, the once-cheerful "player" from the club sitting stunned and stupefied - and make his "stay" at the facility even more surreal. Gunshots no longer faze him, since men driven to madness rush the inward-turned barbed wire everyday and are systematically "dealt with"... His cot is a far cry from the Select Comfort mattress and memory-foam pillows he yearns for every night.

One last act of "Compliance" for the benevolent government... The lines extend from the rows, standing straight and true as they await the train. The Critic sees through his weary eyes the ultimate result of the tyranny he worked so hard to ignore as he steps into the car with the other malnourished, tired prisoners. The collective anguish echoes through the boxcar as it gets underway, destination unknown... The "idiot troofer" dies fighting the oppression in a field that is not his, but he is remembered by those who fought alongside him and his legacy is told and retold. The Critic's body becomes nothing but another mass of "neutralized" tissue in the disposal pit, and his name is lost to the ages.