One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. -Anonymous
[This is a work of poker fiction set ten thousand hands in the future. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.]
In the 1970's Italy's Red Brigades practiced "La Strategia della Terrore," the Strategy of Terror, carrying out mass casualty bombings designed to strike so much fear in the heart of the public that the Italian government would have no choice but to impose increasingly ruthless and repressive counter-terrorism tactics which, the brigades believed, would eventually turn the people totally against the government. Many foreign terrorist groups have since practiced the Strategy of Terror. It then should have surprised no one that America's anti-poker terror cells would adopt it for their own use.
"Purify each neighborhood of the poker menace," the reverend had told his followers. In response, all over the country local poker puritans formed themselves into militant anti-poker cells. Southern California's "card commandos" staged a noisy push-and-shove poker table sit-in at L.A.'s Tricycle Casino. New Jersey's "hold 'em haters" vandalized the poker room at Atlantic City's Boardwalk Casino. "It's not enough!" said Jack Boots, self-appointed commanding officer of Tennessee's "anti-poker patrol." "Sit-ins and vandalism won't stop poker. We need to employ the time tested tactics of terror against our enemies. Did the KGB stage a sit-in at the Tsar's palace? Did the SS spray paint the Reichstag? No! They took action! The only way to win the anti-poker game is to play the terror card!"
Willie Nelson may have sung, My heroes have always been cowboys, but Andrew Jackson Boots' own heroes were Tim McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski. If Jack Boots could have found a classified ad that read "Terrorist Wanted-No Experience Needed," he would have happily applied. Until that day arrived, parking enforcement officer Boots terrorized double parkers and meter cheaters on the streets of Middleberg, Tennessee.
Working as a "meter mister" allowed Boots to wreak some little revenge on the public and, during one frenzied ticket blitz, he strayed out of his own jurisdiction and into that of the legendary two old meter maids, The Sisters Queen. It was love between them, and hate of everyone else, that brought and kept them together.
This strange threesome of scorned social outcasts were soon called to action by the Reverend Brother's great poker purge, forming what would soon become the most destructive and dangerous of all anti-poker terror cells, "the anti-poker patrol."
"We must think BIG!" Boots told his group. "The Baader-Meinhof gang didn't think small when they bombed Berlin's police headquarters. The IRA didn't think small when they bombed London's Victoria Station. We must stop Tennesseans from playing in poker rooms!"
"There a problem," said one of The Sisters Queen.
"A pretty big problem," said the other Sister Queen.
Boots waited for one of the Sisters Queen to tell him what the problem was.
"There are no poker rooms in Tennessee."
"Not a single one."
In this The Sisters Queen were exactly correct. A hundred years before, Tennessee's legislature had enacted America's toughest antigambling law-Any and all wagering games of chance, including any variation whatsoever of the card games known as Faro, Euchre, and Poker are hereby and forever prohibited.
"If there are no poker rooms ..." began one Sister Queen, "how can we stop Tennesseans from playing?"
Jack Boots laughed. "There is one great big ugly riverboat poker room moored right across the Mississippi River in Missouri. That's where they play poker and I intend to blow it out of the water!"
(To be continued in the next issue of Poker Player)
