During a rare Fox & Friends appearance, a genial Vice President Hunter reminded his hosts that the Constitution had been written centuries earlier, “long before we had electric lights and flight seemed like an impossible dream,” so even men as brilliant as the founding fathers could not have foreseen the complexities of the modern world. “Which is why,” he explained in his guise as a constitutional expert, “in the very first article of that hallowed document they provided the mechanism we are using today, right now, to modernize and protect it to make certain [index-finger-pointing certain] that the principles it enumerates endure exactly as they were given to us, with only a few necessary changes, for at least another quarter-millennium!”

On Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update the following Saturday, Thomas Jefferson, played in a surprise guest appearance by Will Ferrell, demanded that the “revised and updated” constitution include such articles as “freedom from Kardashian selfies” and an official price list for lobbyists interested in purchasing their own senator.

The administration’s first public action was to divide the country into twelve military districts. This was done purely for administrative and budgetary purposes, Secretary of Defense McCord explained, and would not have any effect on daily life. People should just go about their normal business. No one would even notice it, other than noticing new patches appearing on the uniforms of the active military and militia they might encounter. The greater Washington area was designated District 1 and Marine major general Michael “Steel Mike” Herman was named military governor.

Someday I intend to write an essay entitled “The Role of Coffee in Fomenting a Revolution.” Voltaire, for example, supposedly drank as many as fifty-two cups of coffee a day (demitasse, I am assuming) while laying the philosophical groundwork for the French Revolution. We definitely had the coffee; it was the revolution we were lacking. There didn’t seem to be any great interest in fighting the government.

That became apparent to me at the gym a few mornings later. The Light Brigade had edged a little deeper into politics, and we were debating the potential ramifications of this war declaration. To my surprise, people were pretty evenly divided about it, and unlike most issues, those feelings did not necessarily follow party loyalty. Maybe it’s accurate to say they were independently passive. The two lawyers were split, the detective wanted to see how it was utilized before he reached any conclusion, and the TV producer praised it for the stability it promised. The Georgetown professor, while admitting some uneasiness about it, took comfort in McCord’s contention that it shouldn’t affect any law-abiding citizen.

“I wonder if you guys really get this!” I shouted. My shouting got their attention. I was lying on my back, doing reps with 125 pounds. I was sweating, but my anger at this response had pushed me to another five reps. “It means some government bureaucrat is now free to listen to your phone calls, read your emails, and hack into your computer without a search warrant.”