Month: January 2025

The Rise & Fall of Gaston the Incredible: Part Four

A War in Pantoland

After the election Gaston and Barry Bollywood took their bromance to the next level. They went everywhere and did everything together. Gaston still hadn’t delivered the free toothbrushes he had promised, but Bollywood was sure he’d just forgotten.

During the bad medicine years Gaston had printed hundreds of billions of dollars to fund various ideological indulgences, and Barry Bollywood’s Diet Soviet Party had rubber stamped all of them in return for being allowed to pretend that he was also emperor.

Gaston had awarded his friends the contract to manufacture the lollipops given to children after their government injections. The original cost for this project was estimated at $230 million, but after a year the cost had ballooned to $1.7 billion, and they still hadn’t decided on any flavours. It was the same story repeated across every Royal government department, and the amount of money being spent by the emperor was now larger than anything the people of Peopleland had ever seen before.

Gaston and his Laurentian nobility were getting very rich. However, all of this money printing had caused a strange new phenomenon that neither Gaston nor Barry Bollywood had ever encountered before, called ‘Inflation’. The price of everything had started rising and neither of them could explain why.

Some elder advisors tried to explain that expanding the money supply had led to this thing called Inflation, but Gaston would hear none of it. He argued that because the things he did with the money were good, nothing bad could happen and so he had them thrown in jail as heretics.

However, the higher food prices rose, the louder the people complained; and the worse the suffering got, the more it looked like there was something wrong with Gaston’s magic. 

Gaston & Bollywood decided to take a tour of the country together to see what all the fuss was about. They rode on horseback through every town & village in the land accompanied by a caravan of circus performers to reassure the people of Gaston’s goodness.

The Official Circus Caravan for the 2023 Imperial National Tour

Gaston’s horse wasn’t actually a real horse, but a pantomime horse called Sophie played by two people who identified as horses. In Gaston’s new inclusively diverse Trans-Islamic Republic of Peopleland this was the same as a real horse, and saying otherwise would land you in prison with the people who believed in inflation.

Bollywood rode a golden horse called Rolex, which he was very proud of. It wasn’t really a golden horse; it was a pony that had been spray painted gold, but no one dared say anything. Royal state media pretended that both horses were real, and even suggested that both should be made Senators in the upcoming reshuffle.  

Every village they entered the people would emerge from their homes to hurl rotten vegetables and shout obscenities at Gaston & Bollywood. After one particularly awful reception, Bollywood announced that he had an idea.

 ‘I know’ He said… ‘Let’s blame the rising prices on the merchants in the market who sell the food. We can tell the people that it is their greed that is causing prices to rise.’ ‘Awesome idea!’ declared Gaston.

So with the help of the Royal state media, they declared that the rising costs were the fault of greedy merchants, not government spending at all. They hauled the merchants into the main square and held a humiliating public trial during which they were asked to explain why prices had risen. Of course, it was Gaston & Barry Bollywood who were robbing the people through money printing, but for some reason the majority of people were not able to understand this.

Meanwhile their neighbours to the south – the ones they’d chastised when they had elected Gaston as Emperor, had crowned a new king: King Donny the Tremendous.

King Donny had been king before, but had been exiled by the evil nobility of his country after a coup backed by the Reptile Club. Now, with the support of the people, he was back and he meant business.

Unlike Gaston, King Donny was no slight-of-hand magician borrowing from tomorrow to create illusions today – he could do real magic. He could create wealth just by breathing on markets; stop wars by simply talking, and bring down foreign governments just by staring at them. It also was rumoured that King Donny’s urine was 84% Ivermectine, and had been used to cure Trans kids.

The nobility who made money from wars and misery had tried to kill him many times, but failed. In short, King Donny was a proper king who had been tested by fire, and he certainly had no time for Gaston’s fart lighting tricks or fake magic.

King Donny surrounded himself with warriors and innovators. His chief minister was a Marvel scientist called Tony Tesla who had invented everything from crazy string to interplanetary timeshares.

King Donny & Tony Tesla set about bringing the now unpopular and weak rule of Gaston to a humane end for the sake of the suffering people of Peopleland. King Donny dedicated seven minutes a day staring at Gaston’s Trans-Islamic Republic of Peopleland silently mouthing the words ‘51st State’, whilst Tony Tesla pulled back the media curtain on the madness and cruelty of Gaston’s hermit kingdom for all the world to see.

The world was shocked at the perverse failure Peopleland had become under Gaston’s ten year reign. Peopleland should have been a rich country, but it had been materially and socially collapsed for the sake of Gaston’s utopian ideals, and now everyone could see it. Peopleland was broken, but instead of trying to fix it, Gaston now offered state assisted suicide to anyone who was unhappy or poor.

Barry Bollywood and members of the Gaston regime began to sense that the supreme leader was becoming a liability. He was now hated so much both inside and outside the country, that being associated with him was harmful. They tried to suggest that Gaston had achieved so many wonderful things that it might be time for him to consider ending his reign, but Gaston would hear none of it – there was still much work to do; he still hadn’t managed to fully impoverish the people, and there were still political enemies to destroy.

In an act of self-preservation, Barry Bollywood declared that he would no longer support the Gaston as leader, but true to his cynical nature, when offered the opportunity to remove him as emperor, declined to do so.

Eventually it was left to Gaston’s Royal ministers to replace him with a new Emperor, but when informed of this decision, he refused to attend meetings with them and instead began hiding in various rooms of the palace in an attempt to evade both them and his fate. Finally, after four days of upstairs-downstairs Benny Hill capers, they found him in the Royal wardrobe hiding in the dressing up box covered in boot polish, and softly sobbing his childhood favourite, Al Jolson’s ‘Mammy.’

The Rise & Fall of Gaston the Incredible: Part Three

The Bad Medicine Years

Early in the New Year it was announced that someone in China had accidentally spilt some CIA monkey juice on the floor of a bioweapons lab run by Dr Faustus. Royal state media reported that it had escaped and started to spread amongst the population.

This was the opportunity the Reptile Club and their young leaders had been waiting for – Gaston continued to allow in flights from China for another week, and then, once the infection had spread sufficiently to warrant an emergency response, he immediately closed the country down.

Unfortunately most people in Peopleland still trusted the government. They had grown up under the benevolent reign of Brian the Boring, and naively believed that the emperor still had their best interests at heart. They were unaware that the contract had been rewritten and that the Reptile Club was now in charge.

Gaston rushed to unite the people behind him by removing all of their rights in the name of safety. The people were told that they were ‘All in this together’ and were encouraged by state media to bang pots at 7pm in support of medical staff busy making Tik-Tok videos.

His government introduced Leninist slogans such as ‘Doing the right thing’ & ‘Being there for one another’. They became rallying cries for Gaston and his ministers, who would recite these spells during public announcements; encouraging everyone to come together under the flag of safety through total obedience to Gaston. He declared Peopleland the safest country on earth, and that no faithful citizen would ever die of anything ever again if they simply ‘did the right thing’.

Anyone who opposed the measures, or questioned the authenticity of the threat was labeled an ‘Enemy of Goodness’, and Gaston openly questioned whether they should continue to ‘tolerate such people’.

By now, the people of Peopleland had become divided into two groups – the loyalists who were still hypnotized by Gaston’s policy magic and transfixed by the fear his Royal state media conjured up, and the rebels who now saw through his illusion, and feared for the future in what was now fast becoming a cruel and despotic reign.

After a winter of lockdowns and a conveyor belt of media manufactured fear, Gaston announced to the people that a new magic medicine was coming that would enable them to have their freedom back. He told the people all they had to do was get the government injection and they could ‘go back to normal’.

Anyone who asked what was in the injection was labeled a ‘Science Denier’, and accused of attempting to ‘kill Grandma’.

Gaston said that the injection contained only goodness and no badness. And although the people who made the injection had only ever tested it on animals – all of which had died by the way – and wouldn’t say what was in it, Gaston granted them Royal immunity from responsibility if anything went wrong. He declared the medicine ‘safe & effective’.

Gaston said that getting the medicine was a choice, but a week later declared that anyone who didn’t get it couldn’t ‘go back to normal’. He announced that anyone who did not volunteer to take the injection of unknown goodness would lose their jobs and not be able to travel. He even decreed that children who did not choose to get the injection would be cast out of society.

Gaston issued passes to those who decided to ‘do the right thing’. They were declared clean and could ‘go back to normal’, but those who still refused were branded unclean and outcasts.    

Some people were really enjoying this. The bad medicine years and Gaston’s public acts of cruelty brought out the worst in some of the citizens of the new and diversely inclusive Trans-Islamic Republic of Peopleland. Those who were firmly latched onto the teet of Royal state media behaved the worst. This section of society started to become fanatically obsessed with safety and compliance, to the point where they viewed non-compliance to be a crime worthy of imprisonment and even death.

‘Why should we tolerate those who refuse ‘to do the right thing’’? ‘Let them die!’ They shouted from the comment sections of Royal state media, which also dutifully deleted any comments that questioned the medicine mandates.

On one occasion, Gaston boasted to his ministers that his loyal followers would be willing throw unvaccinated children into ovens if the Royal state media told them to do it. Such people lined up to get their children the injections completely unaware that this was a Reptile Club initiative.

At the same time, the people who had started to see through Gaston’s grand illusion began to organize and protest against the medicine mandates. Gaston started to sense that time was running out. So despite everything being closed down, Gaston decided that this would be the best time to call a snap election in the hope of gaining a majority; then he could commit some real tyranny on those who opposed goodness.

In the election, Gaston narrowly secured another even smaller minority government. He hated the idea that the people would say no to him. He extended his medicine mandates to include people who delivered food for a living – Uber Munch, Delivery-O & Skip the Liberty, and declared that their drivers would need to get the medicine if they wanted to feed the people trapped at home.

This time the people had had enough. They had become completely reliant on home delivery during the lockdowns, and had forgotten how to feed themselves. They organized and gathered together under Gaston’s Imperial balcony and booed him when he appeared that Sunday to address the nation. Gaston declared them all ‘Racists’ & ‘White Supremacists’ and vowed that he would take everything away from them.

The next morning he told the Police of Infinite Justice and Goodness to create a threat that would allow Gaston to impose martial law. Then he got Royal state media to declare that there were people who wanted to hurt his government and that he would need to use special powers to deal with them. These powers were usually saved for war, but as far as Gaston was concerned this was WAR.

The Police of Infinite Justice and Goodness took four men from one of the protests and accused them of being revolutionaries. Gaston threw them in jail and declared martial law. He also announced that anyone who dared to protest against him would be crushed by his Royal cavalry.

After weeks of protest in the main square under the very balcony that Gaston waved from each Sunday, thousands of protesters, including many elderly and children, stood peacefully in the snow reciting prayers as Gaston’s Infinite Justice and Goodness moved in and began beating them to the ground with clubs and trampling them under horses. The fresh blood of the good people of Peopleland decorated the snow as his police officers took to social media to boast of their brutality and how the overtime was paying for their swimming pools.

Gaston had finally become a real dictator, just like his real father. Now he had supreme power and the people were terrified. He sat back to savour this moment… He loved the feeling of crushing the people and could now see why his real father had enjoyed it so much.

Gaston vowed to destroy all those who dared stand against him. He announced that his government would seize all their property, including their children, and freeze the bank accounts of all those involved. His deputy minister – the one whose grandfather had accidentally been a Nazi – announced that anyone who donated more than $25 to the protests would also be cut off from their money, rendering them unable to support or feed themselves or their family.

However, Gaston did not consider the effects his actions might have on Peopleland, or that international investors might become nervous and start pulling their money out of the Trans-Islamic Republic of Peopleland, concerned that it might also be confiscation by the Gaston regime.

Gaston didn’t know it yet, but he had just overstepped the mark. In just five days the Royal Bank of Peopleland lost $8 billion as nervous international investors did exactly that, whilst the people of Peopleland also started pulling their money out of the banks in protest.

The Reptile Club who ran the banks immediately called Gaston and instructed him to cancel martial law, concerned that the bank run in Peopleland could spread to other Reptile Club nations and cause their entire financial empire to collapse.

The next day, Gaston was forced by his reptilian overlords to cancel martial law and reassure everyone that their money was safe in Peopleland. This put an end to the financial losses, but in brutally suppressing the protests against him, Gaston had revealed himself as a petulant and vengeful boy king who was willing to destroy anyone who dared to say ‘No’.

The Rise & Fall of Gaston the Incredible: Part Two

Barry Bollywood

Few people knew it at the time, but Gaston was just one of many young leaders who had been recruited & trained to represent the Reptile Club – an elite group of powerful people who had big ideas about how the future should look for the little people of the world.

He was assigned a mentor – a wise old man who had accidentally worked for the Nazis in World War Two. George, or Emperor Palpatine to his friends, had a lot of money and was looking at spending it on creating the perfect society. Gaston was only too happy to help – he loved big ideas. He also liked the idea of ruling without other people getting in the way with boring stuff like representation.

Gaston’s policy miracles were getting bigger and more sophisticated, and as they did they became more expensive – $2 billion for this; several billion for that; $3 billion to design a new flag for Sudan; $5 billion in pregnancy kits for Afghanistan, and $30 billion in gender neutral artillery shells for Khazaria which was acting as a launderette for the Reptile Club.

In order to pay for all these feats of policy Gaston had to take more and more money from the people by raising taxes. He taxed the people of Peopleland when they earned money; he taxed them when they spent money, and then he taxed them for simply being alive. He called this The Carbon Tax – a tax on anything made out of carbon – people, plants, pets etc. If it moved or breathed, it paid tax to Gaston.

Soon Gaston was taking more from his people than the feudal lords of medieval Europe had taken from their subjects. He taxed them so heavily in order to fund his noble & virtuous projects that he had to instruct his royal state media to ban the use of the word ‘feudal’, and label anyone who continued to use the term a ‘Nazi’.

To keep the illusion of his policy miracles flowing, Gaston was forced to divide the people of Peopleland into those who were ‘good’ and those who were ‘bad’. I was quite simple: those who were good supported his policies, and those that did not were bad.

He told his state funded media and police – the Royal Police of Incredible Justice  – as he had declared them, to start looking for people who were not willing to repeat the lie of his magic and did not share his view of the perfect society. Royal state media then branded these people ‘White Supremacists’.

About this time rumours started circulating that Gaston’s real father was not Pierre the Bastard, but in fact the communist revolutionary, Marco Cubano – the leader of the cane sugar republic of Muy Povertino. Cubano was an even bigger bastard than Pierre the Bastard, and Gaston’s mother was well known for both her anarchic libido and penchant for pantomime villains.   

It also emerged that whilst Gaston had been at Clown school in Montreal teaching children how to light farts, that he’d also been unofficially instructing young women in the art of lovemaking. However, it turns out that Gaston had not checked all their I.D’s carefully enough, and at least one of them had been a child. Ooops! Gaston had paid the family $2 million not to mention it again.

Then just as the dust was settling on these scandals, and less than a year after he had banned black boot polish for being ‘racist’, videos emerged of Gaston as a child covered in boot polish singing the Al Jolson classic ‘Mammy’.

It transpires that even as a young child Gaston could not be left alone with boot polish. He had told his mother that he identified as Saladin – the destroyer of Christendom. To which she had replied ‘That’s nice dear’. Little did she know that as Imperial Emperor, Gaston would spread lies about dead native children that would result in the burning down of 95 churches.

Any one of these scandals would have ended the career of Brian the Boring I, II or even III, but Gaston was special. The old rules did not apply to him because in the new Trans-Islamic Republic of Peopleland, the Royal state media, the police and the judges all served the emperor rather than the people. The Royal state media did not mention these scandals, and if they were forced to, they made excuses for Gaston; the Royal Police of Incredible Justice pretended they were busy tackling transphobia, and all the judges said they were having lunch at the time – paid for by Gaston of course.   

However, despite all this institutional support, the people were now slowly starting to see through Gaston’s sophistry, and some even started booing him when he appeared on the palace balcony to wave at the people. For each one of those who dared to boo him, there were another ten who had grown tired of Gaston’s high tax reign. Gaston had the royal state media brand anyone who dared boo him as ‘Transphobic’.

In the next election Gaston narrowly secured power, and had to seek another party who enjoyed an equally loose relationship with reality in order to form a coalition.

Barry Bollywood – the leader of the Diet-Soviet Party and former Punjabi Ken Doll was the obvious choice. His party sang the same songs of inclusive diversity that Gaston’s party sang, and like Gaston, he also lived in a world where money wasn’t real and actions did not have consequences.

In many ways Barry Bollywood was worse that Gaston. Gaston was a petulant boy king who would throw tantrums at the people and have them thrown in prison when they didn’t love him enough, but Bollywood was a cynical grifter and a fraud. He employed political opportunism to increase his power and wealth whilst pretending to care about the poor people who supported him. He drove expensive sports cars, wore expensive watches, and his wife danced around in Tik-Tok videos wearing gold jewellery whilst the victims of Gaston’s policies lined up for food in the snow.

But as far as Gaston was concerned, Barry Bollywood and his Diet-Soviet Party would re-legitimize Gaston’s waning rule and allow him to continue being divine Imperial Emperor.

Gaston had a meeting with Bollywood in the gold room of the palace, and over a Rolex catalogue asked him what it would take to secure the support of his party. Bollywood told Gaston that all he was looking for was free toothbrushes for everyone in The Trans-Islamic Republic of Peopleland… and maybe a Rolex for his trouble.

‘Free toothbrushes?’ Gaston asked, his voice almost breaking in excitement and disbelief. ‘Free toothbrushes in return for supreme power you say?’ Gaston could not believe his luck. It was like doing business with a child – he felt like the first Conquistador to land in Peru; trading sacks of gold in return for cheap glass beads. Bollywood may have been a cynical political operative, but he clearly had no understanding of the power he had, nor how negotiations worked, and as Gaston noted, was easily distracted by shiny objects. 

Despite this imbalance, Gaston and Bollywood enjoyed a bromance of political opportunism – they were like a couple of Siamese twins conjoined by poor policies and economic illiteracy – neither could rule without the other. Gaston proposed even higher taxes and Barry Bollywood’s Diet Soviet Party rubber stamped it just as long as it made the people more dependent on the state.

Both knew that this model was unsustainable long term unless they could somehow enslave the people fully and convince them that it was in their best interests. Then, as if by magic, in the winter of the following year in a far off land came the opportunity the Reptile Club and their young leaders so desperately sought.