The understanding first came to me when I was deep in thought while listening to a podcast and playing an FPS PvP video game. The sun was beaming through the window, highlighting dust motes in the air. I’d always thought of light as a force of goodness in the world. Flashlights light up the darkness, sunlight chases away the night, and lightsabers cut through the evils of the Sith.

But in that moment, sitting in my room, the glare of the sun struck my monitor in the wrong way and I fell off a cliff in the game I was playing, plummeting to my death and messing up my K/D ratio. The timing of it was perfect. Right then, the podcaster was talking about a deal I could get on Goop Gabber Flashlights, the latest in glow-in-the-dark companion flashlights who talk to you in the darkness so that you will be terrified of them instead of potential monsters.

In that moment, I knew the real monster to be terrified of: The sun. It’s revisionist. It was a word they’d been talking about in the podcast, about when somethings fails to hold up to its standards, and I knew it was applicable here. The sun was supposed to do the job of light, but instead it killed me in a video game. This was the beginning of my real education in geopolitics.

I grew up in a small town in Iowa, a gated community named after the state, located near Harvard. From my first steps, I knew I wanted to change the world. I wasn’t sure how, but I knew I was destined to do it and nothing was going to get in my way. The first time my parents paid for expensive private education, it only affirmed the destiny that was building in my heart. I looked up to figures like White Science Man and Misquoted Political Statesman as great men, who had left their mark on the world. I saw in myself the potential to be one of them, to walk in their shoes, to go where no one had gone before. At least, not identically to how they had. Different enough that it would be distinctly great.

As I grew, I worked hard, getting all A’s and paving my way for Harvard. I didn’t have a lot of time for a social life, but neither did Quirky Inventor Who Isolated Himself either. Perhaps I’d be like him, staring at a wall for hours on end and musing about the nature of reality. I’d pass out and it would come to me a dream and I’d rush to a chalkboard, jotting it down, while an orchestra played my theme song in the background. I’d become a household name for it.

But I had to get through Harvard first. Getting in was hard. You might not know this, but a lot of people want to go to Harvard, at least five of them for sure, and I was among that number. I pored over ideas for a submission essay and toiled for hours at the tennis courts while I let the ideas come to me. In the morning, I would jot down every thought I had and then in the evening, I would try to combine them. I called my essay Day and Night, and it was back when I still believed in the sun.

My essay didn’t get me in, but luckily, my parents had paid them off, so I got in anyway. Money talks, as they say, and my parents were loaded. Can greatness be bought? I think so. I did consider trying to trademark the word for a while, but never got around to trying. College, or university as the Britlans say, put me to the test. For the first time in my life, I became fully aware of how many fools are in the world. One of them was a spunky fellow calling himself a communist.

I was tempted to strike him, but my mother had always taught me that you’re supposed to shoot commies and I didn’t have a gun, nor have any idea how to shoot one. What is a gun anyway? I think it is a metaphor for fire. That’s why they say that you fire a gun. You never water a gun. Water is for putting things out and flooding them like in The Bible. Fire represents hell and suffering. Therefore, guns are hell on Earth. Except for water guns. They are more biblical.

Guy Whose Name I Can’t Remember said, “The pen is mightier than the sword.” I agree with him. Every time I write, I feel my pen cutting down the enemies of progress. In my case, in college, midterms. I wasn’t a fan of them. Where was I? Oh yeah, so the communist guy. He said that Stalin was only 99% evil and the other 1% was good. This made no sense to me. Is water only 99% water and 1% other thing? Is an apple only 99% apple and 1% water? Are ducks made of geese? I tried to make sense of this, but the more I reflected on it, the more confused I became.

I went on to become an esteemed teacher at Harvard, teaching theoretical metaphysics of biofeedback mechanisms in horticultural spectres. I don’t know what happened to the commie, but that was the last time I spoke to him. His comment stuck with me though, lingering in the background, waiting to become relevant.

That fateful day when the sun killed me in a video game, it came back. The sun as revisionist. What if Stalin was a revisionist too? It would fit with him being 99% evil and 1% good. Had he stuck to whatever it was he was trying to do exactly, he would have been 100% that. But he didn’t. Just like how the sun didn’t stick exactly to being the goodness of light.

This was a life-changing experience and it was when I knew my great man moment had come. I immediately quit my teaching job, much to the dismay of everyone in my life, and joined a mainstream news publication. They were relieved when they realized it was more lucrative this way. I started writing pieces on revisionism, starting out small. The sun might be too much for some people at once. First dirt, nobody likes dirt, so that one is revisionist. Then ants. Nobody likes them either. Gradually I worked my way toward the sun and when that was well received, I dug into Stalin.

It was a touchy subject. At first, they called me a communist for even invoking Stalin’s name. I explained my thoughts on guns and they calmed down. I knew I had them in the palm of my hand then. Then I went into depth. I explained how although the majority of Stalin’s actions had been pure evil and performed via demonic rituals as a test of the religiosity of all those involved, a small percentage of his actions had been because he was a revisionist.

I got an award for that one, from the Definitely Not Anti-Communists for Peace organization. This was the breakthrough. From there, I went on to criticize various heads of state who the west was angry with, using my same theory. Sometimes I even flirted with being a socialist. In interviews, I would talk of how society could improve if we did some things for people and laughed about it. The hosts always took it well, laughing along with me. Then we got back to serious matters of life and I leveraged my background in theoretical metaphysics of biofeedback mechanisms in horticultural spectres to inform my political analysis. A horticultural spectre is a lot like a politics. They both have commies under the bed. This was my magnum opus.

When I landed on that, I knew I had finally performed the work I was here to do. I retired early to my home in the gated community named after the state of Iowa and did volunteer work for an organization that trained geese in how to give bread crumbs to the homeless. I couldn’t have done any of it without my gorgeous wife Martha and my two daughters and two sons, and I see the restraining order they have with me as a sign of how truly complex life can be.

When life gives you lemons, don’t suppose they are just lemons. A small percentage of them might just be a revisionist in disguise.