Otis Spengler leafed through the Brooklyn Galaxy one last time. He had to quit doing this. Three editions already without him in it.
Wasn’t it time to make a proper break?
‘I’m not pro-war, I’m anti-terrorism; no exceptions! Take it or leave it!’ panted the greasy, shimmering shade of Marcus Charleston Bubble; in the interview that ought to have destroyed Bubble’s career rather than making it. Some things Otis would never understand.
Then again, he wasn’t the only person who ‘didn’t understand’ things.
But what was not understanding, and what was merely not, in the memorable phrase of Morton Megaraparthenon, ‘giving a rat’s arse?’
(Now he was free, Otis Spengler could finally put the record straight about how the somewhat more-than-memorable hook-in line ‘former gay porn erotic radical political performance theatriste, convicted hate-criminal and crypto-secular UK Minister for Culture and the Arts Morton Megaraparthenon’ was not actually his line.
Now, much as he admired the intricate and cunning weaseliness of the words, these were not his words, but those of Gideon Truman. He still remembered, to this very day and hour, how Gideon spat out his cigar in amazement when Otis raised the topic of the rather sinister addition to his perfectly sober and ethically serious article.
Now, for someone supposedly short on time, it really did seem that Gideon could just spend hours and hours in a good debate. Nothing disciplinary, if you will, ever came of their arguments; indeed, somewhere deep down, Otis sensed that Gideon Truman actually enjoyed and admired their little tug-‘o’-wars.
I mean, it was for all the world as though Truman, unable to enjoy the joys of a (somewhat) clean conscience and the philosophical consolations of a substantial catalogue of ethically reflexive and, at times, even genuinely subversive articles… Well, it was as though Truman, although no more willing to enjoy such wholesome pleasures as he was able to pursue them, nevertheless revelled in these pleasures.
He was living a great life of superlative journalism; but vicariously. Vicariously. Vicariously, my dear boy!
Always vicariously.
Forever.
Yet even so, there was indeed, once upon a time, an occasion such that upon generously uttering-out his usual Schadenspiel about all this poor little black boy big daddy Truman, heartie-breakie bear-huggie ole Giddy Truman had, y’know, just gone and pretty much hot-damn scooped the fuck up outa all these here loathsome ghetto business and put the boy on his feet, the right way up…
Well yes, it really was pretty hard to deny, judging from the rare hint of genuine tragedy that flashed across Truman’s forehead (his cold, fishy eyes rarely showed his hand), well yes, it was damned hard for Otis to purge his mind of the harrowing feeling that Truman genuinely admired him. And more…
Envied him.
And not even in an entirely malicious way.
Otis was the young, fresh, creative spirit the mediocre Gideon Truman had never had the ghost of a chance of being.
‘You know what?’ Truman used to spit. ‘You’re the brains, and I’m the fuckin’ wallet, baby!’
At times, Otis would almost have preferred to be the wallet; for then he could be stowed out of sight, away from the insincerely gratified, faux-congratulatory eyes of the cannibal on his back.
… Sindbad the Sailor?
Oh, God! Those allegations of the ‘Arabian Whites’ party in the Amber Hornet! Otis wasn’t sure why Truman forbade him, not so very far from literally-at-the-point-of-a-gun, to elaborate on precisely what was alleged to have been going on the night the club was bombed.
And when Senator Marcus Charleston Bubble victoriously greased and waddled out of the wreckage.
He had one or two leads.
But only in his head.
Better to keep them there.
Contrarian and rejectionist as he was, Otis was not such a fool as to think that even here, the land of the free, the nation of the American Constitution and the First Amendment, he could ever get away with just writing whatever the hell he wanted.
After all, when people did…
Well, things just tended to…
Happen.
‘Make of that what you will,’ Otis muttered to himself.
His stock barbs already seemed threadworn and hilariously, pathetically irrelevant.
What kind of use were his sneaky innuendo and snarks, when the problem wasn’t actually that people didn’t know what was going on?
Because they knew.
Everyone knew.
What, you think our people are stupid?
Otis inwardly groaned.
‘There is not one government, not one government in the history of the entire world, that has ever told the whole truth about their foreign policy, unless it was at the point of a bayonet… if that,’ Ubuntu Grace had hinted, shortly before her mysterious assassination.
Curiously enough, Dickie Klindel and Eva Vernon Letterman took good care to ominously repeat these words two days afterwards; albeit lacking entirely the note of anger and bitterness that was in the voice of the prominent black civil rights activist (‘Food Stamp Bunty,’ Senator Bubble called her).
The fact that they were being interviewed only an hour or so before the time the coroners were to declare Ubuntu Grace dead of just short of 4 whole dozen dum dum gunshot wounds, was of course not well remarked upon, amid the media. The fact that Letterman had said ‘Look Cassie, I really wish we could talk for another hour. I mean, I’d sure rather be here with you than facing that ugly crowd in Minneapolis, like Umbongo Grace is doing. But she’s a big girl, God knows! I guess she can take care of herself!’
The compliment, of course, was very far from sincere. But to say that a notable liberal interventionist intellectual like Eva Vernon Letterman was being sincere was pretty much the most obscene thing you could possibly say.
Not so much because it was insulting to her, or to her filthy comrades-in-arms like Dickie Klindel; but because such a comment would be an unbearable insult to the intelligence of anyone who heard such an infuriatingly tautological proposition.
And had not Dickie Klindel not taken the stage with Lynton Goering at the previous Florida Caucus, endorsing his comrade’s Presidential run, saying…?
‘We shall never promise we shall tell ‘the truth’ to the unworthy. There are different kinds of truth. There are the truths of patriots, and the truths of those who are… hating our nation. Who can gather figs from thistles? Or who can chant high praises to the High Jehovah, Lord of Seas and Storm, in the darkest temple of Mount Babylon?’
This burst of pretentious radical humanitarian interventionist performance theater did not seem to faze the audience; indeed, not even the self-evidently (so thought Otis), but yes, the self-evidently fallacious reference to the non-existent Mount Babylon; not one of these things seemed to make the slightest difference to the unspeakably ruthless, wolfish-baying mob 0f barbaric humanitarian genocide apologists.
So, it was no wonder that Lucy Brendan was driven to commit suicide. The idea that this naïve 13 year old had somehow ‘seduced’ and ‘manipulated’ Lynton Goering, forcing him against his will to make the proverbial ‘honest mistakes’ that so many humanitarian interventionist intellectuals and politicians make day and daily, was palpably absurd. But Lynton Goering couldn’t possibly be a… a sex offender?
Well, not a real one, anyway.
There must be some mistake
Men get drunk.
Men make mistakes.
I mean…
I mean, oh for God’s sake, he’s a man! You can’t question his judgment on foreign policy purely because…
Oh, would you just get a frickin’ grip, man!
And not one single person at the Brooklyn Galaxy had ever but once dared to concoct the correct unpostmodernly-correct variety of sensationalist headline for this heinous deed.
Clearly, Otis had never forgiven himself.
Nor could he ever.
No, no, no…
Come hell or high water, he would have done what he could to have avenged the soul of that terrified young girl.
But he couldn’t.
He was in a cell.
Honest ‘mix-up.’
Another honest mistake.
‘Whew! Shit, boy. Hoo-wee!’ breathed the boss. ‘I never woulda thought it was actually you. You know what, you are actually, the real, honest-to-God Otis fuckin’ Spengler. You know what, it’s been a pleasure, sir! I mean, the poor asshole who treated you bad and falsely accused you; I mean he’s pretty new, and he says all you folks look kinda similar to you, so you…’
Otis’ face had hardened, to the point where the bulging bullfrog eyes of his tormentor-in-chief had almost popped out of his skull.
‘Shit!’ Charlie breathed. ‘Well, like, shit! Hoo, boy! I mean, not like you… you know what I mean, that you actually do look kinda all the same. But, but… some of our boys, I mean you kinda look that well to them, that’s all I’m sayin’. But I mean, like, yeah boy… been a pleasure.’
‘Has it?’ murmured Otis, with all the devices of his age-long artifice of coolness; staring the chief blue-ass flea in the face, who immediately began to puff and pant, desperately trying to retain his composure.
Otis staggered out of the cell, almost dead with hunger. He almost swore he heard his torturer snort the usual.
‘Ungrateful nigger, got no sense of goddamn gratitude. No different, no different, no different. No different from them all, the bastards… Dammit!’
Maybe his ears were just ringing from hunger?
God knows.
This was a very unpleasant memory. But what hurt more, is that he hadn’t managed to stab Gideon Truman in the back, and find some way of getting a headline and byline that could express the ugly truth as least imperfectly as mere words could do:
GOP Paedophile Lynton Goering: ‘Raping in the Name Of!’’
Alleged sex offender and proven humanitarian interventionist unifies theory and praxis: Former Campus Radical Carries on a Grand Old Trotskyite tradition.
And those delicious first two lines:
A humanitarian interventionist is a Trotskyite who has been mugged by the prospect of a huge state stipend.
But there aren’t enough icepicks in the whole of Mexico to impose a fitting punishment on the filthy, subhuman R2P child-rapist Lynton Goering, whose dashing ‘humanitarian intervention’ on Lucy Alice Brendan is just the kind of ‘legitimate rape’ the subhumanly-beastly ‘Party of Humanity’ really didn’t want to be casting forth too loudly.
Yes, he would have made sure he had stabbed Gideon Truman in the back with that headline.
Truman wouldn’t have minded, if Goering had merely been a rapper or a union thug or ‘some ole lowfalutin’ shit like that,’ his usual dismissive throwaway for people he held in too much contempt to genuinely abhor.
Indeed, no! The only ‘virtue’ Truman had (and some would no doubt consider themselves worthy to affirm that this did indeed place him one very slight notch above Senator Marcus Charleston Bubble), was that he was no more capable of bearing a long-term grudge, than he was capable of loving or admiring someone with any real sincerity.
He was just uninterested in people; except insofar as they were useful to him.
Or in a word: lucrative.
But who cares?
That was a long time ago.
Maybe Gideon Truman and his Big Daddy Ford were right after all.
History is bunk.
***
There is a lot of talk today about how history will judge us if we sit on our hands. And I tell you now: as a mother, as a daughter, and as an American who loves this nation: almost all of our troubles come not from sitting on our hands, but from trying to achieve the impossible.
Beware of those who promise to bring freedom at the point of a bayonet.
Such freedom, I tell you truly…
It is ever dearly bought.
And it is surely, I implore in truth, it is those who pass through the valley of bayonets, who will never be able to fully enjoy the fruits of their pilgrimage.
Beware you now, of all these mighty ones who are ready to bang the drum for war all morning long, but who are unwilling to smoke the pipes of peace when twilight falls.
Our enemies wish to take away our freedom, this is true.
And surely this is surely not within their power.
But this I make bold to declare to you today:
They cannot take our liberty from us.
But they can certainly incite us to heedlessly cast it away, through our own folly, heedlessness and hubris.
And that, in the end, amounts precisely to the same thing.
The final and everlasting extinction of the light of Thomas Jefferson, of Johnny Appleseed, of William Penn; of good Tom Paine, of honest old Booker T. Washington, of the passionate Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. of most distressing memory;, of Frank Chin, of Azar Nafisi, and no less than the very greatest of these, of my own dear blessed sisters of Seneca Falls of most humble and exalted memory…
Ye who here, this very night are gazing on and mourning the dire and dreary state of self-disgrace and depravity into which we are yet falling, falling, falling.
Ever, ever deeper.
Friends, fellow-citizens and fellow-dreamers of America, do not take upon yourself the yoke of the darkness, because you chafe under the heavy burden of the light. For if it is hard to rejoice the heart of the King in Jerusalem, how much more so in darkest Babylon?
I am an American.
And I weep for our city of peace.
God help me, here I stand. I can do none otherwise.
Good night, my children of the light and candle-bearers of imperilled hope.
And I say not, this one night of passion, God Bless America!, but:
God shield our precious candle.
From the raging winds of this despair and grief.
***
Senator Deborah Willow artlessly turned and faced the sky.
The rains of blessing would not come.
A camera glimpsed the shadow of a tear.
…
But, aye!
A camera’s not the equal of a tender heart.
