Ruby Chandra de Montevideo ushered the eager, scarcely 35 year old Seamus Riddle into her office.
‘The last time anything big happened in this office,’ Ruby murmured seductive as sin, and as eternal rank benevolence, ‘it was truly something! But this will be bigger. I assume we have no reason to distrust your loyalty to The Party?’
Seamus Riddle smirked and reeled it off pat the Sibling’s Oath of the Blue Humanity Common Interest Supercaucus. So this, after all, was no myth?:
One Free and Vigorous Democratic Nation.
One Unified, Abundant and Dynamic Global Village.
One Robust Commitment to One Great, Grand Glorious and Unified Common Humanity.
We are all in this together.
The good of one is nothing, without the good of all.
The good of all will come to nothing, without the effort of all.
I ask not what I shall do for myself, but what my people shall do for my people.
Even if I were bound to harm every last individual on earth, I would still be sworn to the public good, the national interest, the global village, and the greater good of our common humanity.
Nothing for the individual, nothing against the individual, nothing in the name of the individual.
So far, so pious. But let us now see what Saul Friedman is getting up to.
***
‘Bastard better be here,’ Saul’s husky voice breathed. The whiskey didn’t seem to be doing him the same good. His throat ached.
He crumpled, dropped, discarded the ancient sophomore’s sophomoric satire pamphlet. His old schoolmate’s satire echoed in his head:
Hey, everybody! It’s yer best buddy Jumbo Johnson here! Everybody loves a bit of good old NON-GOVERNMENTAL Human Rights Organization shit, huh?
That’s right, bitches! Time for one damn fine bit of unpatriotic pinko analysis of the notable patriotic human rights NGO, Freedom House! Ooo, SHIT! I LIIIIKE the sounda THAT!
Well hey, baby! Everybody loves freedom, right?!
Yup! No shit, chicken! I mean, I literally can’t imagine what kind of an ignorant, bigoted asshole would hate freedom; can you???
So, here we go. Snuggle up a little here, baby, and have your cosy ol’ sneak peek at lil Jumbo here.
I hear that pathetic little Euroweenie bastard Anglo-Harry, like, I say, I hear all my jerk-ass lil vanilla-bitches be sayin’:
Hm. This rather bears, shall we say, a passing resemblance to a certain… as it were, official view being shat out over the American airwaves from time to time…
Well hey; never mind that there Pacifist-Socialist-Cultural-Marxist-Command-Economy garbage!
Can’t think of a better way to smash the old Jumbie-jumb Arab than, than to vilify and sneer at all them goddamn Russkies, and patriotically endorse the Vast Freedom-Wing Fast-Food-Ification of liberty: swift, surgically dubious, greasy, deeply satisfying (for some!) and very, VERY close to ‘free’ (as all the Big Bossmen, at least, are gonna be tellin’ ya), and leavin’ you freaks hungry again within a matter of moments, and just gaggin’ the ol’ Chief here for some more.
(After all, an Obamadronie-bonio shitstormtroopertastrophe ah innocent ‘collaterals’ takes matter of seconds, if that!)
But guess who’s been fundin’ up this damn fine institution?
(Give yer shit-credits for italicisin’ emphasis for good ol’ Jumbo here; you’d better believe it, bitches!)
According to this tiresome, hateful polemic against my National Interest, two names that ‘raise the steak’ of ol’ Jumbo here are: Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.
Well hey, girl! Turn that grubby ol’ trout-pout west-side snout, baby! Cos, ya know, Wolfowitz, that there guy ain’t no fool! He’s a frickin’ notable American scholar, and all that jazz!
Well, hey: American Enterprise Institute, anyone?
By the way, those boys, well their motto is:
Competition of ideas is fundamental to a free society.
Or in other words: You’re either with us or against us!
Well, fuck yeah, freedom-baby!
Kein frickin’ Scheisse, Scherlocke! Freedom House.
Well, hey!
Say what?
Say, what the fuck is that, my patriotic lil cute-ass charmer?
Well, it could be many things.
An established and unshakeable foundation.
A stony edifice.
An imposing fortress A golden palace. A home of freedom. Whew! Lovely name, ain’t it?!
😛
Ooo, shit! FREEDOM! That one gets me goin’ every time. Well, snuggle-ya-later, honeybuckles!
Ol’ Jumbo here has to make for rearrangement of his fine ol’ Jumbokin pork-platter.
Cos ya know see ol’ Jumbo here, he just loves the stench of freedom in the morning, baby!
Oh, and by the way.
If ever you’re ever be wantin’ some freedom: Believe me, good Ol’ Jumbo will be just here. Just right here where ya need me! OOO! Shit! All about the frickin’ rhetoric, baby! OOOOOOOOOOFFFFFFFFFFFF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
… Shit! Whew! Oh my frickin’ gosh, that was one HELLUVA…
Whew! Would ya just look at that!
Hm. Now, where’s that bastard, shitty little Mexican when ya need ‘im…
***
Adolph Adams softly intoned the words he had penned for his graduation. It grieved the orphan deeply that, at that most precious proud and precious day of in his life, his ‘big brother’ (Saul was two years younger and quite a few inches shorter) had been too angry to wish him well.
If only Saul had known how much he owed to Adams.
Their paths had diverged a great deal. Professor Friedman, as brilliant and creative as he was disorganized and clumsy, would have made a superlative Einstein. And yet as a politician, he had never quite hit the heady heights reached by Governor Adams; a former hacker and ruthless shit-stirrer who, staid and sober and plain of speech as he was, had made truly superlative achievements. Under the aegis of ‘the electric Quaker’ (Adams had no religious beliefs to speak of, or at least none that he considered worth to be publicly flaunted and dickwaved), the miracle had been achieved. Mississippi, the erstwhile ‘graveyard of liberalism,’ had been hauled into the terrifying and chaotic No Man’s Land of solid, reliable, indeed ever-and-always-dependable swing-statery.
His stubby fingers traced every drop of ink.
His heart was troubled.
His heart was ever free, anew.
THE PLEA OF EUROPA
My Dearest America:
An ardent and blazing ocean of love…
Upon you and amid you! We are friends, and brothers, and sisters; and we are ever far apart. But whatever our squabbles, never forget that if the USA surrenders to the tyranny of mediocrity and the mediocrity of tyranny, we in Europe have even less hope of resisting the advances of the Empire of ‘Humanity.’
There is a time to weep; and a time to let a thousand pens blaze!
We condemn your leaders not because we despise you, but because they want to destroy your heritage.
If there is no perfection on earth, the US Constitution is one of the greatest miracles of history.
The Empire of the Individual blazed forth in a broken land, when even the dazzling patriots of Paris and of France could not recognize the beauty of her splendor.
We implore you to keep your candle burning; and we in Europe will exchange with you whatever light we can. When you are at your best, we will be more free, because your nation is always the greatest when you lead by example, and not by force!
America is an impossibility; but time after time, you have triumphed over adversity, and shown that mere impossibility is no excuse for accommodating tyranny!
A day is dawning for America, just there, over there, out on the horizon. A day where the snoopers and humanitarian interventionists and rabble-rousing shills will be the Dred-Scott intellectuals and faux-enlightened slavers de ces jours-là; and never once du jour! All that is of this earth will pass away; but your dream will never pass away!
Forgive our impatience, and remember that every cord you unbind will be unbound for others also; and every knot you fasten will be fastened also upon us. As one of our own sages has proclaimed:
You have every right to mind your own business. But mind how your business affects mine!
Your business is liberty. And if we in Europe forget our business, we hope and pray with all our hearts, that you will not forget yours.
The shadows are darkening here, and you too are seeing the encroachment of ghouls and phantom bugbears.
Do not abandon us in your hour of need; but better still, do not abandon your own people!
Because you are the individualists of this world; and if the eternal throne and dominion of the individual is shaken in your precious land, what can be said for us?
We are fearful. But we fear for you; not merely because you are our best example, but because we owe you too many things to count or to even acknowledge without a blush.
Do not let the flame retreat.
For if ever there were ever a true meaning to American Exceptionalism, it must surely be this:
Power through humility.
Friendship with all peoples, cynical allyhood with none.
Seeking partnership, and never dominion.
Neither national egotism nor rootless globalism, but the common life of free individuals across the countless prairies and cityscapes of space and time, holding hands without fear, and without recrimination.
Forget thou not these tears, America.
You have given us what no-one else has given: a strong example to emulate, and not to obey.
This is an inconceivable treasure, and our pearl of great price.
Don’t trade it in for anything.
In love and eternal friendship
Europa Hawah
And everyone who will blaze aloft
The humblest, most exalted banner of the individual
And of freedom
And of liberty.
***
‘And do you know what I want you to do for me, Mr Riddle?
Ruby’s seductive, full red lips glistened with the crystalline longing of the finest of cognacs.
‘I am at your service, here and forever,’ Seamus breathed.
Ruby’s spotless, chubby fingers descended to the point of decision.
‘You are mine,’ the rapist murmured, overcome with a frenzy no more of this world than of hellfire.
‘Make sure you give me what I want. You are my good boy now, aren’t you? And you shall be loyal forevermore, as you are right now?’
Seamus dropped his trousers and mopped his panting brow against his Savior’s crotch.
‘The night is young. We have 17 hours until the press conference. Do you think you can satisfy me sufficiently.’
‘I must be such a potent guy,’ he moaned.
Ruby pushed away the head.
The uselessly bewildered humanitarian idiot gaped up at her in horror. At this shameless, indeed unforgivably barbaric, denial to the Universal of his No-Less-All.
‘See how you do tomorrow. There is love enough and to spare when you thrill and excite more than any other man has inspired and stimulated me; precisely 11 o’clock tomorrow night.’
Seamus burst into tears.
Ruby laughed and laughed and laughed.
Seamus staggered, woeful, on his way.
…
The next morning he could not remember the slightest thing.
***
‘It’s 5 a.m.,’ Saul croaked. ‘This piece of shit better be fuckin’ comin’. You watch out, you, you, you, you-you-you-fuckin’ piece ah…’
The ringing stopped.
So, the power disconnect was finally happening here.
Even here.
‘Ye gods, Saul muttered. ‘Whom the gods want to destroy…’
But what was this?
The…
The other phone?
Saul dashed to grab the cellphone, setting a whole battery of pans (rank and scrubbed alike) clattering to buggery.
‘You!’ Saul almost shrieked.
‘Good morning, Saul,’ the old familiar voice… well… not rang out; but certainly resounded. After a fashion.
‘Fuck good mornin’!’ snarled Saul, overcome almost more with joy than rage. ‘Well? What are you sayin’, son?’
‘Brother Saul, I have been seriously considering your proposal. I have simply found myself entirely unable to find any peace or rest…’
‘Yeah yeah sleepness nights, the usual crap, yada yada yada,’ Saul whispered, almost suffocating in his attempts to choke back the sobs of a long-reeling hope, a single one life’s final, forlorn, most finely-forethrown dream.
‘There is a lot to be said for it. I do not see anyone else who is in a position to do it. The question…’
‘The question’ Saul almost sobbed, but the words remained tightly buckled up his throbbing, surging heart. The blood of millennia of oppression and of innumerable generations to an inner voice and never once an outer, coursed through his veins with an infinity of joy and desperate, overwhelming liberty of spirit that threatened, with a single flick of the wing o’ the dove, to cast Saul forever into the abyss of the most divine and most demonically transcendent of intoxicated madnesses.
‘The question, Saul… is not “if,” but how.’
Saul whispered something, God knows what!
And staggered away from the phone.
He remembered nothing, when he awoke the next day.
Or, almost nothing.
This is the song that Saul Friedman sang, as he rose and stood before the beauty of this great, grand, open, shining window:
There is None Good, Save One! (Hymn to the Individual)
All Hail the Individual!
Thrice Mighty is his Name
He towers above the maggots
Of empty pride and fame
His Endless throne is virtue
His courage is thy splendour
Without this burning brander’s torch
Thy soul has no defender
O Nation, Race and Species!
Cast down thy crowns of mud
Be washed away on freedom’s day
Bright harvest of our blood!
The ailing tree of liberty
Must needs be refreshed, anon
My neck, this soul, your chopping block
I offer to my throne
The piteous foes of darkness
In dusktide’s murk they chatter
But freedom’s call must summon all
Now cease your pitter patter!
The feast of glory’s rapture
Will burst upon our eyes
Whilst acolytes of ‘greater goods’
Bewail their sad demise
There is no power in time and space
In Heaven or Earth or Hell
Can e’er defile the Individual’s Brow
O tyrants! Mark ye well…
***
“Really, old chap? Beheaded in the very street? Well, I’ll be buggered!” Morton Megaraparthenon tutted. The Home Secretary glared at him distrustfully. The Trade Secretary squirmed anxiously, awaiting his opportunity.
A cough from somewhere.
The moment?
Lost.
***
A thud.
The devilish Korean Gulag thug raised his club to deal one final blow to this miscarrying mother.
Michiko tried to raise her head.
But her eyes were already caked with blood.
Her spirit pierced him, nonetheless.
‘You will not win,” she spat at him, though she could no longer move a muscle.
She awaited the final blow.
The final blow never came.
…
Her bones did not even have a chance to rot.