the secret life of simon & the whale

 the boy inches close to the water        barefoot                       backpack slung over one shoulder
he plays with the sand             dips his toes in
his name is simon
simon is my human
i quote mean girls: “get in loser, we’re going shopping”
he giggles
he likes ranch dressing but sometimes the buttermilk is too much for his stomach
he enjoys wong kar-wai’s movies        but would rather talk about steven universe
when we play hide-and-seek he wants to be found because he loves me
i take him to school     he hums along to my songs but prefers katy perry
we watch tv
i tell him how unrealistic the show shark tank is
he looks at me quizzically
we change channels                 then go to dairy queen
he doesn’t say things like white whale because that is derogatory
just like how we don’t talk about sushi or climate change
he shoos screaming babies and barking dogs away from me
when we go to coney island we speak in russian accents and fall over laughing
i ask if he has been following the news
he says someone is being mean to him at school                     wants to know what to do
i quote kate moss: “looking good is the best revenge”
he shows up the next day looking spiffy
he has a slick yellow raincoat
so i won’t get wet when we hang out!  he says
i smile
he offers me half of his sandwich and i am happy
i tell him about my creative writing class
he teaches me how to tell a joke                     he is a master of comedic timing         i am no slouch
i tell a joke about hiding the minibar keys from lindsay lohan
he laughs but mostly because i act it out         it is an oscar-worthy performance
he wants to offer me some goldfish crackers but thinks twice
he hands me a hot dog with mustard and relish instead
we watch the sunset                                        see the dolphins showing off again
he asks what i’m dressing up as for halloween            i say zorro        he makes a face
he says he couldn’t decide between a zombie or an astronaut so he is going as a zombie astronaut
we test our knowledge of state capitals but he falls asleep at lansing
i say i got called for jury duty              and explain what that is
simon says you have the right to remain silent                        he bursts out laughing
i reveal that lobsters are the kings of secrets   they have dirt on everyone
the hoovers of the ocean
he thinks i mean the vacuum   i guess that makes sense too
for my birthday simon brings me a red velvet cupcake
my favorite kind
he asks how old i am turning
i say 30                        wow!  that’s old!  he says
i tell him that whales live up to 200                his eyes widen
what will we do when we’re 200, he asks               as i wipe the tear from my face

fists of harmony and justice in 3 acts

i really believe in cities                        and connecting people             you say            real heartfelt

make me your nasty woman    i say     staring into your eyes

my intergenerational trauma is            my parents live in silver lake   you say            earnestly

mmhmm          i say     not objecting               because you are cute

so this is what it means to have                       a moment of madness

you have come to the right place                     you have so much to hide

perpetual war               tell me your secrets                  get me in trouble

obsessed                      paralyzed                                 the clerk will call the roll

*

i regret to inform you that                   you will not be home

in time for dinner with your wife         no matter how often she calls

you will put your phone on vibrate                              then turn it off

you will stay over        we will get drunk         things will happen

then you will leave                                          still thinking about me

swallowing you                                    like an eclair

*

in the movie of my life            i would like to be played

by emmy-winning actor           james spader

although i am not white

as they remind me

at every turn

statement of evil corp

 for immediate release
press contact :: lucifer morningstar
(666) 666-6666

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october 6, 2019, remarks as prepared for delivery

i informed mister river barkley last night that his services are no longer needed in my life.  i disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions, as did others in the administration, and therefore i asked mister river barkley for his resignation, which was given to me this morning.

although i appreciated his jfk jr vibes and his assertion that his dick is his biggest muscle, he never did my laundry.  he failed to deliver to me macaroons in every imaginable color or call me his pocahontas and he my settler.

he cast serious doubt on his intelligence by detailing the depth of his feelings in support of the vietnam war and the draft.  the public was regularly informed of this.

his choice of veal over fish was totally inexcusable.   i was equally appalled when i encountered tickets to mariah carey in his diary stained with sperm and electric blue ink.

he never recovered from the unusually loud guttural noises he made during sex.  he was unconvincing when he said he loved me, often in a voice that suggested he was far away or underwater.  his declaration that tulsi gabbard should win the democratic nomination was similarly off-putting.

he was unable to tell me how many planes are in the sky or if it is true there are more people alive now than have ever lived.  he declined to feed me more jello shots despite our school motto possunt quia posse videntur (they can because they think they can).

he embarrassed me by getting into that fight with his truck and losing.  subsequently he had his arm in a cast which stank to high heaven.

admittedly i will miss the firm underside of his thighs and the steady scaffolding of his sex.  i am however comforted by the truth that nothing is better than breadsticks with the menendez brothers.

i thank mister river barkley very much for his service to our country and my happiness.  i will be naming a new mister river barkley next week.

thank you!
(don’t pretend you’re sorry​​)

acid taste like

He started seeing Sam everywhere.
Sam, who called him ‘beautiful,’ eyes like liquid smoke.
Sam, who stood perilously close as they poured the wine.
Strong yet gentle, blond-dusted hands.
Sam, who wore the plaid shirt, frayed khaki shorts, and beat-up loafers on their bodega run.
Chestnut-brown bedhead, cheeks rosy on their porcelain face.
The one he wanted to hold him, the one he hoped to make less lonely, the one he followed home.

Life was hard enough without a Greek chorus of Sams second-guessing his every move.
Haunted by his exes, he wanted significance.
He cried into his champagne, tired of questioning, tired of pushing back.
Acceptance sounded so good, like a drug.

Boy was with Girl.
Kind, inquisitive eyes the color of concrete.
Brown hair (of course) slicked back, shoulders firm, torso wide.
Girl freaking out, some low-rate drama.
Boy’s body, a boar ready to charge.
Girl in the bathroom, Boy’s expression softened—
Freed,
Granted a reprieve,
From performing masculinity.
Boy looked over, smiling as if he understood.
So tantalizingly close,
All he had to do was reach over,
Before Boy slipped back into character.

He imagined bringing Boy dinner, roast chicken and potatoes.
They would eat in silence, as if any stray sound might tip her off.
Bellies full, side-by-side on the bed—
Striped pajamas,
Sheets that smelled like her,
Growing braver in the dark, bodies ablaze with feeling.
Skin, lips, tongue, there for the taking.
He raised a finger to Boy’s lips and gently pried his mouth open, inserting his finger.
Play it safe or swing for the fences?
Snatching Boy’s receipt off the table, he felt a sickening swirl of desire—
Like standing in the eye of a hurricane.
This little victory made him happier than he’d felt in a long time.

Throwing up in that Waffle House, acid stinging his throat.
Outside for a smoke, his socks mismatched and his hair wild.
GO BACK TO CHINA, someone yelled, speeding past.
Possessed by cultural restlessness,
Always searching for a way in, a way out.

He decided that his favorite word was ‘possibility.’
Even hope doesn’t seem as surefire a thing.
Possibility is hope plus.
Nothing out of reach.
Maybe.

He unfolded the receipt, admired it.
CUSTOMER: SAM ____, it read.
He noticed the digits, the urgent scrawl.
Penmanship tight, compact, economical.
CALL ME, it said.

The shine and swagger of a new day.

Great Recession? Not Hous­ton. And yet, and
yet there had been a speed bump in September 2008, sure, but that had been
assessed and corrected; and now the city of Brock Wharton seceded further from
the rest of the flatlined coun­try in the first week of September 2014. As
Wharton was considering whether to rearrange his weekend schedule to pencil in
sex with his wife, one of the strangest men he had ever laid eyes on breached
the space of his open doorway. Of average height, the boyish, sun-cooked man
appeared taller than he was as his askew brown hair lashed out in every
direction. His rangy build (accentuated by the too-small, off-the-rack, navy
double-breasted suit he wore as if he were a redneck admiral at a regatta that
Wharton would never enter) seemed pulled at the sinews’ seams. It was the sort
of flawed build that none of the South Texas ranching families would ever
breed. If not for the inten­sity of the blue eyes—divided by a comic eagle nose
that dived toward raggedly chapped lips—so nakedly sizing him up in return,
Wharton would have dismissed the figure as an apparition too absurd to be real.

Unnerved by the fixed eyes that looked through him
to some burning skyscraper or falling zeppelin outside the window, Wharton
twisted around anticipating to be hit by a tornado. But the downtown skyline
was undisturbed. Annoyed by this intrusion and humiliated that he had been
tricked into a search beyond his window, Wharton spun around in his chair to
regain the initiative. “Who—”

“You’re the man to beat?” A smile the size of the intruder’s
face tore through the puffy lips and exposed a series of swollen red gums
congregated around two monstrous white tusks for front teeth, which, if not
fake, the hospital-white fangs had avoided the yellow staining of the other
teeth and clearly swam in their own current in the man’s mouth. A muddy five
o’clock shadow surrounded the giant mouth, which surely, upon closer inspection
of this dark facial sandpaper, would be attributed to not shaving than some
celebrated regeneration of stubble.

His piney, log-cutting aftershave sprayed Wharton’s
office with his scent. A hand slithered in the air above his desk toward
Wharton. He stood and asked in a harsh tone that betrayed the mask of imper­turbability
he wished to project, “Who are you and what is the nature of your business in
my office?”

“I’m Mike Fink,” the man said in a mysterious
dialect, a dialect hailing from a region that Wharton could only place as from
the land of the lower class while his limp hand was grabbed by Fink. His fla­grant
confidence-man grin expressed an expectation that Wharton knew the name, if not
the reputation. “I’m here for the leadership position.”

I, Wharton declared to himself, will personally see
to it that that never happens. This was a case that needed no analysis. Wharton
pulled his hand from Fink’s clasp and came around from his desk. “Be that as it
may, I have never heard of you. I am sure we can resolve this misunderstanding
in no time if you would please . . .” But Wharton trailed off, watching in
horror as Fink plopped down unasked in the chair across from Wharton’s desk and
wriggled his lanky body to find an incorrect posture. This creature’s
cheekiness apparently knew no bounds. Wharton found himself slightly behind
Fink and facing his back; Fink tapped his right foot, waiting on the start of
an interview.
Wharton was not about to give
such an entitled lout. Leadership posi­tion? Papers rustled behind where
Wharton stood, but he could not take his eyes off the hunched back of Fink.

“I see that you used your Special Forces
navigational skills to find Brock’s office, Mike,” a squeaky voice said behind
Wharton.

“Too easy, Carissa. Didn’t even have to consult the
compass.”

“Consult,” Carissa repeated in a higher pitch that
no doubt carried a waving of a finger at clever schoolboy Fink for his
introduction of an unimaginative punning attempt to their colloquial exchange.
“A good consultant never consults a compass.”

“Miss Barnett, what is going on?” Wharton asked, as
he swung around to see the top-heavy recruiter giggling and swaying her head to
the savage’s tapping beat. Was she blushing? Her lips certainly now bore the
mark of lipstick, adorned in a Valentine’s Day red to match a pair of six-inch
stiletto heels that had magically sprouted up from her earlier flats like weeds
in a trailer park. She was without her jacket, and it appeared that—was it
possible, even amid the other illusions?—she had lost three or four buttons,
too, judging by the excessively gratu­itous amount of breast on exhibit. All at
once, Wharton felt the butt of a joke, a weary traveler who had stumbled into
some rustic country inn for shelter only to be mocked by the randy bar maiden
and the regular patrons.

“Oh, Brock, I’m so sorry. I guess you hadn’t been
notified that Mike would be interviewing this afternoon. He was traveling from
New Orleans and wasn’t able to make it for the morning block of inter­views.”
She ruffled through the stack of papers in her hand and pulled a badly mauled
page out and passed it to Wharton. “Here’s a copy of his résumé. Like I told
Mike, you are the only one left to interview him before the meeting in the
conference room in half an hour to decide on who the new hires are.”

Wharton waved her on before she disclosed any more
details of the hiring process. Oblivious to the intent of his wave, she leaned
over to Wharton with the bright eyes of a much younger child, a mercurial
silver sparkle that screamed antidepressants, and whispered audibly for Fink to
hear, “He’s a Green Beret.”

“I don’t care if he’s the pope, Carissa, as I have
only a half hour
to give an intensive
interview,” Wharton said truthfully, for despite his conservative Christian
upbringing, he now cared little for religious figures. Indeed, besides possibly
salvation, little reward stemmed from religious fervor beyond the required
Christian affiliation among his strategic-friends crowd. Wharton thought even
less of people in the military, despite the nauseating resurgence of post-9/11
glorification of a segment who’d been the frequent subject of derision prior to
that day. In Wharton’s youth, the military was the last stop for the talentless
who could not do anything else in life. It usually wasn’t even much of a
choice: You can go to prison, or be all you can be in the Army. Now
everyone was expected to shake their hands, pick up their checks in
restaurants, turn over their first-class seats on airplanes, and worst yet,
stand up and clap for them at sporting events while nodding that the only
reason the sport is even being played is because of heroes like them fighting
in some country with cities no one can pronounce. An inane rah-rah
yellow-ribbon patriotism, a shared ritual offering peace between the jingoes,
Middle America, and pinkos where everyone emerged feel­ing good about their
participation. Doubtless this explained how this Fink character was granted a
CCG interview.

“Well,” Wharton said to Fink, shutting the door on
Carissa, “it ap­pears I am to interview you. I’m going to take a minute to scan
through your résumé.”

“Take your time,” the applicant advised the
interviewer. “There’s a lot there.”

There, Wharton quickly realized, was not a lot
there: current em­ployment listed as none, no work experience (unless
ten years in the military counted), a 2.9 GPA, and a bachelor of arts in
English litera­ture (was that not the easy major?) from Tulane University (a
bottom first-tier university that CCG did not even review applications from)
the same year Wharton graduated. Lo and behold, Fink’s résumé was actually a
mirror out of a fable, in that if you held it up, your exact op­posite looked
back at you.

“An English literature major?” Wharton murmured,
bringing the CV closer to his eyes.

“With a minor in theater. I read
somewhere that English majors make the best consultants. Stands to reason.”

Had recruiting seriously thought the special forces
bullet in bold letters at the top alone merited an interview? Special Forces
could not be that special if Fink lacked the cognition to apprehend that he did
not belong at CCG. That his presence, an interloper squandering his time, was
offensive to a Brock Wharton, who had conducted a life cultivating a résumé.
Fink was a great example of a candidate not hav­ing researched CCG; how had he
passed the first-round interview? In fact, Wharton assessed it to be the most
heinous résumé ever submit­ted for his review: not even the oversized font or
alignment from sec­tion to section was consistent in what amounted to only a
stretched half page of largely questionable achievements (high school senior
class president?). Wharton looked up at Fink in time to see him fon­dling his
Texans football!

“Put that down!” Wharton pointed at the ball holder
on the wall next to Fink, who on his orders positioned the ball upside down on
its seam.

“I apologize. I had forgotten that you were drafted
in the last round after playing for UT.”

Wharton searched the blue eyes sunk back in the
triangular face for an intended slight in the usage of “last” to describe the
still-prestigious seventh round. What it seemed Fink hadn’t forgotten was the
chatter of sports columnists, recruiters, superfans, and boosters who had once
ranked Wharton the top high school quarterback in the South and proclaimed him
the next UT football savior. He in turn ranked this same mindless mob number
one in cowardice after four years of enduring their catcalls every time he was
injured and being denounced by them for betrayal when their impossible
expectations for their fair-haired boy were not met on the field. “Were you
drafted as well after graduating college?”

“Drafted by our country,” Fink said, startling
Wharton with a belly laugh loud enough to be heard down the hall.

Wharton avoided Fink’s face to conceal the anger he
was sure must be reddening his own cheeks. He found refuge in Fink’s résumé. A
review of it demonstrated that the undereducated Fink knew abso­lutely nothing
beyond the art of exploiting some tax credit for busi­nesses that interviewed
veterans. Another bending of the laws, no less egregious than allowing veterans a pass in public
with their PTSD service dogs while their pit bulls created anxiety for everyone
else. Wharton pushed aside the flash of resentment that made him want to
physically kick Fink from his office. He settled on an approach he was
convinced would inflict far more damage to this impertinent CCG im­postor’s
candidacy: cede the stage to an unwitting Fink and allow the veteran to shoot
himself, hailing as he did from a demographic statisti­cally known for its high
suicide rates.

“Thank you for your service. Now why don’t you walk
me through your academic accomplishments?” Wharton began anew, chumming the
waters of that pesky foe of Delusion: Fact. “I see here that you had a
two-point-nine grade point average at Tulane.”

“Two point nine four five to be exact, but if you
round that up it is a two point nine five, and if you’re really telling a tale,
you could round that to a three point zero.”

“CCG, almost as a rule, requires its applicants to
have a GPA of three point six or above from a top-ranked college. You are
applying for the position of consultant with an undergraduate GPA of two point
nine against a field of applicants that all have MBAs, and, in some cases, two
advanced graduate degrees. Have you done any graduate-level course work at
all?”

“The Special Forces Qualification Course.”

Fink was making this easy for Wharton. “I don’t
think I follow,” Wharton said, baiting him to continue his charm offensive and
ram­bling lack of reflection, which conformed ideally to Wharton’s plan of
wrestling back control of the interview. “Can you elaborate specifically on how
this course qualifies as graduate school and how it relates to a career in
consulting?”

Fink straightened up in his chair. His arrowhead
chip of a face leaned in over the desk. Was he applying for a job or auditioning
for a small part in a play?

“De Oppresso Liber,” Fink said, enunciating
each Latin word for Wharton’s appreciation.

Wharton stared dramatically at the now confirmed
lunatic and awaited a further terse three-or-four-word inadequate explanation that was not forthcoming. It
was not as if Wharton lacked experience playing a part; he knew full well what
was expected of him in life’s star­ring role. Finally, Wharton asked, “Excuse
me?”

“Motto of the Green Berets.” Fink thumped his chest
with his fist (in the spot where the handkerchief, which could have been the
only item to make his costume more ridiculous to Wharton, was missing). “It
means ‘To Liberate the Oppressed.’ ”

“What does this have to do with consulting?”

“For a decade I trained not only on how to
operationally liber­ate the oppressed, but also how to free my mind from the
oppression of conventional thinking. A consultant referencing unconventional
thinking in a plush CCG office and actually being unconventional when the
stakes are high are as different as a yellowbelly catfish is from a bullhead
catfish,” Fink exclaimed. He had also managed to concur­rently use his hands to
grotesquely elucidate the contrasting courage of each subspecies by forming
what Wharton interpreted as human female and male genitalia. “Like consulting,
it’s about being adaptable. Who is the most adaptable? Ain’t that America? Now,
I’m not a big war story guy, but you asked me to describe a situation where I
had to lead a group of people and convince them that an unconventional solu­tion
was the right way and to that I say: how about every day in Iraq! If
that—”

“Two alphas battle to be top dog at a global consultancy in this amusing satire on business, ambition, and entitlement…. A solid entertainment from a writer of considerable talent and promise.”

– Kirkus, Starred Review

“I didn’t ask you anything of the sort. You are
barking up the wrong tree.”

“I once stared the bark off a tree I was so riled
up,” Fink offered as further qualification. He laughed and winked at Wharton.
“Too much time overseas in the sandbox dodging death this past decade will do
that to you. The relevance of my graduate work in the Special Forces
Qualification Course is that I have unique professional training and a record
of success in solving and analyzing complex problems. As I explained to the
senior partners, and this perhaps fails to come across in a limited reading of
a CV, there is a value in being able to establish networks of influence—”

“Influence,” Wharton repeated. “You are claiming to
have ac­quired this from the military?” Here was a hick who could not influence the next banjo number at a
hoedown—could Wharton get a witness among the kinfolk (because they’re all
related) messing around on the hay bales?—and yet Fink thought himself up to
CCG snuff. The true tragedy of these small-town military applicants not being
that bright was that they were unaware of it. Seeing how everyone else was
afraid of the possibility of veterans returning to the office and shooting up
the place, Wharton saw it as his duty not to coddle military candi­dates, but
rather to use the interview as a teaching moment to direct them to their
intellectual rung below dieticians. He did not doubt that they probably thought
his posture that of a cheese dick. But comport­ing yourself as such was part of
the game, be it assimilation of the fit­test douches. In Wharton’s CCG class,
there had been an ex–Naval Academy nuclear submariner who had lasted a year out
of the Houston office with his conventional mind-set, his pervasive logical
staleness onsite incapable of turning the client ship around. He’d even had a
gut.

“May I please just be allowed an opportunity—” But a
knock at the door cut Fink off before Wharton could cut him off again.

Nathan Ellison, a senior partner in his midforties
with the body and energy of a younger man able to both network around town at
all the right social gatherings and find time to teach Sunday school, stepped
inside. “Didn’t realize you were still doing an interview.” He apologized to
Wharton, then noticing Fink, asked, “Is Brock giving you a real pressure
cooker?”

“Can’t complain, no one’s shooting at me,” Fink
said, bounding up from the chair to straighten his corkscrew backbone into an
erect fig­ure of authority for a handshake, with a nod to Wharton. “Yet.” Their
hands met and held, arm wrestling blue veins popping out in the kind of
kingmaker handshake set aside for finalizing backroom palace coup plots. They
smiled at each other and continued to ignore Wharton as if he were a naked man
changing in their locker room row. “Only jest­ing. He’s great, Nate.”
Wharton brooded over the liberty taken with Nathan’s name, paraded as it was by
Fink, who no longer sniffed the air but deeply inhaled the noxious fumes that
he had introduced to the office.

It dismayed Wharton that the late-afternoon autumn
light from his window slightly softened the crags of Fink’s bird-of-prey
profile, the challenging mannerisms and hillbilly hostility of the hawk-nosed
dive bomber jettisoned for the litheness of the assassin, high on hash and his
mission, who moves limberly along the corridor wall in wait on the balls of his
feet. “Unlike our intellectual discussion, Brock and I were sparring about the
value in establishing networks of influ­ence onsite with clients. I suppose we
represent differing schools of thought”—Fink motioned with his hands to group
him and Nathan on one side against Wharton on the other—“regarding the best
method of how to mine pertinent data to achieve effective results. Just waiting
on him to give me the case, but if you two are in a rush to get to your
meeting, I am happy to skip over the bio part.”

“Can’t talk about it,” Nathan said, and turning to
Wharton added, “or he’d have to kill us.” Was the newly christened infantile
persona Nate, once a sober CCG senior partner by the honest Christian name of
Nathan, as high as Fink?

“Influence.” Fink flicked his wrist in the air to
snap an imaginary towel at Nathan, who laughed and closed the door. Fink’s
reciprocal laughter, forced to begin with, stopped the moment the door shut.

Wharton hypothesized that Fink’s true intellectual
capacity could be brought to the surface quite easily with the right
application. Deployed not to the Middle East but to the far more unsympathetic
region of high finance, how would Fink operate in the world of big money?

“Let’s play with some numbers. We have to know that
you are com­fortable with numbers and speak the language of the business world
while coming up with unconventional solutions to complex problems, as I recall
you endeavoring to frame it earlier. The best way for us to discern whether you
have the skill set required for the intellectually rigorous environment of
consulting is by walking you through a case and seeing how . . . you . . .
compete.”

“Mike Freedman writes with a distinct sensibility. His new novel King of the Mississippi throbs with humor and American exuberance.”

—Ha Jin, National Book Award winning author of Waiting and The Banished Immortal

“I like to win . . . in . . . life.”

Win? Was Fink attempting to commandeer winning,
the very ethos Wharton lived by? Wharton handed him four clean sheets of paper
and a clipboard with a pen attached. “How many in-flight meals were prepared on an average day
last year for flights from George Bush Intercontinental Airport?”

“Forty thousand.”

“Come again?”

“Forty thousand.”

Wharton could not have been felled harder had Fink
launched his entire gangly frame at his knees. In point of fact, Wharton
would have normally explained if Fink had not rendered him speechless, the cor­rect
answer to the market-sizing question was forty-three thousand after factoring
in the four thousand meals for the international flights. Wharton attempted to
salvage some dignity from this unfathomable opening checkmate that had always
stumped even the smartest busi­ness school students by an incorrect margin of
at least ten thousand. “Would you care to illustrate how you arrived at that
number?”

“For the reason that around forty thousand is the
right answer,” Fink charitably clarified.

“I am interested not in Hail Mary guesstimates but
your thought process. That you were on the runway for ten minutes and watched
two other planes touch down that you then multiplied by six to calculate how
many per hour. You then extrapolated out that there were three runways total
and each plane on average carried one hundred forty-five passengers. Which you
multiplied by twenty instead of twenty-four, as the time from midnight to four
in the morning is essentially a dead zone for departures. And that, of those
domestic flights, only twenty-five percent of them provided a meal service.”

“Which is how I arrived at around forty thousand
meals. Just do the math like you just did. I solved it like I had one shot, one
kill. Some of us applicants have been vetted—and I don’t mean at an investment
banking desk job playing with myself and numbers.”

Fink released a cackle of a laugh aimed to pierce
what patience Wharton had left. The Prohibition gangster–suited Brer Rabbit
across from him had duped Wharton into illustrating a method aloud that backed
Fink’s wild-ass guess, now claiming ownership of Wharton’s mathematical
reasoning. What next: squatter’s rights to Wharton’s office? After Fink’s
barrage of assaults on football, his manhood, and the nonvetted like himself who had played with
themselves while in­vestment banking, Wharton suspected that his colleague Piazza
was behind all of this. The explicit attack on investment banking by Fink was
an overplaying of the inside information he had been fed, reveal­ing the puppet
strings. It was time to cut them, as Fink was still an applicant applying for a
job at Wharton’s firm. Why hadn’t he stuck with the Dr Pepper case, a
straightforward branding case? Fink could not even articulate his own identity.
“You will need to write down your calculations and structure an outline for the
remaining part of the in­terview. And I will be collecting your notes when we
finish for confi­dentiality purposes.”

“I understand. You’re talking
to a holder of a Top Secret security clearance.”

It occurred to Wharton that
such a fact, if true, did not bode well for national security. Wharton got up
and walked to the window. “For the sake of simplicity, let us use the number
forty thousand meals a day.” He faced Fink and began the mad minute of firing.
“Our client, a company called Swanberry Foods, is responsible for fifteen
percent of the daily in-flight meals at George Bush Intercontinental Airport
with a profit margin of one dollar per meal—but the meals only stay edible for
eight hours. Recently, management at Swanberry Foods has been considering an
overhaul, moving to frozen meals that stay edible up to twenty-four hours,
enabling our client to increase its profit margin twenty-five percent per meal.
The technology and new equipment to switch to the frozen meals costs fifteen
million dollars over five years.” Fink’s pen lay untouched atop the paper.
“What would you advise our client to do under the circumstances? You may take a
minute to struc­ture your—”

“I’d pull the trigger and double down on this new technology if our client’s only objective is to maximize profit over the long run. You’ve got to roll the dice to make money.”

“Please demonstrate beyond the
usage of military and gambling metaphors how our client should strategically
approach this decision. This time, be so kind as to walk me through your
calculations that support your hypothesis after taking a moment.”

Fink held up his index finger
to Wharton and began to scribble manically. The same index finger reappeared
two more times sepa­rated by three-minute intervals between flashes. It took
all the reserve in Wharton not to snatch the finger on its third appearance and
break it.

“What do your numbers say?”
Wharton asked, putting an end to the longest ten-minute silence of his life.

“Profits of almost six million
dollars a year if Swanberry switches to the proposed plan. That’s before I
shave their fixed costs to trim them down.”

“I think you mean variable
costs,” Wharton said, allowing a laugh to escape at such amateur histrionics.
He leaned over to try and read the chicken scratch on the top piece of paper.
He was enjoying this and shook his head slowly at the illegible writing,
indubitably representa­tive of the mind that had dictated it. “God only knows
where, but I’m afraid you have an extra zero or two in there somewhere. I don’t
know where to begin helping you because I can’t make out a single number on
your paper. This is why a successful applicant will use this as a dia­logue
and voice aloud each major step in his or her explanation; that way we can help
guide you a little should you stumble in one of your calculations. Had you done
the math correctly, you would see that at their projected rate of sales
Swanberry would lose almost a quarter of a million dollars a year over the next
five years, and that it would take almost six years just to break even after
the investment if they could withstand the initial losses.”

“I was shooting for long term,
the big picture.”

Like the trajectory of a clay pigeon, Wharton had anticipated this
rationalization before he fired. “If you were thinking ‘long term’ and the ‘big
picture,’ you would have noted they needed to increase their market share by
marketing to airlines that their newly designed meals would last longer and
save the airlines money compared to the other products being offered by
competitors. Even acquire a competitor and streamline costs. And that’s only
after analyzing whether the indus­try is growing. You would have recommended
that they diversify with other products or at least expand their current market
into supermar­kets, hospitals, retirement
centers, prisons, and even your military base chow halls. And that is exactly
what we did, because I worked on this for eleven months—though the real company
was not called Swanberry.”

“Not bad, though, for ten minutes versus what took
you a year, right?”

Wharton did not bite on this tease designed to
distract him from closing in for the scalp. “Where’s your outline or structured
strategy? I need to collect your scratch paper as well.”

Fink first handed Wharton a sheet from the bottom,
the out­line. “There might be a gem or two buried in there y’all could use,” he
thought he heard Fink say as Wharton gazed transfixed on the only two things
written on the paper: profits = revenue –costs, and cir­cled below it, always
look at the revenue.

“ ‘Always look at the revenue.’ I don’t even know
what this means,” Wharton muttered in shock, letting the outline float down to
his desk. “This is your foundation?”

“Winning,” Fink instructed, standing up and tapping
with the fa­miliar index finger on the written equation at the top of the
outline. “Or in the more narrow terms of this particular world, maximizing
profits. In a wildcatting oil town like Houston, a thin line—”

“I must conclude this interview, for I have to
attend our office meeting,” Wharton said, rising from his chair and sparing
himself from Fink’s clichéd interpretation of the essence of Wharton’s home­town.
“Do you have any questions for me?”

Fink held up his hands as if about to make a
confession. “I’ve got nothing for you.”

Wharton thought it was the first valid point Fink had made.

Excerpted from King of the Mississippi, Copyright © 2019 by Mike Freedman. To be published by Hogarth, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, on July 9. Excerpt published on Wrath-Bearing Tree with permission.

For the amputees of Walter Reed Army Hospital, Segways were the new fad. It had become common to see roving gangs of them, upright and speeding across campus and through the hospital, riding in elevators and waiting in line at the cafeteria or pharmacy, causing a flurry of complaints from doctors and staff. And when Doc Rodriguez looked up from his physical therapy mat and saw Anthony cruising down the hall on one, a public affairs officer plastered against the wall as he sped by, Rodriguez couldn’t help but smile.

Rodriguez had been feeling sluggish, unmotivated. Kristen, his therapist, had tried getting him to do some core work with a medicine ball, but he stopped as soon as her attention moved on to another patient. He was about to leave when, through the glass windows that made up the room’s far wall, he saw Anthony. Anthony had gotten his Segway a few weeks prior from an organization that was donating them to wounded vets, and he hadn’t gone anywhere without it since. Rodriguez had tried riding one, but it bucked him off like a horse when he awkwardly attempted to step up with his prosthetics, and that was enough for him. Anthony parked the Segway against a wall and then joined Rodriguez on the stretching mat.

“What’s up, Rod?” Anthony asked.

Rodriguez shrugged.

“Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean. Hey, we gotta hit up some Halo later.  Gotta practice for the tourney next week. Can’t let Jeff and those army assholes beat us again.”

“For sure. Talk to Juan and the guys lately?”

“Nah, haven’t seen them online for like a week. Wonder what they’re up to?”

“Getting ready for another deployment, probably.”

Anthony paused.

“Miss those guys.”

They were silent for a while; Rodriguez picking at an ingrown hair on the stump of his left leg, Anthony brushing dandruff off his shoulder. There was a commotion in the hallway and Rodriguez looked up to see some officer striding towards the entrance with a gaggle of aides scurrying around him, one of whom broke off ahead and opened the door shouting, “Officer on deck!” to everyone in the PT room. When the officer, a colonel, entered he waved his hands saying, “At ease, at ease,” despite no one having gotten up to begin with.

“Must be the new base commander,” Anthony whispered. “Looks like an asshole.”

“That’s just how officers look,” Rodriguez said.

The colonel was now walking towards the center of the room, “Don’t mind me, gents.  I’m Colonel Darby, new Commanding Officer of Walter Reed. I’m here to introduce myself and get the lay of the land, to see how the sausage is made, if you will.”

His aides, a group of lieutenants and captains, stood behind him, their hands on their hips.

“Definitely an asshole,” Anthony said.

The room then shifted back to its normal atmosphere. Patients returned to their workouts and conversations, therapists moved from mat to mat, treadmill to treadmill.  Colonel Darby stalked around the room, asking questions about exercise machines and what unit people had served with, which they grudgingly put up with. His jovial attitude wore off slightly with each conversation. When he moved on, a captain appeared and handed the patients a heavy challenge coin with the Colonel’s name on it.  Eventually, he made his way to Rodriguez and Anthony.

“So, what are your names?” Darby asked, arms crossed tightly.

Time for another life story, Rodriguez thought. They had all been through these conversations before with every fucking VIP that came by. He was about to speak, but Anthony beat him to it.

“I’m Anthony and this here is Rod,” Anthony cracked his knuckles, causing Darby to flinch.  “We got blown up together, which is pretty cool. I think. We were both—”

“Do you have a rank?”

Rodriguez and Anthony exchanged glances. “Well, I’m a lance corporal.”

“And you?” Darby nodded.

“HM2 Rodriguez.”

“HM2?  I’m not familiar with Navy ranks.”

“It means I’m a petty officer, an E-5.”

“Sir,” Darby said.

“Hm?”

“You will address me as Sir, HM2 Rodriguez,” Darby said, drawing out the syllables in Rodriguez’s name and rank and jabbing his finger into Rodriguez’s shoulder.

The room was quiet again and he could feel a dozen pairs of eyes on him.

“I’m an E-5,” Rodriguez repeated. He lowered his eyes to the floor, deflating his previous confidence, before adding, “Sir.”

Darby smiled and leaned back.

“E-5. An NCO. Tell me, petty officer, how is it everyone here is so undisciplined? Going by first names, not respecting rank. Have you forgotten you’re all still soldiers? Why are you not ordering them to wear authorized PT gear? Why do half the soldiers in here not have proper haircuts? I didn’t want to believe the reports of poor morale around here, but now I completely understand.” He was no longer speaking to Rodriguez but addressing the whole room. “There are going to be some changes around here.  It’s time you all started looking and acting like soldiers again instead of a bunch of moping civilians.  You’ve lost your pride.”

“Actually, some of us are Marines, sir,” Anthony said.

Darby glared at him and then stormed out of the room, followed by his aides.

*

Every now and again, despite not having feet, Doc Rodriguez took the bus up Georgia Avenue to the Wheaton Mall and bought a pair of shoes. These were the only trips he took outside of Walter Reed since arriving from Iraq eight months ago, and so he liked to make the most of them. Months in a wheelchair had taught him how people tip-toed around him, afraid to make the slightest insult. It amused him to watch them squirm.

Col. Darby had been in command for over a week now and the hospital was beginning to feel even more suffocating than usual. Every wounded warrior (a term Darby had grown fond of repeating) living in the barracks now had to attend 0700 accountability formations. Authorized PT gear was made the uniform of the day, no longer could they wear what they wanted or what was most comfortable. Wounded warriors had to check-in and out with the SNCOIC every time they went to an appointment, which was often multiple times per day. There was even talk of a curfew being put into effect. Rodriguez needed some kind of escape. So he went to the mall.

When he reached the shoe store, Rodriguez rolled straight to the athletic section. Two salesmen behind the counter exchanged looks of confusion with each other before pretending to be busy on the computer. No doubt hoping he would leave, Rodriguez thought. After a few minutes picking up shoes, checking the flexibility of the toes, comparing their weight, the younger of the sales reps, a lanky teen who hadn’t yet filled out his overgrown frame, cautiously approached.

“Looking for a gift for someone?”

“Nope,” Rodriguez inspected the tread of a running shoe.

“Well, that’s a great runner right there,” the rep said, rubbing his hands together and looking back at his comrade, who was still feigning interest in the computer screen.

“It’s got great tread for cross-country and is very light weight. And the sides here allow your feet—” he paused, a hint of panic in his eyes. Rodriguez said nothing and waited for him to continue— “um, they allow your feet to breathe.”

Rodriguez raised an eyebrow, wondering how long the kid could last before bursting into a frantic apology. But he’d had his fun, and instead asked if they had them in size ten; a good, solid size, he thought.

The sales rep made a quick glance towards Rodriguez’s nonexistent feet. “Let me go check.”  He disappeared into the back of the store, the other rep following close behind.

Rodriguez knew he was being an asshole. It made him feel good, normal, like he still had some control over his life. If that meant some ableds had to feel uncomfortable for a minute or two, then so be it, they could walk it off.

The lanky rep came back out, alone this time, and Rodriguez met him at the cash register.  The rep removed the security tag and boxed up the shoes, asking Rodriguez how he would like to pay. He was relaxed now that he was making a sale. Rodriguez was about to respond when he was grasped around the neck. Whoever it was squeezed tightly.  Rodriguez could feel their body pressing against his back and shoulders.

“Excuse me,” Rodriguez said.

The arms gently released and he turned to see an old woman. She was somewhere in her sixties, seventies maybe, judging by her gray, dry hair and purple fanny pack. He could see tears welling up in her eyes.

“Oh, I’m sorry I just couldn’t help myself. I saw you and just had to come over and hug that poor soldier. I just can’t imagine what you’ve been through.”

“Sailor.”

“What was that?”

“I’m a sailor,” he said, pointing to his shirt which read “NAVY” in big block letters across his chest. “A Navy Corpsman.”

“Oh, I apologize, I just assumed. What’s a corpsman?”

Rodriguez sighed. Nobody ever knows what the fuck a corpsman is.

“A medic for Marines.”

“That sounds wonderful, sweetie. A real hero! Please, let me buy these shoes for you.”

She had already pulled out her card from the fanny pack and was handing it over the counter before Rodriguez knew what was happening.

“No, ma’am, it’s really all right.  I can—”

“Oh no, don’t you worry.  It’s the least I could do to thank you for your service.  You boys really have done so much for this country.”

“Thanks, but—”

She pulled him in for another hug, nearly yanking him out of his chair. When she was done, she kissed the top of his head, signed her receipt and left. What the fuck? The sales kid was stifling a laugh.

He sat at the bus stop, waiting to return to the hospital and hoping no one else would talk to him. Other than a few confused glances at his shoebox and the empty space where his legs used to be, no one bothered him. He wanted to shrink into his chair and disappear.  When the bus arrived, he waited for everyone to board before moving to the door and asking the driver to lower the lift in the back.

“Didn’t notice you there,” the bus driver said. He was a big man and had to rock himself forward a few times to build enough momentum to get out of his chair, but once he was up the bus driver was surprisingly quick. “My apologies, folks.  Gotta help get this young man get loaded up.”

He met Rodriguez at the back of the bus. “This’ll take no time,” he said, reaching for the lift controls, as if Rodriguez hadn’t done this a hundred times before, and didn’t in fact know that the lift was slow as hell. Rodriguez could see the other passengers watching through the windows, visibly annoyed that their ride was being delayed. When the lift was finally lowered, he reached for his wheels, but the bus driver beat him to it, grabbing onto his chair and pushing and guiding him onto the ramp.

“Hey,” Rodriguez said, “I got it.”

“I just want to make sure you get on nice and straight. See?”

“Fine, whatever.” He just wanted to get on board.

“Make sure you lock your wheels, I’d be all shook up if you rolled off backwards once this thing is up in the air.”

“I’m good. I’m holding on to the rails.”

The bus driver ignored him and locked the wheels himself.

Rodriguez wanted to scream at the man but didn’t want to make this already ridiculous scene any bigger, and so he bit his lower lip instead. The other passengers were huffing and sighing, checking their watches and phones with annoyance. It was embarrassing to be such an inconvenience. When Rodriguez was finally aboard, the bus driver pulled out some hooks and straps, and used them to anchor the chair to the floor.  Rodriguez again tried to protest, he hated the idea of being locked in place, unable to move until someone came and untied him, but the bus driver, all smiles and stupid jokes, ignored him again.

*

Back in his room, Rodriguez tossed the shoebox on top of the dresser and transferred from his chair to the bed, shoving a pile of clothes out of the way. He was tired, mentally drained. No, it went deeper than that, he thought. Spiritually drained, that was a better word for it, but not in the religious sense. Mentally, he could take anything, had taken everything, but this place was wearing him down in other ways. And now Darby.  Rodriguez was still pissed about their first encounter. Address me as Sir, he thought.  Act like soldiers. Where the fuck did he think he was? Like we don’t have more important shit to worry about than getting a fucking haircut every week. And that dumb grin. He should have just stuck to his guns.

He couldn’t dwell on it, he thought. Negative emotions will just demoralize the patient, making their survival less certain. Always direct their attention elsewhere. He began to run through the procedure for bandaging a sucking chest wound: stop the bleeding, seal the wound with plastic, you don’t want any air entering the chest cavity, place a bandage on top of the plastic and tie it around the chest for good pressure, roll the victim onto their injured side while awaiting evacuation, monitor for shock. When he was done with that, Rodriguez moved on to treating immersion foot, pitted keratolysis, where to place a tourniquet and for how long.

After several minutes his phone chirped with a text message: get online bitch. It was Juan, one of his old squad mates still down at Camp Lejeune. Rodriquez reached over to the nightstand for an Xbox controller and microphone and logged on.

“Hey, Doc, how’s it goin, dude?”

“Same old shit, man,” Rodriguez said, “It’s good to hear from ya.”

“Fuck yeah, man.  Ain’t nothin new here, just playing some Call of Duty while the boots do working parties.”

“Ha ha, just like the old days.”

Rodriguez wished he could be back there, dealing with all the bullshit, but these game sessions went a long way to make him still feel connected, still part of a unit. When he first arrived at Walter Reed, the doctors and therapists kept going on and on about his “new normal” and how once he got adjusted he wouldn’t feel different at all. A life of adventure awaited; wheelchair basketball, handcycling across the country, sit-skiing down Breckenridge, fucking hiking up Kilimanjaro, and all that other inspirational horseshit everyone expected them to be doing. New normal, he scoffed. Fuck all that. He just wanted to feel normal normal.

“Aint the same without you, Doc. These new corpsmen we got are boot as fuck. Could use you down here training ‘em up.” There was a commotion on the other end and Rodriguez had to pull the headphones off when the sound started banging around and scraping in his ear.

“Yo, Doc, you legless asshole.” It was his old roommate, Benjamin, clearly drunk.

Rodriguez laughed. “Benji, what’s up, brother?”

“Corporal Benji to you, you fucking squid.”

They continued like that for a couple hours, shit talking back and forth, Rodriguez asking what training they were up to, if they got their next deployment orders yet. Afghanistan, Juan said, though he didn’t know where exactly. They were heading out next week for mountain warfare training in California, they’d be gone for a few weeks. Even though he had hated combat, hated how afraid it made him, hated bandaging up his friends, had felt relief when he woke up in Germany with no legs, knowing he’d never have to do it again, Rodriguez had a sudden, deep longing to go with them, and when he logged off and turned out the light, he fell asleep fantasizing about not having been blown up, about getting drunk in the barracks, about training in California, about the mountains of Afghanistan.

*

The next day, after physical therapy, Anthony came over to Rodriguez’s room to play some Halo. It was a usual routine for them after PT and helped them relax after working out for two or three hours. Though Rodriguez would never admit it out loud, playing video games made him feel like his old self, back when he didn’t need any kind of handicap or special equipment to play sports or any other activity. They were the one thing that made him feel like he was still equal and whole.

There was a knock at the door and Anthony got up to open it. It was Jeff, their Halo tourney rival. He pushed past Anthony and walked in.

“Yo, you trying to steal our strats or what?” Anthony said.

“Like I need to.  You noobs can practice all you want but you’ll never beat me and the LAN Warriors.”

Rodriguez rolled his eyes. “You idiots still using that dumbass name?”

Jeff waved him off, “I’m not here to talk about that. Colonel Darby is doing room inspections. Just finished with the second floor.”

“What, here?” Anthony said.  “Are you serious?”

“Yeah I’m fucking serious. Asshole just burst into my room and chewed my ass out for leaving one of my arms on the bed and clothes on the floor.”

The three of them surveyed the room. The “barracks” they lived in was actually a former hotel, converted for use as overflow patient housing when amputees began coming home in unexpectedly large numbers, and like most hotels was not an ideal long-term living solution. Every inch of floor space not necessary for wheelchair traffic was covered in luggage bags and spare limbs, a collection of t-shirts and knitted blankets lay in the corner, growing with every new tour of American Legion and VFW groups to come through. Clothes were haphazardly piled on the guest bed and the small garbage can was overflowing with empty Red Bull cans and soda bottles. The bed sheets were open and scrunched to the side. A collection of magazines, pizza boxes, and orange pill bottles lay across the desk.

“Well, it smells all right,” Anthony said.

The door swung open and in walked Col. Darby, who gave the room a quick once over and then stood in front of the TV.

“HM2 Rodriguez, why am I not surprised?”

“You tell m—”

“I’ll tell you why, HM2 Rodriguez. I’m not surprised by the state of this,” Darby scanned the space again, “room because every gosh darn room so far has looked exactly the same.  Clothes every which way.  Pizza boxes, spit bottles, pop cans,” he hesitated, “pornography.”

“And I’ll tell you something else, HM2…”

Rodriguez could have sat there silently and taken the ass-chewing like he did earlier. Just stare and say a couple of “Yessirs,” maybe squeeze in an “Aye Aye, sir” just to throw Darby off a bit, a slight stick of the needle so he could feel smug about it later. Then toss him some platitude like “I’ll get right on it, sir” with no intention of actually following through, but offering just enough to make Darby feel like he had accomplished something so he could leave.

And that’s exactly what Rodriguez did, Anthony and Jeff following his lead. But when Darby finally reached the end of his self-indulgent tirade he said something that caught Rodriguez off guard.

“Excuse me, sir?”

“I said, HM2, that I’m tired of seeing all of these Nintendos.  I don’t believe in coincidences and I believe there is a direct correlation to the lack of discipline around here and those darn machines.”

Nintendos? he thought. “Do you mean video games, sir?”

“Don’t correct me, HM2. Give me anymore attitude and I’ll be speaking with…whoever it is in charge of you.”

“Aren’t you in charge of me, sir?”  Rodriguez allowed himself a slight grin.

“You find this amusing, do you? Well, I think I’ve seen enough here. It’s obvious what the problem is. Captain!” An aide appeared at Darby’s side as if she had been there the whole time. “I want you to call IT and instruct them to shut off network access for all…video games.” She nodded and pulled out a Blackberry.

“You can’t do that,” Anthony nearly shouted.

Darby regarded him, “It’s my base, son.”

“You can’t mess with our personal time like that,” Rodriguez countered.  “We’re,” he searched for the right word, something Darby would understand, “off-duty!”

“You’re never off-duty when you live on base.”

“But, we’re fucking hospital patients!”

“And that’s exactly my point. You all need to get back in the right mindset. You’re not hospital patients, you’re soldiers! And soldiers don’t play video games, they train. You should be working on PMEs for promotion boards or taking online college courses. There are plenty of more productive activities you could be doing. Believe me, I’m doing you a favor.”

“But, sir,” Rodriguez pleaded, all the resistance in him from a moment before had drained out, “I know it’s hard to understand, but this is important for us. All of us. It’s how I keep in touch with the guys in my unit.” He hoped that would be enough, that Darby could at least sympathize with that.

“You have a cell phone, don’t you? Shut it down, captain.”

She was still holding the phone to her ear but gave a thumbs up.

“Why don’t you three spread the word.”

*

They gathered at the smoke pit in the courtyard. A few dozen soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines in wheelchairs and on crutches. Some listened from their windows, their heads and arms dotting the walls of the hotel which surrounded the courtyard on three sides.  They were angry. They were powerless. Who do we blame? The colonel?  For most of them he only existed in the abstract; some liminal force both real and unreal, capable of controlling their lives, their actions, manipulating their fears and desires towards his own ends.  Another authority free of accountability. And so they blamed each other.  Arguments spread over who hadn’t been keeping their room clean, who spent more time playing Xbox or Playstation, who didn’t cut their hair, shave, bathe, didn’t render a proper salute, act professionally, ate too much pizza or Chinese takeout—

“Enough!” Rodriguez shouted.

He made his way to the front of the group, wheelchairs parting to let him through. All eyes reluctantly turning to him.

“Are we really going to turn on each other? Over one asshole’s stupidity?” That got him a few laughs. “An asshole who’s been here all of a few days and already thinks he knows how to the run the place, who thinks he can barge into our rooms, our PT building whenever he pleases? Humiliate us?” Hell no, someone shouted. Rodriguez pointed at Jeff, “How long have you been here?” Thirteen months, Jeff replied. He pointed at someone else, “How long have you been here?” Ten months. “And you,” he pointed to his left, “how long have you been here?” Two years, was the answer.  Rodriguez paused and let that sink in.

“Walter Reed exists for us. We are the reason for that state-of-the-art PT building. We are the reason celebrities and politicians come here, supplying them,” he pointed towards the administrative buildings, “with good PR and propaganda. We are the reason their budget has been doubled.” Hell yeah! Damn straight! The crowd was nodding and clapping in agreement. “I don’t know about you all, but I’m tired.” Real fuckin tired! A shout from the middle of the crowd. “Tired of people grabbing my chair without permission.”  Yeah!  “Tired of having my therapy interrupted by some chicken hawk senator or b-list actor offering to take a picture with me.” Fuck those douchebags! “Tired of being told about my ‘new normal.’” Hear, hear! Hell, yeah! Speakin truth! “Tired of being forced to live up to everyone else’s expectations of how we should think and act!” Furious applause.  “And I’m fucking tired of thinking we have no control around here!” The crowd was wild, clapping and waving canes in the air, surging towards him. “WE run this place!” Rodriguez shouted over the noise. A chant began seemingly from everyone all at once, “No play, no work!  No play, no work!  No play, no work!”

Back inside the group gathered around Rodriguez. It had grown larger as more people came down from their rooms and into the open lobby.

“What are your orders, Doc?”  Anthony asked.

“I’m not giving any orders. But we do need to organize. We’ll need volunteers.”  Everyone raised their hand. “Good, strength in numbers. First off, we’ll need some counter-intel.  People who can make some posters for propaganda and psy ops.”

“I can do that,” Anna said. She was an air force staff sergeant who had lost her left arm in a rocket attack. She was fairly new, having only been here a few months. Normally, she kept to herself in her room, went to PT in the afternoon when fewer people were there. She wasn’t timid, Rodriguez thought, just quiet. He nodded to her and she raised her one fist in acknowledgement and then left to gather more members for her team.

“Okay, hopefully we won’t need it, but a direct-action team would be nice.”

“That’s got my name all over it, Doc,” Jeff said.

“Focus on gathering stuff to use as barricades, we’ll need to be ready to block the entrances and stairwells in case they try to force us out.”

“Roger that.”  Jeff raised his fist.

“Everyone else should help out where needed. Prepare some defenses or gather up enough food and meds to last us a few days. We’re not going to ANY appointments until we get our video games back. They can’t punish us all if we stick together!”

Rodriguez turned to Anthony. “I’ve got a special mission for you.”

Two days later they were still holding strong. That first night, Rodriguez had called Darby’s office and stated their demands. He hung up before the colonel’s aide could respond. Soon after, all internet access in their rooms was shut off. They’d heard nothing since. But morale among them had never been higher. With no instruction they had eagerly organized themselves into four-man fireteams, each responsible for a set of windows or hallways. A rotating guard shift was set up at every entrance and a direct-action team waited in the lobby ready for anything. The building custodial staff had given them the keys to the building, raising their fists to Rodriguez when they handed them over, and now they had unlimited access to the cafeteria as well as the roof, where they posted lookouts. The staff had also donated a few sets of walkie talkies, which were distributed throughout the building. If Darby thought he could wait them out, Anna had said, he was mistaken.

“Man, we shoulda done this sooner,” Jeff said. “I’m fuckin’ pumped.”

“It’s nice to feel useful again,” Anna replied.

“I’m just glad to be a burden on my own terms for once,” Rodriguez said. The others nodded.

OP1 to HQ, movement on the northwest of the courtyard. Coming down the path, looks like Darby and some aides, over.

Anna clicked on her radio, Roger that, OP1, out. “Looks like he finally wants to talk.”

“We’ll see,” Rodriguez said.

They waited for Darby to come closer, so he could see what they had left for him. All along the building, along all three sides of the courtyard, the windows were plastered with posters. NO PLAY, NO WORK was the most predominant, with others like FUCK THE POLICE and ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US interspersed throughout. A large pirate flag hung from a window. From behind the glass doors Rodriguez could see Darby carefully scanning each sign, his disgust evident by the ever-growing scowl on his face. His aides stood nervously behind him. Rodriguez instructed the guard to unlock the door and then rolled out to meet him.

“This little insurrection of yours ends right now!” Darby said as soon as Rodriguez was out of the building. “If it doesn’t, I’ll have every last one of you charged and court martialed!”

Rodriguez snorted, “Good luck with that.”

“Listen here, Aitch. Em. Two, this facility will not be held hostage and I will not negotiate with insurrectionists. This insubordination will end—”

“I’m sorry but we don’t really care what you think is going to happen.”

“How dare you, you—”

“And we don’t much care for your indignant attitude.” A round of banging echoed across the courtyard as those watching from the windows drummed their canes on the window frames. “It’s time you recognized who holds the power around here. Us. You’re here to serve us, to make sure we’re getting the proper care we need. We’re through with being treated as if we were children on timeout. Now, turn the internet back on and restore our video game access and we’ll gladly return to our duties.” More drumming. The aides took cautious steps back.

“I will not be ordered around by some enlisted man, a petty officer! I’m in command here and you will shut this, this, this charade down!”

“I think we’d prefer not to.” Rodriguez smiled and crossed his arms.

“Fine. Seize him!”

Darby’s aides hesitated a moment, and then rushed forward. A lieutenant grabbed his left arm and Rodriguez punched him in face. The lieutenant let out a sharp squeal that even had Rodriguez feeling embarrassed for him and crumpled to the ground. Before Rodriguez could reposition himself two captains clutched his arms from behind and tried to pull him out his chair.

“CHARGE!”

The captains paused and turned back to the building entrance. Out from the building burst Anthony on his Segway wearing a Che Guevara shirt followed by two others on Segways. They were wearing helmets and elbow pads, and wielding canes. Anthony pointed his cane forward like he was Patton galloping towards the enemy upon his steed.

“Go for their legs!” He shouted and soon they were upon the aides and slashing down on them. They rode circles around them, smacking and beating their thighs and calves.  Projectiles were now reigning down from the windows; shoes, challenge coins, tomatoes; someone was firing BBs from a slingshot.

“Retreat!” Darby ordered. “Fall back!” The officers, laying in the fetal position, scrambled and stumbled to their feet. They sprinted shamelessly, trying to catch up with the colonel.

“NO PLAY, NO WORK. NO PLAY, NO WORK.” The chant grew louder as they shouted from their windows. The officers ran faster. Anthony and his team escorted Rodriguez back inside where the direct-action team prepared for a possible counterattack.

“Lock it down!” Rodriguez shouted.

Jeff reached for his radio and gave the signal, Turtle up!  Turtle up!

A flurry of activity ensued as they locked the doors. Empty wheelchairs and spare limbs and unused furniture that had been kept off to the side were now piled against the entrances. Fireteams on each floor pushed more wheelchairs down the stairwells. Every lookout and post were doubled up as they went to 100% security. Food and water were evenly distributed. Their time had come.

*

Over the next thirty-six hours, the base MPs made several probing attacks. The colonel’s goons first tried to get in through the front entrance, rather than attempt another courtyard gauntlet, but found the way blocked by a lifted, yellow H2 Hummer and a black Mercedes Benz AMG (both courtesy of the government’s tax-free $50k/per limb compensation to each amputee). They then attempted a night raid through the courtyard, thinking the resistance would be asleep. They were beaten back by a combination of million-candle-power flashlights and water balloons filled with urine. Jeff was particularly proud of that idea. Then, on the fifth day, the real assault began.

They heard it first. The unmistakable sound of boots on pavement, marching. The lookouts on the roof confirmed what the others already knew, this was no probe. I count at least 50 headed towards the courtyard, over. It took ten minutes for the MPs to file in, riot shields over their heads, boots clomping in a methodical rhythm, but the resistance held their fire. They formed up five troops wide, all that could fit through the doors at one time. Rodriguez, Anthony, Jeff, Anna and two dozen of Jeff’s direct-action team stood ready to face them at ground level, a mountain of twisting metal and rubber separating the two sides.

Panic seized Rodriguez for a moment as he considered what was about to happen and all he had done to bring it about. He may not have forced his comrades into mutiny, but he couldn’t help but feel responsible for the real danger they all now faced. Had he been right? Were these actions justified? Was their cause doomed? He began to cycle through a dozen similar questions he hadn’t contemplated before and the weight of it all nearly sent him to grab the nearest white flag, until Anthony placed an arm around his shoulders.

“If we could only see us now,” Anthony said, smiling.

Rodriguez looked up and down the line and saw the same determination in every face.  His panic passed. Doomed or not. Right or wrong. They were together.

It happened all at once. The MPs rushed forward, quickly smashing through the glass doors. The window teams opened fire with an assortment of heavy and disgusting objects. The MPs responded with pepper spray, but their range was limited and could only reach up to the second floor. Both sides dragged away their wounded. The front rows of MPs were grabbing and tossing all the debris in the blockade aside, passing it over their heads to be carried back and out of the way. “Hit em with the balloons!” Jeff barked. They crashed and broke against the barricade, spraying the MPs with all their contents. The front row disappeared as they retreated out of the line of fire but were quickly replaced by those behind them. The two sides repeated the cycle for several minutes, but the MPs were removing the debris far quicker than the resistance could deplete their ranks, and eventually the MPs broke through.

“LAN Warriors, charge!”  Jeff sprinted towards the breach. Rodriguez nearly choked laughing, but he and the others followed right behind. The next moments were a blur of canes and batons being swung back and forth. Two men, one in a chair, the other on crutches, fell to the floor, blood spilling down their faces. They were quickly dragged off.  Rodriguez and the others were slowly being pushed back by the MPs, lacking the leg power needed to hold their ground. The MPs had given up on pepper spray now that they were in close quarters, switching to their tasers instead. Two more amputees on the left flank went down, bloodied, forcing the remaining men on that side to fall back and cede ground. The MPs quickly took advantage and Rodriguez and Jeff found themselves surrounded, batons coming in from all sides. Rodriguez fought back with all he had, swinging his cane like a baseball bat, chopping down like an axe. He smashed one MP in the nose, sending a gush of blood spraying out. Jeff knocked another out cold, he had lost his cane and was now punching any uniform he could reach. An intense pain surged through Rodriguez and he lost control of himself as his body seized up. He fell out of his chair and was convulsing on the ground as two MPs tried to drag him off.

He heard a scream from somewhere in the mass of bodies and he couldn’t tell if it was one of his or one theirs, but then Anna burst from the crowd and threw herself at the MPs dragging him. “Get Doc outta here!” There were new hands on him now, dragging him away from the fight, further inside the building. Anthony screeched by on his Segway and drove straight into the mass of uniforms, disappearing as he flew over the handle bars.  The last glimpse he got of Anna before the MPs surrounded her was of her swinging her prosthetic arm like a club.

*

Now in the casualty collection point, Rodriguez had time to think again. He was badly bruised and sore from where his muscles had tensed themselves up into knots after being electrocuted but looking around it was clear he had gotten off easy. Nearly two dozen people lay about the floor in different states of shock and injury. Most had blood leaking from gashes in their heads, some lay unconscious, others had their arms in slings. A group in the far corner were busy pouring milk over their faces and sitting in front of large fans.  A man Rodriguez didn’t recognize lay next to him, struggling to wipe the blood from his eyes with the stubs of his arms. Rodriguez leaned over and pulled a bandage from his pocket. He did his best to wipe the blood from the man’s face and then applied the bandage to the wound on his forehead.

“Thanks, Doc,” the man said before groggily closing his eyes.

It was all too much for him now as the panic crept its way back into his chest. How many had new concussions? Rodriguez thought. How many broken bones? How long would their recovery now be delayed because of these new injuries? He began to shake and he lost the strength in his arms, and fell back against the wall. He took another look around the room and nearly burst into tears. “I thought I was done with this,” he said to himself.  He could still hear the sounds of battle going on in the lobby. The banging, the shouting.  He tried to cover his ears but the sounds were too loud and slipped past his fingers. There was only one thing he could do. He pushed himself back up and crawled from patient to patient, tending to their wounds.

The fight went on for thirty more minutes until the MPs retreated. A second direct-action team had arrived as Rodriguez was being pulled away and managed to hold the lobby. Jeff found Rodriguez and gave him the quick AAR: half of their resistance was injured, and of those, half could still fight. Several members were missing, including Anna and Anthony, and were presumed captured. They’d depleted all their water balloons and most of the projectiles. But, Jeff said, we still own this place. No MPs got past the lobby.

Rodriguez was quiet. Anna. Anthony. Everybody. They sacrificed themselves, for me, for my dumb plan, he finally said.

“No. They did it for themselves,” Jeff answered. “Look around, man. Even with blood and pepper spray in their faces, they’re laughing.”

Word had spread of the MP’s retreat and the mood in the room had shifted to an exhilaration not unlike that after a firefight. The exhilaration of fear and of being alive. Of having fought and won. It became clear to Rodriguez that the outcome of this mutiny no longer mattered, had probably never mattered. He climbed back into his chair and he and Jeff headed to the lobby.

A voice from a bullhorn echoed in the courtyard.

“HM2 Rodriguez. I think we’ve all had enough of this and are ready to come to an agreement.” It was Darby. “Unless you’d rather I throw your friends in the brig.”

Rodriguez and Jeff approached the window. Darby stood in the courtyard with a team of MPs in SWAT gear. Anna and Anthony sat handcuffed and bandaged at his feet.

“That motherfucker,” Jeff said.

“I’m willing to restore full internet access and grant everyone immunity if you end this rebellion now,” Darby continued, “Well, not everyone.  HM2 Rodriguez will have to face punishment. Someone has to, after all this destruction.”

“Fuck that, Doc. If anyone needs to be punished it’s that asshole.”

“No. We’ve won,” Rodriguez said. “We did it.”

“But you can’t just turn yourself—”

“I don’t want anyone else hurt over this.” Rodriguez looked over his shoulder at the guards by the doors, still defiant despite bandages on their heads and torn shirts, one of them raised his fist. “We got what we needed.”

Jeff nodded reluctantly and clapped his hand on Rodriguez’s shoulder.

*

It was silent when he rolled out to Darby. The grin and arrogance from Darby’s face was gone. It was clear he hadn’t slept at all for the past five days and looked as though he had lost twenty pounds, his uniform hanging off his shoulders and arms. Rodriguez raised his fist at Anna and Anthony and they both smiled in return. Darby said nothing to him, didn’t even look at him, just signaled for the MPs who came and handcuffed Rodriguez’s arms behind his back. They took hold of his chair and began pushing him towards a patrol car on the far side of the courtyard.

They were halfway down the courtyard when a single voice shouted from the windows, “NO PLAY, NO WORK.”

Others joined in and the chant quickly spread around the courtyard.

“NO PLAY, NO WORK.”

A prosthetic leg came sailing out from a third-floor window. Another came from the second floor across the way. Then an arm, a foot. More and more came tumbling out of the windows in a cascade of limbs all around the courtyard. The chant got louder and built up to a thunderous echo, bouncing off the walls and the trees, rising, rising, rising above the buildings and out across the street and into Rock Creek Park, down Georgia Ave and downtown and into the Capitol, the National Mall, the White House.

“NO PLAY, NO WORK.  NO PLAY, NO WORK.”

Rodriguez laughed and laughed, tears streaming from his eyes, as he was wheeled down the path and out of sight.

Most schoolchildren in the English-speaking West read Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal in high school or college. Since its publication in 1729, A Modest Proposal has become a staple of English literature, the most recognizable satirical example of hyperbole. A Modest Proposal is often read by students of history, politics, and economics for similar reasons. It is a genre unto itself—the “modest proposal” essay—and is treated as such in many online media publications (Salon, Slate, Jezebel, TNR, The National Review, and… well, all of them, irrespective of political alignment).

For those people who missed Swift’s original satire, here’s a quick summary. In the early 18^th century (really from the 17^th-20^th century), the Irish, colonized and exploited by England, suffered from extreme poverty. Meanwhile, a growing overseas empire and industrialization helped expand the British middle class, and drove appetite for consumer goods. Swift offers a solution to both issues—the middle class should cultivate an appetite for the flesh of Irish babies, which will alleviate the suffering of poor Irish families.

A Modest Proposal is not modest, nor is it sincere. Swift does not expect people reading it to take his argument at face value, though it is likely that he earnestly hoped his writing would help raise awareness and empathy for poor Irish civilians. The type of person (a person like Swift’s fictional narrator) who would suggest developing a market for baby flesh—breaking humanity’s taboo on cannibalism for sustenance, satisfaction, or profit—would be an immoral monster. But Swift’s ambition isn’t simply to shock with A Modest Proposal, he designs the essay to deliver horror logically, to examine a particular way of thinking about problem solving. The essay derives much of its power through fusing “thinkable” (the expansion of markets and generation of wealth as a way of alleviating human suffering) with “unthinkable” (that market expansion, in A Modest Proposal, is Irish babies).

Because A Modest Proposal communicates its point so effectively, it is widely emulated. A favorite of New York Times Op-Ed columnists and contributors, (as well as bloggers) and many other media publications (as described ealier), the “Modest Proposal” of today is (unlike its inspiration), often quite modest in terms of its ambitions, and respect for the sensibilities of English-language readers. These not-immodest contemporary proposals have lost almost all connection to the original sense of Swift’s intentionally outrageous essay, and function simply as a way of grabbing readers’ attention. They’re a kind of bait-and-switch, where naming the essay in a way sure to draw parallels to Swift’s essay serves as the “bait,” and a justification for maintaining the status quo is the “switch.”

One (out of countless) example of a failed “modest proposal” directly inspired by Swift is this Obama-era 2010 think piece that whimsically offered to improve U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts by firing everyone in the CIA and replacing them with out-of-work investigative journalists. Elements shared with Swift’s Modest Proposal: (1) offers to solve two social problems in one stroke, (2) is an unethical and bad idea, (3) clearly forwarded for rhetorical impact rather than as a serious suggestion. Elements it lacks: (1) offers some truly transgressive idea for the sake of exaggeration, amusement, and illustration [journalists are intelligence gatherers, and better at intelligence gathering than the CIA].

Even unconventional proposals (like Noam Chomsky’s 2002 “modest” proposal that the U.S. arm Iran and let them attack Iraq) fall short of actually breaking taboo. In the case of Chomsky’s satirical essay, a much worse thing happened than the invasion of Iraq by a U.S. supplied Iran—the U.S. invaded Iraq itself, destabilizing the area so completely that open warfare in Iraq is ongoing. In fact, Iran has contributed mightily in the struggle against ISIS, in terms of soldiers and material. Chomsky’s vision for possible horror was totally insufficient for the satirical form, and is now a reality in Iraq.

The best or purest recent “modest proposal” to be found is tagged and searchable as a “modest proposal,” but not explicitly titled as such. It is a Clinton-era essay from 1999 by David Plotz that proposes to end school shootings by arming all schoolchildren. Plotz doesn’t spend the time exploring the idea—how useful this would be for the gun industry, and (presumably) would assist the U.S. economy in ways that would create more prosperity, thereby reducing the type of family conditions that often lead to dissatisfaction, mental illness, and murder—but it’s similar in tone and feel to Swift’s satire. It’s also pretty close to a stance actually supported by the NRA in the wake of Sandy Hook. Still, a decent attempt.

What’s stopping writers and thinkers from going beyond Swift’s rhetorical form? It’s not as though the world is essentially more just or equitable than in Swift’s time—on the contrary, knowing what we do about history, a compelling argument can be made that things are worse now then when Jonathan Swift was writing. Sure, there have been advances in technology and science. There have also been catastrophes on an almost-unimaginable scale, such that if one does not learn about them at school, one is inclined to believe that they are hoaxes. The Great Leap Forward, the Holocaust, Holodomor, the genocide of Native American populations in the Americas, the invention and deployment of nuclear weapons, and many other horrific tragedies of the industrial age required the invention of new legal and ethical categories for which Swift and his contemporaries did not have words.

Granted, Not Everyone is a Satirist

One possible reason so many authors and thinkers invoke A Modest Proposal without using the most powerful component of its energy (taboo-busting hyperbole) is that most writers don’t consider themselves satirists. They don’t write to satirize, they write (a column, for example) to advance a serious policy with serious people. In this case, serious writers could be interested in referencing A Modest Proposal to show that they’re well-read. They could also hope to use a portion of A Modest Proposal’s energy to highlight the desirability of their position (which is not eating babies) while affiliating the competing argument with calamity.

Here’s another factor to consider. Pundits and the political/media commentary class tend to come from the ranks of the wealthy, influential and powerful. This offers an incentive for employees of the wealthy and powerful (those working for Jeff Bezos at The Washington Post or the Sulzberger family at The New York Times, for example) to be careful with what they write, and how they write it. One will find criticism of The New York Times and The Washington Post within their own pages, because those media institutions practice journalism (and do so well). Nevertheless, that criticism rarely takes on a disrespectful tone, or one that is strident or moralistic. There are limits.

The Sulzbergers are great patrons of the Democratic Party, and (an assessment based on regular readership of The New York Times) tend to pull for mainstream icons of the Democratic Party including the Clintons and the Kennedys—political families accustomed to chummy relationships with large media organizations. This is just one prominent example from an industry rife with patronage and nepotism, on both sides of the political spectrum. Nepotism and favor happens to be visible to many people who keep track of politics or consume journalism in a way that it isn’t visible in physics or rocket science. Nepotism and favor are also differently useful in politics and journalism. When a political or authorial brand passes from one generation to the next, having a prominent father or mother who can parlay influence into access can make or break a young career in either. Is it any wonder that within two groups who depend on each other for power there tends to be little incentive to write hard-hitting satire that might undermine the position of either?

Social media also makes bold satire difficult by particularizing audiences, and opening satirists up to personal attacks (as well as the potential consequences of those attacks). Although satire is not supposed to care about being criticized, certain topics cannot be satirized without being criticized as offensive. There is a higher standard for satire today, that takes more into account than an essay’s subject (for example, the author’s personal connection to the topic at hand). Besides, media institutions can be destroyed by the wealthy and powerful.

The final criticism of A Modest Proposal and similar satires could be that hyperbole as a rhetorical device has been overcome by the horrors of the 20^th century. Satire, no matter how well-intentioned and effectively written has yet to prevent the worst human impulses. From this perspective, if satire isn’t effective, maybe it’s better not to write it.

But I’d tend to disagree with that idea. Here’s an example I wrote of a satirical piece that emulates the intent behind Swift’s argument in A Modest Proposal without imitating the structure. In this case, a man seeks to assuage his fears about terrorism, and in so doing, becomes a terrorist. As a matter of course, the piece (built as a how-to) describes terrorist activity. It’s not great satire, but neither is it awful—and certainly on par with, say, most of what passes for satire in mainstream media today outside Clickhole and The Onion. If it were to go viral and be read by everyone in the U.S., would fewer people become terrorists? Maybe!

Or, to put that better—if it were good enough to go viral, it would almost certainly have a deterrent effect against domestic terrorism, because that’s what great satire does, it makes bad but appealing ideas clichéd, it exposes the ephemerally attractive as flawed and stupid. Anecdotal evidence suggests that clever mockery can do more to make an argument against a given issue or idea stickier and more effective than earnest straightforward appeals. Common sense suggests the same.

Ultimately, what does it matter if satire is ineffective or inefficient? Who said efficiency was the standard of value? Probably a British capitalist eating Irish babies.

Writers Invoking A Modest Proposal Should Be Less Modest

Without innovative, bold, confrontational writing, satire ends up excusing unethical or hypocritical behavior. It is satire’s job to attack the status quo in those ways that the status quo has grown oppressive to humans—regardless of whether or not that attack is successful. Selectively, yes, and constructively, satirists and writers hoping to improve society must do so sometimes through offensive and/or provocative literature.

Absent real satire, the landscape for substantive discussion shrinks until it has been reduced to two agreeable gentlefolk bowing before one another, respectfully begging one anther’s pardon for being so bold as to ask whether the other might be willing to favor them by proceeding through yonder open door.

A Modest Proposal is not extreme, save in comparison with almost all of its recent published descendants. That there are fewer sincere satirical calls for evaluation in political, social, or economic terms at the same time that there are many essays pretending to do so is a commentary on the general comfort many well-educated people feel with the status quo. It’s also a comment on how effective publishing has become at supporting writing that most people find satisfying. That’s almost as bad as a President Trump. And not quite as bad as raising Irish babies to feed the aesthetic tastes of the affluent.

Shortly after Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Booker Prize was awarded to fellow American Paul Beatty for his novel The Sellout. It seems Americans are having a moment in the world of literary prestige, maybe to counterbalance the current political nadir. Dylan was the first American to win the Nobel in 23 years, and Beatty is the first American ever to win the Booker Prize, the pre-eminent prize in Anglophone letters. Originally the Booker Prize had been limited to British writers, then eventually to English language writers from the larger British commonwealth, now to any writer in English. I have read a few handfuls of the past winners and candidates, and I can say that Paul Beatty’s win is well-deserved and ranks among the best of them.

The Sellout is a satire on race in America. It is not only one of the funniest and most intelligent books I have read about race in America (a relatively limited number for me), but one of the funniest and most intelligent books I have read, period. The novel is told by a Black urban farmer with the surname Me in a fictional South-Central Los Angeles slum called Dickens. This impoverished locality, “the murder capital of the world”, was an embarrassment to L.A. and the U.S.A. and was disincorporated by the authorities. One of the central plans of Me is to reconstitute and delineate his hometown of Dickens. He also begins to slyly reinstitute segregation, first on his girlfriend’s bus, then in shops, the library, and the school. After this gambit, crime plummeted and student test results skyrocketed.

The main character was raised and home-schooled only by his father, a prominent psychologist and intellectual who made his son’s life into one long racial sociological experiment. The farm they inhabit takes on Garden of Eden-like qualities, with an impossibly wide-range of exotic fruits that are well-known around town, and delicious enough to make rival gang members put away their Glocks to lick up watermelon juice. One of the members of the local donut shop intellectual club is a Black media impresario named Foy Cheshire, who steals Me’s father’s best ideas to get rich, and calls the main character “the Sellout” for most of the book.

The funniest and most controversial character by far is an aged television actor named Hominy Jenkins, who played a minor role in the old Little Rascals TV series of the 1920-40s. Hominy rejoices at all signs of overt racism, and happily enlists himself as the Sellout’s lazy and unwanted slave. The eventual discovery of this relationship and the resegregation scheme puts the main character behind bars, and eventually in front of the Supreme Court.

There are numerous mentions of real-life African-Americans, often unnamed for legal reasons, throughout the novel, including Barack Obama, Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, and Dave Chappelle. The novel makes use of the author’s detailed knowledge of Los Angeles, as well as Black pop culture, intellectual culture, language, film and TV, and literature. The plot is very engaging from the first page to the last, as well as being chock-full of new ideas in almost every paragraph. The author never seems to run out of interesting and funny new formulations about race and life in America. It is a very difficult book written with frankness and irreverence, not worried about upsetting any sacred cow or offending overly sensitive readers. It appears at a time when just such blunt discussions of race are needed.

One instance of how biting the book can often be is this passage about all of the miserable cities of the world that rejected Dickens as a potential sister city. The last of these is the Lost City of White Male Privilege:

“The Lost City of White Male Privilege, a controversial municipality whose very existence is often denied by many (mostly privileged white males). Others state categorically that the walls of the locale have been irreparably breached by hip-hop and Roberto Bolano’s prose. That the popularity of the spicy tuna roll and a black American president were to white male domination what the smallpox blankets were to Native American existence. Those inclined to believe in free will and the free market argue that the Lost City of White Male Privilege was responsible for its own demise, that the constant stream of contradictory religious and secular edicts from on high confused the highly impressionable white male. Reduced him to a state of such severe social and psychic anxiety that he stopped fucking. Stopped voting. Stopped reading. And, most important, stopped thinking that he was the end-all, be-all, or at least knew enough to pretend not to be so in public. But in any case, it became impossible to walk the streets of the Lost City of White Male Privilege, feeding your ego by reciting mythological truisms like “We built this country!” when all around you brown men were constantly hammering and nailing, cooking world-class French meals, and repairing your cars.”

In the final anecdote in the novel the main character tells about a long-ago visit to a local comedy club featuring open mic night for black comedians. Halfway through, a white couple walks in and begins joining in the laughter. The comedian confronts the white couple and asks them to leave. “This is our thing,” he says. The main character then expresses regret that he did not stand up for the couple’s right to be there. It’s a serious end to a powerful, nuanced, and funny book. As all satire, it punches up at an entrenched system of power–racism and bigotry, in this case. Most of the blows landed. In "post-racial" America, though, it will take a lot more people punching to topple the system in question. And a lot more people reading and writing and engaging in open dialogue with each other, and defending each other’s rights to live and laugh freely.

The German government, a coalition of Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats and the center-left Social Democrats, has decided to allow prosecution of one of its citizens, a comedian named Jan Böhmermann who read a poem which mocked Tayyip Erdogan, the President of Turkey. This is because there is a law in Germany’s penal code that forbids insulting foreign leaders. The decision was made by Merkel despite protests from her coalition partners. Thomas Oppermann, the leader of the Social Democrats, said: “Prosecution of satire due to lèse-majesté does not fit with modern democracy.” Even Merkel admitted that the law should be changed and that Parliament will do so in the next session. It should be obvious that there are some important issues at stake in this case.

I have previously written about Freedom of Speech here (about the Espionage Act and government secrecy) and here (about Charlie Hebdo and terrorism). I am not an absolutist when it comes to Freedom of Speech; I think that it is not permitted when speech comprises credible threat of violence against a person. Insults and mockery, on the other hand, however offensive they may be, are fair game. Giving offense is not a crime, nor is bad taste; they are both protected by freedom of speech.

I like to think of freedom of speech as the first among equals within the “First Amendment suite” of universal human rights that are the backbone of any free society: Freedom of Speech, Religion, the Press, Free Assembly, and Free Petition of Grievances. Without these most basic protections, no society can be considered free. When these rights are impinged upon, a society becomes less free.

My concern in this case is not for Germany. There is no doubt that Germany is a free, but imperfect, society (there has never existed a perfect society). The fact that the left-wing and right-wing opposition in Germany are in agreement with the Social Democrats that prosecution of Mr. Böhmermann is the wrong decision shows that Germany is not turning into an authoritarian state. Merkel herself clearly said she would try to eliminate the ridiculous law that allows for such prosecution. The problem is not with Germany. The problem is with Turkey.

Turkish President Erdogan has ruled his country for the last 14 years–the first 11 as Prime Minister and the last three as President. For the first few years he was widely praised as a reformer and modernizer who could bridge East and West. Turkey was in discussions with the European Union about potential membership from around 2004-2009. This candidacy stalled ostensibly due to a series of major problems with human rights that were far below EU standards: there was reported to be a lack of freedoms of expression, thought, conscience, religion, assembly, and press; there is also a lack of impartial judiciary, children’s and women’s rights, and trade union’s rights. This does not count to lingering problems of the oppressed Kurdish population, the Cyprus question, and the ongoing official denial of the 1915 Armenian genocide. Since the EU integration process was suspended, there has been a clear move in Turkey even further away from these reforms and more towards authoritarianism.

I have previously written about the legacy of Kemal Atatürk here. While I am highly skeptical of any consolidation of power into the hands of a single person–a dictator or autocrat–there have been historical cases in which the situation called for such a person in order to make otherwise impossible reforms. Atatürk is one such case of the rare benevolent dictator. Other historical examples can be counted on just one or two hands, and the assumption should always be that these necessary dictators give up power as soon as possible (for example, when Garibaldi conquered the Kingdom of Naples in 1860 and began implementing constitutional reforms, before voluntarily and peacefully giving the territory to the newly united Kingdom of Italy six months later). One of the lessons of history is clearly that all power corrupts (another theme I have discussed here). If we look critically at the career of Tayyip Erdogan, we can easily follow the path he has led towards authoritarianism, with no apparent sign of his giving up any power during his lifetime. He has moved away from his early reforms towards crushing all opposition and making laws according to his own personal diktat. 

The tragedy of Turkey is that it has the potential to be a great country with a free society. It has no need of a dictator. It is similar to Russia in both these regards. But power corrupts. And when certain men (because it’s always men) hold power for too long, they begin to see conspiracies and threats around every corner, and they tighten their control of state institutions and limit any lingering freedoms already existing in the country. These men are always afraid of armed uprisings or military coups d’état, but what is just as dangerous in their minds is mockery. When a dictator consolidates his power, writers, comedians, artists, poets, and intellectuals of all stripes are immediately placed under surveillance, exiled, imprisoned, or shot. This is because dictators cannot stand the idea of anyone openly making fun of them, even if it’s a joke about their facial hair. Only the dictator sees a real potential threat from a joke by a poor comedian about the dear leader’s whiskers. In this case, Erdogan has followed the dictator’s operating manual to the letter.

It has long been troubling that a law exists in Turkey that forbids criticism of any kind against Kemal Atatürk. The existence of such a law is itself an affront to freedom of speech and historical inquiry. I respect the achievements of Atatürk, but no leader, living or dead, is free from criticism from his subjects or posterity. The danger of such a law has been made manifest in new laws clamping down on criticism against Erdogan, and the complete disregard for freedom of speech and the press that now seems to plague Turkey. Erdogan has ruthlessly pursued prosecution of anyone expressing any criticism of him, such as a Turkish doctor who posted an (admittedly uncanny) comparison between his President and Lord of the Rings villain Gollum.

Erdogan is now taking his game one step further by exploiting a little-known German law to pursue a case against a German comedian who mocked him on German television. This comes at a key time in which European governments are relying on Turkey to stop the influx of refugees through Turkey into Europe so as to appease the growing right-wing xenophobic parties gaining steam around the continent (and the world). Erdogan, always a wily operator, will take advantage of this deal to demand that European governments import his version of press controls in return for cooperation on refugees. 

America is by no means a perfect society, but at least it has probably the strongest tradition of freedom of speech and of the press in the world (even if the limits are constantly being tested). In how many other countries in the world can you imagine a comedian not only mocking a sitting president to his face for 20 minutes on live television, but even living to tell about it. That is what happened with Stephen Colbert and President Bush in 2006, and happens everyday of the year with other comedians, writers, or just normal citizens on social media. As I have explained, jokes and speech are allowed to be offensive or in bad taste. My freedom of speech allows me to publicly disagree with what someone said, but not to silence them. The only exception is violence or threat of violence. When America talks about exporting freedom, this is what is meant. It takes a combination of strong leadership and a willing populace to gain such freedoms in the first place. It is unfortunate that the former is lacking in Turkey today, though we can hope that the latter still has a vote in the matter.