Everything seemed the same, everything seemed fine. So what was the big deal? Maybe it was just his nerves.
He looked at his watch. It was 3:50, ten until the 4 p.m. news meeting. Just enough time to get the lay of the land.
He clicked on his computer, waited for it to warm up just like a fifties TV, until the code prompt came on and warned him he had to change codes in nine days but he could do it now if he wanted, and he didn’t, and he waited till his icons came on, little cartoony emblems against the field of deep blue, and he decided to skip the Net-Drudge, Huffington, Power Line, TNR, NRO, and the others-and instead moused straight to Lotus Notes, double-clicked, waited again until the e-mail index came up, checked to see how many he’d gotten, good Lord, it was over 200 and-
Wait, it wasn’t over 200.
He looked carefully.
It was over 8,000.
8,456!
David felt his respiratory system ice over in that moment; it just solidified into something heavy with cold and death, immovable and gargantuan, something not him.
He flicked away from the page to refresh it, and when it came back, the e-mail count was up to 8,761.
He looked around, convinced that everyone in the office was staring at him but would make no eye contact, as if his colleagues were turning away exactly as his eyes rose to meet theirs.
That many e-mails could mean but one thing: the Big Mistake.
He glanced at the displayed topic lines of the e-mails in the column that ran the length of the screen.
ASSHOLE
Times commie
ignoramus
Should have called NRA
Fool
what about seven-day waiting period for YOU!
Can’t tell Winchester from Rem
Not a PSR, clown
DUH
And on and on it went.
He picked one that seemed less incendiary than the others, its topic line reading “Visual vocabulary insufficient.” At least this guy might understand punctuation and capitalization.
Dear Mr. Banjax,
I suppose by now you have been notified you ran a four-column photograph on the front of your newspaper claiming that you had a picture of a crooked FBI agent firing an FN PSR at the FN range in 2006, when what he is actually holding is a Remington VTR 700, a model not introduced until late 2008. You must also realize that the photograph completely invalidates the premise of your story and your investigation, reveals itself to be a fraud, and suggests that the integrity of the Times has been tarnished beyond recovery. All in all, a smashing performance. Congratulations! You couldn’t have done more harm to your cause if you actually TRIED to harm your cause.
This represents a distressing tendency on the part of Mainstream Media. You all are so opinionated on gun matters, gun policies, gun politics, yet you lack even the most fundamental gun knowledge to buttress your implicit claims of expertise. Quite the opposite, you oh so frequently expose your woeful ignorance and laughable grasp of reality. But even by that standard, this morning’s blooper is quite spectacular.
You represent the media assumption that a gun is just a gun. Any gun is any other gun and therefore you of the enlightened, educated ironic classes needn’t trouble yourself with actual facts about it. The facts don’t matter, only something you’re sure you see, called “the truth.” But if there are no facts, there is no truth. It’s a pattern we see repeated over and over again. Someone once defined a newspaper gun story as “something with a mistake in it.”
You idiot. You were incapable of looking at one rifle and distinguishing its differences from another rifle. It’s not rocket science, chum. Thus you publish a picture misidentified that literally millions of people-not all redneck neanderthals listenin’ to CW n’ drinkin’ moonshine in trailer parks, neither, Snuffy-will see through in a second.
The FN PSR is a refined version of the Winchester Model 70 and still bears the hallmarks of that VERY FAMOUS weapon. The most obvious of these is the trigger guard; the Winchester designers of the early 30s who created that piece of metallic (later alloy) genius had a sense of streamline and grace and they managed to come up with a classic interpretation of the oval. That Winchester oval is part of the visual vocabulary of our times, and any hunter recognizes it instantaneously; it carries with it a trace of art moderne, reflecting the fashions of the period of its creation, and, serendipitously or not, it was so slick and eye-appealing and perfectly scaled and brilliantly machined and blued that even now, over 70 years later, its inheritors in South Carolina can’t bear to part with it. That is why all the new FN rifles bear approximations of it, and any rifle claiming to be FN bolt action would feature such an emblem. The rifle you identify as an FN SPR does not.
It contains another equally vivid symbol of an American classic. Remington had a different, though just as distinctive, interpretation of the trigger guard. They knew that their rifle, the Model 700, had to have an immediately apparent visual signature that marked its difference from their main competition, the 70 (do you get the 70/700 dynamic?). They were coming into the market 30-odd years later (1962) and at that time, the Model 70 was the baseline, but they saw an opening because they knew that Winchester was planning an upgrade that would ease manufacture but coarsen the product. So they had to deliver something distinctive. Their trigger guard has a kind of bow to it, an expansive exaggeration that takes it out of the oval, opens it up, out, and downward (some say the function is to allow a gloved finger easier access to the trigger), but again with a harmony and grace that is instantly recognizable to anyone who knows even the slightest thing about firearms.
Evidently, you and your confreres at the Times missed this OBVIOUS distinction, as you missed several other unique hallmarks of the VTR that make it all but impossible to confuse with the PSR.
I could go on to various differences in the nuance of stock and bolt design. I could point out that the scope on the rifle is a Leupold 9X and unlikely to possess the refinement for the kind of shooting (less than MOA at 300 yards) the picture and the story attribute to Mr. Memphis and the “PSR.”
But you get the point: all in all, pathetic, ignorant, transparent. Quite ugly. You think we’re so stupid, while you’re the one who’s stupid. You should be ashamed.
Sincerely,
Neanderthal P. Country-Music Redneck
3d Trailer on Right
Passel O’ Toads, NC
aka
Lawrence M. Fisher, MD, PhD
Director of Oncology
Methodist Hospital
Kansas City, MO
Banjax realized he had been had. He had been faked and ruined and he’d walked right into it.
“David?”
It was the bureau chief’s secretary.
“David, Mel would like to see you.”
“Well, I-”
“David, right away,” she said in a voice that communicated the secret meaning David, right away.
44
Swagger lay in darkness, too focused to sleep. He was curled on the cot, facing the wall under a thin blanket, aware of the TV camera in the corner of the dark room, its red eye signaling its activity. He waited for time to pass, for his torturers to select a guard, then bed down for the night.
His wrists were bound together by the tough plastic of the flex-cuff, impervious to most blades; it took a pair of clippers and a great deal of force to cut through them. Thus, by the configuration of wrist on wrist, his fingers were closely intertwined. With the fingers of his right hand, he went to his index finger, left hand, and began to carefully peel the Band-aid around the base of the finger-“Cut ourselves wanking, have we now?” It was a process made more arduous by its taking place behind him, in the dark, and inside out, with the left to the right and the right to the left, with numb, swollen fingers. But by picking at the edge of the Band-aid, he got it loosened, and by stretching, sliding, manipulating with great focus and energy, he got the Band-aid removed from the base of the finger. There, buried in scab from the skin-cutting tightness with which it had been wound about the finger, a few inches of hard cutting wire used in certain surgical applications rested, coiled tightly. He got the coil off the finger, ran it through his hands to open it and clean off the dried blood, then-again straining at the awkward angles, the stretch of joint, the numbness in his fingertips-he looped the cutting wire over the plastic of the flex-cuff, caught an end in thumb and forefinger of each hand, and began to saw.