OBJECT LESSON: My dad died about eighty klicks north of Karachi. He was a gunner and those are always the toughest assholes. But in the very last message I got right before they ambushed his ass he basically said, David, you are a dreamer and a disgrace and you’ll never get your shit together, and I’ll always fight everything you believe in, but I’ll also never love anyone more than you, so if anything happens to me just keep going the way you are.
I think that’s where we went wrong as a country. We were afraid to really fight each other, and so we devolved into this Bipartisan thing and this ARA thing. When we lost touch with how much we really hate each other, we also lost the responsibility for our common future. I think when the dust settles and the Bipartisans are history that’s how we’re going to live, as small units who don’t agree. I don’t know what we’ll call it, political parties, military councils, city-states, but that’s how it’s going to be and we’re not going to screw it up this time. It’ll be like 1776 all over again. Act Two for America. Okay, Eunice, I’m off for the night. Don’t forget the supplies for the Fourth.
Yours,
David
15 THE SINNERS’ CRUSADE
Dear Diary,
I hate the Fourth of July. The early middle age of summer. Everything is alive and kicking for now, but the eventual decline into fall has already set itself in motion. Some of the lesser shrubs and bushes, seared by the heat, are starting to resemble a bad peroxide job. The heat reaches a blazing peak, but summer is lying to itself, burning out like some alcoholic genius. And you start to wonder-what have I done with June? The poorest of the lot-the Vladeck House project dwellers who live beneath my co-op-seem to take summer in stride; they groan and sweat, drink the wrong kind of lager, make love, the squat children completing mad circles around them by foot or mountain bike. But for the more competitive of New Yorkers, even for me, the summer is there to be slurped up. We know summer is the height of being alive. We don’t believe in God or the prospect of an afterlife mostly, so we know that we’re only given eighty summers or so per lifetime, and each one has to be better than the last, has to encompass a trip to that arts center up at Bard, a seemingly mellow game of badminton over at some yahoo’s Vermont cottage, and a cool, wet, slightly dangerous kayak trip down an unforgiving river. Otherwise, how would you know that you have lived your summertime best? What if you missed out on some morsel of shaded nirvana?
Frankly, these days, knowing that immortality is further away from me than ever (the 239,000 is gone; only ¥1,615,000 to my name at last count), I prefer the wintertime, when all is dead around me, and nothing buds, and the truth of eternity, so cold and dark, is revealed to the unfortunate acolytes of reality. And most of all I hate this particular summer, which has already left a hundred corpses in the park.
“An unstable, barely governable country presenting grave risk to the international system of corporate governance and exchange mechanisms” is what Central Banker Li called us when his ass had landed safely in Beijing. We had been humiliated in front of the world. The Fourth of July fireworks were canceled. The parade to crown the “American Spender” winner put on hold because a section of Broadway near City Hall had buckled in the heat. The remaining streets were empty, the citizenry prudently staying home, the F running at one train per hour (not that different from its normal schedule, I must say). The only changes noticeable are the new ARA signs drooping off some of the Credit Poles featuring a tiger pawing at a miniature globe and the words “America is back! Grrrr… Don’t write us of [sic]. Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now! Together We’ll Surprise the World!”
Tuesday morning, after the long weekend, Post-Human Services sent a Hyundai Town Car to pick me up for work. It took forever to get up to the Upper East Side. Almost every block going up First Avenue was a barbed-wire-strewn checkpoint. Bleary-eyed, overworked Guardsmen with those thick Alabamississippi accents would pull us over, search the vehicle from engine to trunk, play with my data, humiliate the Dominican driver by making him sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” (I myself don’t know the words; who does?) and then making him parade in front of a Credit Pole. “Soon the time’ll come, grasshopper,” one of the soldiers brayed at the driver, “for us to send your chulo ass home.”
At the office, Kelly Nardl was crying over the riots, while the young folk in the Eternity Lounge were deep into their äppäräti, teeth grinding, sneaker-clad feet crossed, unsure of how to interpret all the new information pouring over them like warm summer pop, everyone awaiting Joshie’s cue. The Guard had cleared a part of the park and let in Media. I was watching Noah’s stream as he ambled up and down Cedar Hill, past the remnants of tarps and somber, amoeba-shaped pools of real-time blood on the tired grass, which made Kelly whimper all over her tempeh-covered desk. She was a touchstone of honest emotion, our Kelly. I took my turn petting her head and inhaling her. One day, if our race is to survive, we will have to figure out how to download her goodness and install it in our children. In the meantime, my mood indicators on The Boards went from “meek but cooperative” to “playful/cuddly/likes to learn new things.”
Joshie had called a full organizational meeting, Cowboys and Indians. We walked to the Indians’ auditorium on York Avenue, significantly larger than our synagogue’s main sanctuary, Joshie leading us past the checkpoints with one hand raised up in the air, like a schoolteacher on a field trip. “Pointless loss of life,” he said once installed at the dais, sipping eloquently from his thermos of unsweetened green tea, as we regarded him multiculturally from our plush reclining seats. “Loss of prestige for the country. Loss of tourist yuan. Loss of face for our leadership, as if they had any face to lose. And for what? Nothing has been achieved in Central Park. When will the Bipartisans realize that killing Low Net Worth Individuals will not reverse this country’s trade deficit or cure our balance-of-payment problems?”
“Truth to power,” Howard Shu brown-nosed behind him, but the rest of us remained quiet, perhaps too shocked by the latest turn of history to find succor even in Joshie’s words. Nonetheless, I smiled timidly and waved, hoping he would notice me.
“The dollar has been grossly, fantastically mismanaged,” Joshie went on, his usual bemused conversational face coiled by the kind of rage that wasn’t allowed at Post-Human Services, a rage decidedly pre-human, parts of his chin shaking independently, so that from one angle he looked thirty years old and from another sixty. “The ARA has tried a dozen different economic plans in as many months. Privatization, deprivatization, savings stimulus, spending stimulus, regulation, deregulation, pegged currency, floating currency, controlled currency, uncontrolled currency, more tariffs, less tariffs. And the net result: bupkis. ‘The economy has still not achieved traction,’ to quote our beloved Fed chairman. As we speak, in HSBC-London, the Chinese and the EU are in final partnership talks. We are finally no longer critically relevant to the world economy. The rest of the globe is strong enough to decouple from us. We, our country, our city, our infrastructure, are in a state of freefall.
“But,” Joshie said. And here he breathed in deeply, smiled sincerely, the dechronification treatments coming to life on his face, glowing eyes, glowing dome, glowing skin-we moved slightly to the edge of our seats, fingered our cup holders suggestively. “We have to remember that our primary obligation is to our clients. We have to remember that all those who died in Central Park over the last few days were, in the long run, ITP, Impossible to Preserve. Unlike our clients, their time on our planet was limited. We must remind ourselves of the Fallacy of Merely Existing, which restricts what we can do for a whole sector of people. Yet, even though we may absolve ourselves of responsibility, we, as a technological elite, can set a good example. I say to all the naysayers: The best is yet to come.