But in reality I wasn’t a holidaymaker and I had no idea what was waiting for me, but I didn’t want to think about it, especially because everything around me was moving towards change: America was shaken by the presidential campaign of Barrack Hussein Obama.”
03:29 A.M._
“Mr. Kold,” the Lawyer looked quickly at the clock. “You are a very good narrator but I’d like to ask you a couple of questions. Do you mind?
“No, go ahead.”
“You mentioned a few times that your father voted Republican. But what are your political preferences?”
Kold thought for a bit then decisively shook his head:
“I have to admit – I like the Democrats more than the Republicans, although you’re right – I am from a family which traditionally votes for the Grand Old Party. Why? Probably because I support change and the democrats are trying to change the world for the best.
“President Obama is a democrat and reformer. He indeed is trying to change the world and I want to believe that he wants to change it for the best. Did you vote for him?”
Kold chuckled.
“I read Obama’s program and familiarised myself with his biography, and I realised that this was what the United States should have had a long-long ago, back in the time of Martin Luther King. Without a black president our ‘Miss Liberty’ looked rather hypocritical, with a slightly powdered bruise and Ku Klux Klan hoods in the folds of her toga. I think you know what I’m talking about.
The Lawyer lowered his head in agreement.
“I have a good memory,” Kold went on. “Thanks to Mr. Eisenberg, who forced us to memorise the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the articles of the Constitution and the speeches of the great politicians of the past. He used to insist that brain is a muscle and needs constant exercise!
Basically, when Obama said: ‘Now, understand, it is a choice. If people like me, if most of the people in this room, can’t afford to pay a little bit more in taxes, then a lot of this stuff we can’t afford. If we’re insisting that those of us who are doing best in this society have no obligations to other folks, then, no, we can’t afford it. I want to make sure that Malia and Sasha and your children and your grandchildren, that they’re inheriting a land that has clean rivers and air you can breathe and that’s worth something to me, that’s something I want to invest in because when I’m all finished here and I’m looking back on my life, I want to be able to say, we were good stewards of the planet…’ I remembered a speech by another black-skinned politician, which was pronounced more than fifty years ago. Thanks to Mr. Eisenberg – I still remember it every word. Are you ready to listen?”
“Do you mean Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech?” the Lawyer asked.
“Exactly.”
“Yes, I’ll listen to it with pleasure.
Kold straightened, his face acquired a slightly tragic expression and he began to talk in a well-trained voice, reciting the whole of Martin Luther King’s speech faultlessly.
“‘Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.
But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free…’”
His voice soared as he was caught in the power of the rhetoric.
“‘…I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together…’”
And as the speech went on, his whole body began to shake, and the sound of the American preacher’s words reverberated through the deep bunker as if they would blast it open.
“‘From every mountainside, let freedom ring!
And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’”
“Bravo!” the Lawyer applauded. “Bravo to Reverend Martin Luther King and your fantastic memory.”
“In Barrack Obama I saw a man who also has a dream,” Kold said. “And I thought, you never know, maybe together we will be able to defeat the octopus and bring freedom back to America? Only one or maybe even two years later I realised that I didn’t have any allies in that bureau and that Obama was a politician like all the others, no better than the Bushes, Clinton and the other recent presidents. But back then, before the elections, I was seized by a real sense of excitement, and I headed to Fort Meade to meet up with the Baseball player.
I’d never had any illusions about Mr. Jenkins. I always spoke to him very formally, understand me. Of course neither Obama, nor the octopus, nor my plans were mentioned in our conversation. I just told him that I wanted to continue my work in the system as a freelancer on individual contracts. So that if my health failed due to epilepsy I could always take a break.
“But are you actually well?” the Lawyer asked then added at once: “Of course, that’s not a very tactful question but it’s my professional duty to ask it.”
“Everything’s good,” Kold nodded. “Although sometimes my legs hurt when its damp, but that’s nothing really. So I will continue…”
File 014.wav
IT workers – programmers, system administrators, and to a smaller extent ‘metal workers’ (Russian slang word meaning an IT worker specialising in repair, assembly and commissioning of computer hardware) and web designers – are special people. I am saying that without any hint of fascism or bolshevism, because I’m not making anything up. Everything is like it is. We are exceptional in the most unsightly meaning of the word. We are not like everyone else. We are a caste, but we’re definitely not Brahmans. People hate us and worship us. In the past only usurers and executioners were treated like that.
If electricity suddenly disappeared from the Earth and the computer isn’t needed anymore, we’ll be the first ones killed. But while these ingenious machines exist, so do we, and we do it quite well.
There are a lot of us, but of course far fewer than there are plumbers or bankers. And they – along with housewives, accountants, owners of investment companies, policemen and even tax inspectors – all look the same, all have the same lamer’s face, the face of a person who understands nothing about computers, and doesn’t want to understand,. They all want just one thing: ‘It needs to work!’. And they don’t care why or how it happens. All of it is our headache, our job and our guarantee that we were, are and will be a treasure as precious as the lotus flower, because the modern world can’t exist without us – and will slide into chaos without us.
I won’t go overboard about our caste, since it’s basically professional snobbery which even sewage workers have, and others don’t have to know it.
But to make it clear how we differ from other people, here are a few IT jokes, which made me laugh like mad:
Every admin has to be a practicing gamer. Otherwise their conditioned save/load reflex will atrophy, which leads to interesting quests like ‘how to restore the server’s state this morning by having back-ups from last week’.