“All leaders do it,” continued Frank frankly, “including the Israelis.  Anyone with half a brain knows that Zionists are radical, in the denotative sense of the word ‘radical’.  As in the time of Joshua, Zionism is an effort of nomadic people to stop being quite so nomadic by settling down on land occupied by less nomadic people, with total disregard for the rights of those people that our Declaration of Independence says are unalienable.

“How radical can one get?  And then there was the method.  Menachem Begin formed his organization Irgun to terrorize those people, and when those people tried to retaliate, we called them terrorists.  We called them terrorists because we sympathized with the Zionists, because we identified them with the six million Jewish persons the Nazis had slaughtered a few years before, which also makes it politically incorrect to call Zionists radical.  So, with United States help, Irgun became legitimized as the state of Israel, with Menachem Begin eventually its prime minister.  It’s basic propaganda.

“In the present case, we can get away with our lame name-game of calling Muslims Islamists, not only because the word is new and ours to do with as we choose, but also because of what some people calling themselves Muslims did.  That is, they murdered more than 3000 Americans in one morning.  Sympathy for that would be radical for real.  So we’re open to be radical.  With that word.

“Most Muslims in Afghanistan have less to do with Fatah than most Jews in New York had to do with Irgun, but we can propagandize the identification for the greater good, as Thomas Paine propagandized for America’s greater good.  See what I mean?”

“I see what you mean,” said Lev.  “Do you think other news networks try to take that approach, or do you think WMN is far and away the world leader?  I mean, do you think you’re supremely competitive?”

 

“You learn quickly,” said Frank.  “That’s another propaganda approach we take, in interviewing people on television.  Your A or B question is like asking me whether I’ve stopped beating my wife.  It’s what lawyers call a leading question.

“My answer is both A and B, and another person’s answer might be neither A nor B.  But you didn’t offer either of those choices, and politeness requires answering a question asked.  So you left me with a choice of being wrong or rude, and you closed with a conciliating question.  Of course I must say yes.

“Of course your question was rude, but polite people don’t think that two wrongs make a right.  So we can be as rude as we wish to be in our interviewing-tactics, because most of the rabble that watches television is too rude to know we’re being rude, while many of the people we interview are refined and so comply with the rules of etiquette, or struggle to.  And that goes toward whether other networks do it.

“Look at morning television, what you see on WMN and all the other major networks.  You see cooking and clothing and dog-and-cat stories and children dying of cancer, and how not to get fat from the cooking, so you can fit into the clothing.

“Why do you see that then, in the morning?  Because we media professionals know that most of the people watching television then are goofy women.  And, if you watch all day, you’ll see a bell-curve of goofy-women influence-programming.

“The first hour of a morning talk-show is more like the evening news than the second hour, and the curve culminates with the afternoon soap-operas, the ultimate in goofy-women programming.  Then it subsides into the not quite so silly programs such as Winnie O’Malley’s.  Then it passes on to the news-shows.

“The first news-shows are generally local, because women care more about local news than about national or international news, which is why their place is in the home.  The next news is the network news, which is national and international because most men are home by then and because the goofy women are in the kitchen.

“Next comes primetime entertainment, which is for relatively goofy men and women, because not-so-goofy men and women have better things to do with their evenings than watch television.  That’s how that goes.  It’s quite standard.”

“So you’re saying all networks are the same,” said Lev.

“No,” said Frank.  “There are nuances, even within one network, that come from personalities.  For example, the only thing insincere about Warren Gentry on ABC is that he’s not out of the closet sexually, while nothing is sincere about Barley Tuner, on the same network.  So Tuner belongs in a closet and is more closeted than Gentry, because important people pay less attention to Tuner, while people on other networks imitate Gentry’s lip-smacking, while being unable to emulate his substance.

“You see?  Personality differences are inevitable.  Gentry may be the most respected and most resented news-anchor, because his personality is too admirable for many people to imitate.  He nearly never expresses judgments, and he almost always ends his show with something upbeat, spiritually inspiring.  And no I don’t mean ‘spiritually’ in the phony sense of some particular religious bigotry.  I mean he leaves us with appreciation for life and a motive to make ours better.

“The reason he can do that is that he is sincere and does appreciate life.  The reason Barley Tuner can’t do that is that he has the Clingon spirituality, the lack of appreciation that leaves one thinking one has to be slickly pretentious to think or move at all.  In other words, Barley Tuner doesn’t know what the definition of ‘is’ is.  His approach to reality never gets past the definition of ‘seems’.

“Maybe the best example of Tuner’s expertise is his promoting literacy by saying that he read as a child by sneaking a flashlight beneath a blanket.  Important isn’t whether he did, but whether he convinces his soap-opera audience of his sympathy, and he can lie for that for any advertiser, because he knows what business he’s in.  When the world learned that Strom Thurmond had fathered a daughter by a black maid, Tuner agreed with the daughter’s lawyer that that wasn’t hypocritical.

“If you’re a smart guy, you must see how such exemplifies Tuner’s expertise in our business.  If people would read, they’d know that television is essentially out-of-context sound-and-sight bites.  But they don’t read and won’t, no matter how many lies we tell them.  So Tuner’s profession profits by his cliché pretension.  

“You might also note that Gentry nearly never broadcasts outside his own time-slot, while Tuner is all over the clock.  I can stay in my own time-slot because I’m an executive and a major investor.  Gentry stays in his because it’s where he belongs, and that’s clear.  Tuner does well everywhere, because he belongs nowhere.

“It’s a matter of integrity, and what makes WMN the far and away world-leader is that we recognize that, or at least I do.  We recognize that most people by far are more like Tuner than like Gentry, and we use that fact as a marketing-principle, from hiring to programming.  And we adjust to keep up with the times.

“WMN began as more like Warren, but now it’s more like Barley.  We’ve gone downhill, but not without reason or motive or careful consideration.  We’ve gone downhill because the peoples of the United States of America have gone down hill because the economy of the United States of America went uphill.  High unemployment forces people to earn their keep, while low unemployment permits people to be lazy and greedy, to be bums and beggars.  Downhill is where one digs for gold.

“After the weird stagflation that came from discharged Vietnam veterans and women demanding liberation and jobs, and their finding a few jobs more quickly than supply could increase to meet the demands of their new domestic income, those people worked hard and well to create the productive prosperity of the eighties.

“After the weird brief downturn that came from the oil uncertainty that came from letting Saddam Hussein slide in order to save the winning of the Cold War after the Gulf War, the increase in world unity that came from winning the Cold War permitted economic prosperity nearly all the way through the nineties. 

“So people became fat and lazy, hardly having to work to earn their prosperity.  So WMN and the other networks catered to the greed and ignorance of the fat-cats and couch-potatoes that most of the United States population became, what some people called the me-generation.  Now, however, we need to take another tack.

“As I said, we have to take the lead.  We have to inspire those couch-potatoes to get off their butts and get back to work, at least while they’re at work.  If we don’t, the only way anyone will be able to make a fortune in the first decade of the new millennium will be to win the lottery or sue someone, ways to wealth too touted already.

“From the standpoint of the general welfare, both of those methods is robbing Peter to pay Paul, and both inspire more laziness, less productivity.  So WMN is going to have to pick up the lead to create some socioeconomic changes.”

Grubbs lifted his moon face from his martini and smiled at Lev.

“Makes sense to me,” said Lev.  “How are you going to do it?”

“I already told you,” said Frank.  “Sincerity has nothing to do with it.  Had it, the Clingons could never have made it into the Whitehouse, much less kept the support of the NOW and the NEA after what Mr. Clingon did to a female intern in the Oval Office.

“Speeches count more than deeds, even when deeds are thrown in people’s faces.  If things go as they stand, Gentry’s experience as an investigative reporter is less important than his unwillingness to cater to soap-opera women.  Gentry types come and go, while Tuner types rule.  And we’ll rule by propaganda.

“We’re going to magnify antipathy toward everyone in the Middle East who isn’t Jewish, because those people are the Semitic nations who have all that oil beneath their land, supporting their sand.  We’ll create a new domino-theory, having Iraq follow Kuwait into our hands, and so on to Saudi Arabia.  Besides gaining control of most of Earth’s oil, that will recreate the Vietnam cycle.  But let me clarify that part of it.

“Now, since the advent of our all-volunteer army, most of our young military men and women are hardly military.  They jog in shorts and sneakers in the morning, not in the combat regalia in which they’d have to move in a military situation.  They’re there mostly for economic reasons, because they couldn’t find a better job or because they couldn’t afford to go to college without the money our government will give them for that, after spending less time in the military than they will in college.

“So, as things stand now, those young pansies will cry their eyes out and write to their congressmen if they have to spend a year in a combat zone as did millions of their predecessors in Vietnam.  And, of course, they won’t know the duration of their predecessors in World War II.  That’s all now history.

“If WMN can instigate that domino approach, we’ll have to reinstitute the draft, making soldiering essential.  Thereby, we’ll breed a generation of worker bees, with a work ethic not protestant at all.

“End result?  Oil wealth and productive citizens guided by a nation of Jewish bankers.  It’s basic, and we’ll carry it through in basic ways, using dynamics Aristotle couldn’t conceive of in his logic.

“You sound Russian.  Sergei Eisenstein, by couching this in terms of Hegel’s influence on Marx through the word ‘dialectic’, defined what France came to call the montage theory of film-editing.  Throw incongruity at people, and they feel forced to resolve, and they resolve in the direction most readily at hand.

“Our reporters talk a lot of nonsense, but the ax in the middle of it is little plain statements of what we wish to be remembered.  And we use Pavlovian psychology, rewarding our audience by giving them sexy-looking reporters to look at, and we don’t have to pay our reporters much, because they’re parrots.

“We hire reporters who don’t know the difference between Muslims and muslin and show it with their pronunciation.  It doesn’t matter, because our reporters are cute, as our trusting greedy or lazy yuppie or downy audience is, and we get away with it because those airheads don’t know the difference either.

“I learned that in high school, without being taught.  When an English teacher tried to teach Melville’s symbolism in Moby Dick, the students told each other that no one could think up all that stuff.  So, then, I understood that people can talk themselves out of anything difficult, and into anything easily offered.

“We require only enunciation, not knowledge that ‘Thames’ doesn’t rhyme with what our recruits are, which is lames.  They’re lame-brained parrots, and the few members of our audience who know the difference get their reward by thinking our reporters are stupider than they are, which is what people most desire, even sexually.

“Why, I mean, do we have so many brands, of automobiles or Levis, or whatever?  Kleenex and Coke became generic references because slopes can make them as well as we can, and now do.  Think of Barbra Streisand and Julie Christy, and you’ll see.

“Barbra Streisand was the most beautiful singer in the world when she was barely old enough to drink, and she hasn’t improved.  Because she doesn’t know how beautiful she is, she makes a fool of herself trying to be smart, trying to direct the world.

“Julie Christy, who played Lara in Dr. Zhivago, a part you should appreciate if you’re Russian, was the most beautiful woman in the world to see before she had her face plasticized into blandness, because she didn’t know how beautiful she was.

“Remember Nancy Wilson, Barbra Streisand’s main competition in the sixties?  She was beautiful both to see and to hear, and she made a few recordings and album-covers and left her legacy as that.  Few people have the strength to leave the stage before they waste away or obliterate themselves.

“It’s basic because it’s obvious to anyone who looks, and we can keep it secret because human nature is to look for things less obvious.  Another obvious thing people ignore is that the thing that makes popular music popular is mostly vocal articulation, singers making sure the audience hears the words.

“In other words, it isn’t about the music, as Picasso’s Guernica isn’t art for sight’s sake.  Picasso’s Guernica is popular because it’s easy to talk about, but articulation of words in music goes further.  Singers have to force themselves to articulate, and so they force themselves to reinvent their voices, to begin anew.

“That’s a little like the question of what one would have done then if one knew then what one knows now.  The forced reinvention draws into the voice what one feels now, and so it sucks in the heart and spits it out, but no one says so.  Christina Aguilera admires Etta James and sings like an eagle of Christ.

“But she doesn’t say why.  She doesn’t say how she learned.  If we know Etta James, we know Christina knows why and how Aguilera learned, because she has given us the oblique allusion.  But she won’t be less oblique, because she’d have to answer the most important question in her claim to beauty:

“If she knows she’s beautiful, why does she poke holes in herself, tattoo herself?  Why does she hide herself behind things that have nothing to do with her self?  And how does her beautiful audience call such hiding beautiful?  It’s the same as the question of why women use makeup.  We big men beat them down to it.

“Maybe Julie Christy didn’t plasticize herself but only powder-puffed herself before she played an Alzheimer’s patient beautiful in old age, and maybe Barbra Streisand sings beautifully in the shower.  But my job isn’t selling beauty or truth, but ugliness and lies.  And that’s easy, because civilization is fear, of itself.

“Yup, WMN plays on weakness in the same way that brand-names sell, in the same way that art sells by what critics say about it.  Nobody understands art, and fashion is only fashionable if its price is high, if you don’t buy it on sale.  Art critics say nothing about aesthetics, and Marlin Brando is attractive, fat or not.

“I know I’m rambling, but let me give you a parable I hope will make my point.  This is an anecdote one of our prospective reporters told me in an employment interview.  Her name was Deborah, and it should have been Delilah.

“She said she'd been a cub reporter for some little rural Kansas newspaper and, having begged permission to cover the Oscars while she was on vacation in Los Angeles, had stood among the rabble and waited for the stars.  She said that, on seeing Clint Eastwood, she'd rushed through the barricades set to keep out the rabble and knocked down into a flowerbed some bearded little man who was walking with the actor.

“’I’m so pleased to meet you,’ she said she'd to Eastwood, grabbing his hand.

“’Yeah,’ she said Eastwood had said, and she said Eastwood had turned away and handed the little bearded man up out of the flowerbed, and her punch-line was that the little bearded man was Steven Spielberg. 

“Well, I think she was lying, but I wouldn’t hire her anyway.  With that mix of humility and name-dropping in her anecdote, she was too smart.  You have to be in control of the rabble, and you have to use the rabble to do it, and smart people don’t follow well, whether or not they’re honest, but especially if they are.  And, although we focus on that fact, making it an overt managerial marketing policy, we’re not the only people who do it.  Look at the A.M.A.  Look at doctors.

“We did a story about a medical-school course that teaches bedside-manner by teaching horse-training.  Horses basically don’t trust humans, and so to train them you need first to establish their confidence in you through gentleness.  So, we have doctors training patients to give them their money.  Now have I made myself clear?

“And don’t forget how the pharmaceuticals companies team up with the A.M.A. to create new names for people to be hypochondriacs about.  If you sell a new name, you can sell a new way to do something about it, and people think they’re smarter when they have a new word in their vocabulary, and they don’t mind paying for it.

“To be succinct, we play on people’s ignorance and arrogance, and we’re not alone.  Look at Cathy Lee Gifford and Walmart.  It’s business as usual.

“Ms. Lee is out, and Mr. Walton is in.  So the popular media don’t point out that Walmart’s claim to selling only American products is bogus, that Walmart’s management is more directly and intentionally involved in un-American sweatshops than Cathy ever imagined possible, in America.  It’s ignorance and arrogance.

“We get by with what we do because people hardly read.  If they read the labels in the clothing they buy at Walmart, they’d know what I’m telling you.  But, more easily, they look at pictures in People magazine, which isn’t about people but about how people’d like to be, rich and famous or sick for pity, without working.

“Marx said religion is the opiate of the people.  What most people call religion is conflagration of peoples, inspiration to burn each other down.  People magazine is the opiate of the people of the Untied States, confining conflagration to fighting and mauling each other to buy brand-name remainders on sale at the mall.

“We put one of our hires we thought was a bimbo in the Middle East, but she did her homework and reported so objectively that we had to move her to the Hollywood beat, where the news is all soap-opera, so she couldn’t obstruct.  We’re pretty sure she’ll leave us soon, but she has no place to go.  To work for Tuner?

“Of course we put some ugly bimbos in conspicuous positions, so no one can accuse us of what we’re doing.  Horner calls that tokenism, and I call it bimboism nevertheless, Marilyn Monroe and Horner’s wife, and Candy in our war in Vietnam.

“Have you seen the movie Candy?  It set the tone for marketing for the last quarter-century of its millennium.  It played a bunch of established actors against an actress who never became established, and called its counter-culture theme free-love.

“And it is tokenism, like putting Ronny into the presidency.  It’s easier to elect an actor than it is to elect a functionary, because functionaries are more interested in functioning than in preaching.  So the marketers of the parties or whatever seek someone silly enough to sit back and let the functionaries perform the functions of the office, while the actors act like they’re acting, making speeches to accept the accolades. 

“Anyway, nothing’s serious.  That’s why I’ve put my protégé Smiles Cryin into the soap-opera time-slot.  I realize that the reason he never laughs, and the reason he advises and ridicules the experts he interviews, is that he’s paranoid-delusional.  But that’s what people want, encouragement to advise and ridicule experts, to think they’re smarter than people they feel are smarter than they are.  Cryin is an easily acceptable serious adult role-model, to soap-opera women and sillily serious men.

“Our reasoning for not sending him to Iraq was partly that we knew his paranoia would freak him out anywhere that might be thought a valley of death, and partly not to alienate pacifist women.  We gave him a little trial in the first Gulf War, and the fireworks shied him so far from a window during a broadcast that a woman had to take up his mike, to keep it on camera.  So now we let him freak out as an armchair advisor to our generals who’ve retired from war to our armchair.  We know women, and war.

“We put him into the soap-opera time-slot because news can’t compete with soap-opera women.  So we let Cryin give excuses to men at home in that time slot, men who can’t find a job and are looking for excuses.  That’s a minority market-segment, but it’s grown since Clingon’s example turned economic prosperity into the me-generation, giving people an excuse not to try to earn the pay they haven’t needed to earn.  WMN knows what’s happening, and we do what we can to make sure we profit, no matter what.

“The key to money-mongering journalism is making people think that whatever we present pertains to them on their side, or at least to the neighbors nearest them in geography and culture and race who like them, and that they can be what we present, if they’re not.  The only reason life and death in remote places sells is that it gives people a way to say they’re more compassionate than they are, because they know in their hearts that compassion is good.  The reason Moses and Jesus have failed to carry their plain and simple message to humans is that humans easily lie to their hearts for pride.

“So we do things like interviewing our own reporters in the middle of a hurricane named for Columbus’ queen, in a truck advertising our affiliate television station there and a home improvement company paying us for that advertising, and we pretend we lose our audio connection to the site, to focus on that advertising on our truck while making our effort seem heroic.  As I said, we’re pretty smart.

“It’s like Yasser Arafat, grinning in Beirut while Israel is throwing every pyrotechnic they can to burn him, and like Richard Pryor developing a comedy routine around his heart attack.  It’s as funny as a heart attack, and it sells like Pryor’s joking about setting himself afire freebasing cocaine.  It’s all about desensitizing, by drugs or otherwise.  Like Christina Aguilera and Tammy Fay.

“Christina has her nose-rings and tattoos, and Tammy has her eyelashes and other makeup.  People flee themselves, and the most responsive name in news responds to their desire by encouraging their flight, giving them a place to turn.  Fashion and art are nothing but audacity, living only on words and excuses sales people use to make people think they’re being fashionable or artistic.

“’Fashionable’ means being one kind of monkey to think you’re better than the next monkey, and ‘artistic appreciation’ means the same.  In case you’re judging us, the most truly artistic or fashionable people are like Hitler, who most really set trends.  WMN just follows trends, as it follows politics.  But we emphasize trends toward our pocketbook.  I mean, toward profiting our investors.

“Cryin is our version of the Boston Globe.  Have you ever noticed that that newspaper has no Sunday funnies?   There’s Dilbert and lame, no Peanuts or Barney Google or Beatle Bailey or B.C.: no Donald Duck, only Dilbert and lame.  It’s the Boston debacle, claiming to be to be smart by denying the good life.  To make people laugh, show them something more miserable than they.

“And we make Smiles funny.  Nothing is less funny than a lawyer, and so we had our main airhead legal preacher give our small somewhat sophisticated audience some irony recently.  We had our coke-freak Toby Lyin, whom we present to the world as our legal-expert, call our paranoid-delusional Smiles Cryin "Counselor".  Cryin took that craziness as a compliment.  I had to laugh at that myself.

“But the funniest thing about that is that few of the people of the United States of America, whether they’re lawyers or psychologists or priests or common laborers, remember Cryin’s cowardice of a decade ago, or Lyin’s predictions of a week ago.  If they did, they’d know we’re no more expert than they are.

“Anyway, we sell such failures funnily, funneling funds to us rich whites.  For example, when that hurricane named for Columbus’s colonizing queen was threatening the coasts of the American colonies named for England’s first post-interregnum king, we ran a story showing clean-up kits from the Salvation Army.  We had our reporter say the kits were huge and show one in a box, and the box containing the kit was about big enough for a mop and a few rolls of paper towels.  We said they were huge.  Huge!

“Now that’s funny.  And funnier is that we ran a story on the same day with a police-chief bragging about arresting people because they averted their eyes from officers.  Anyone who considers what white people have done to black people in this land of the free for a half-millennium must know that that’s quintessential racial profiling.

“Who you looking at, boy?  That’s hilarious to anyone with a sophisticated sense of irony, but hardly any of our audience is African American, and less of it is black.  So, we don’t care if it’s funny.  Nor do our advertisers.

“We’re neither historical nor hysterical.  History is about names, and the electorate that makes up our audience looks at names, not at what all’s going on or has gone on.  Our market blames Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein for this or that, because they’re named in conjunction with specific memorable events.  Our present president’s father quietly accomplished more against such things, through many events.  Those events added up to the biggest event of the last half of the 20^th century.

“Next thing you know, some actor will run again to govern California, and he might be an alien.  And, if he’s an alien, he might pronounce the name of the state a little more like most of the state’s population pronounces it than do the Anglo-descendent politicians leading the state at the time of this hypothetical revolution.

“So, the Anglo competition might ridicule the pronunciation and try to further defame the actor for sexual misbehavior, as though politicians don’t do that.  Many double standards could be involved in that, but what if the Anglo party were the party of Clingon, seeking to say that the other party is as degenerate as they.

“As things stand now, in the United States of America, none of it would make any difference, because citizens of the United States of America have become like the citizens of the decline of Rome.  They’ll elect a groping governor to feel better about their own futile groping, and they’ll defend Saddam Hussein, for the same reason.

“Our market, the electorate of our nation, doesn’t remember or learn history.  Instead, it pays attention to braggadocio and preaching, and so we give that audience that to which it listens.  We give them paranoid Smiles Cryin and subordinate to him an ignorant modern soap-opera woman, to keep up with the soap-opera trends.

“Soap-operas are now trending toward angry revolutionary women, and we feed that while keeping our angry arrogant ignorant co-anchor subordinate to Smiles, sucking up to Smiles’ stupid sarcasm, the attitude of the unemployed man.  So we cover all the bases, leaving no sucker behind.  P. T. Barnum’s got nothing on us.

“As Hugh Hefner has nothing on WMN for harem-building.  Horner, our founder, bagged Barbarella and converted her from a peace-creep into a hard-body, sucking a generation of women out of flowers and fresh air and into mechanical gyms stinking of men’s sweat.  Not even Tuner can touch my and Jack’s plums.

 “We’re commercial.  Maybe the best way to get people to vote for people and issues, rather than for parties or other separate racings, is to be an ambiguous candidate.  Ideal might be a movie star who promotes pro-choice on a Republican ticket.  More perfect might be a pro-life candidate running as a Democrat.

“We know that, because we’re professional marketers.  But we leave all that alone, not because we’re objective journalists, but for our investors.  Being neither politicians nor journalists, we spin for the advisors who pay us most, or we make them think we do.  As our founder said, don’t follow.

“We’re testing a new approach.  Shep Blitzkrieg, our most celebrated reporter, is going to try making every issue racial, by finding Uncle Toms willing to sell their souls for fame and fortune and having them argue the culpability of black people in the news, against white devil’s advocates.

“White people have the money, and bigots have the energy.  So we’ll fuel the bigotry and get the money any way we can.  We can get away with that because we can call it objectivity, presenting both sides.  What can be more objective than blacks condemning blacks?

 “You seem to be a smart guy.  The WMN slogan isn’t ‘the most responsive name in news’ for nothing.  You should understand what I’m saying.  You must see it’s dog-eat-dog.  I mean people-eat-people.  You must see it.  It’s very plain.  Is it clear?

“From Jack Horner’s power-freakiness down to Shep Blitzkrieg’s desperation to extend his fifteen minutes of fame from anchoring our reporting of the Gulf War that nearly cost us the Cold War, and on down to the plentitude of such as Smiles Cryin and Ms. Killer Blips taking pharmaceuticals to the next marketing level?

“'Why all the fuss about steroids in sports?' we had Killer answer to that question, to give the loser men at home an excuse to lose a little more of their love and life, to spend their unemployment-checks on drugs we advertise instead of beer.

“Killer earned her name when she laughed while saying that Whitey Bolger answered a charge by saying that no one had asked him whether he’d done it.  But my personal favorite was when we sought an injured Santa, and found one who’d fallen from a float in a Thanksgiving Day parade, so we could have Smiles give one of his rare smiles.  We had him smile saying he hoped Santa had a health insurance clause in his contract.  Insurance, pharmaceuticals, big money.

“We gave Smiles a day off and had Killer say he was out getting his caffeine into a higher gear.  So, we get money from Starbucks and all the pharmaceuticals companies from Advil to Valium, not to mention the legal insurance gamble that takes more from the poor than it gives to the pharmaceutical companies, or the illegal similar destruction of sports and blue hair in Las Vegas.

“Of course the pharmaceutical companies have the technology to create new diseases and pump them into Tylenol to become heroes by providing the cure later, after some people have died from their cause.  But that’s not my problem, because I’m not a soap-opera woman, or a would-be sportsman.

“Smiles helps foster athletic cowardice, while Killer helps us drag women into a new version of the days when they sucked up coffee in their kitchens after their family was off to work or school, because we know that women still make most spending-decisions, for the home.

“But our best public service from Smiles Cryin came from our having him say a woman had walked away empty-handed, when she forgave a child who had killed her daughter, and placed the blame on the child’s mother.  We know the market.

“We know that the outside chance that the World Wrestling Federation inspired that young man to kill that little girl isn’t worth compromising our WWF profits.  Life, as any fool knows, is far more complicated than that.  So we pick simple ways.

 “Marketing means avenging adults, to get their money from them.  WMN is successful because we know what business we’re in.  We’re in the business of leading anyone not at my end of our daisy chain, down our primrose path.

“We lead the generating public, bimbos and snot-nosed chauvinist yuppies, and Blitzkrieg leads our pack by pronouncing ‘nom de guerre’ as though it rhymes with ‘gooier’.

“Maintaining Shep’s fame alone will lead the public into whatever ditch or feeding-trough we wolves desire.

“I mean, we top dogs.”

 

Lev had sat silent for some time, looking not into a river but into this swamp.

            “I think,” he said, at last, “that sympathy speaks for itself and so doesn’t need training, and that anyone who needs to be trained in bedside manner doesn’t care and so isn’t likely to be a care-provider.  Yes, I think you’ve made yourself clear.

            “Christina Aguilera is a lovely and powerful name, and I hope the sensibility that chose that name shall take your ring out of her nose, by showing her she is as beautiful as she sings she is.  For Arafat and Richard Prior, life may need to be funny for vastly different and similar reasons, vastly different and similar.

“For Smiles Cryin and condominium association trustees, life has room to be simple and plain, but they’re crazy anyway.  The difference between them and people who can live up to a name like Christina Aguilera is the difference between heartlessness and courage.  And you’re on the wrong side of that difference, at least by selling that wrong side.  You’re selling sawdust into Earth’s transmission.

            “It’s the economy, stupid.  And the electorate of the United States of America is who’s stupid.  They voted Clingon’s predecessor out of office because they don’t have the span of concentration necessary to understand history past what’s in their pocket now, to understand that the economy is a huge ship and can’t change course in one presidency, much less in one election-year.  And they reelected Clingon because they don’t consider the future of their children, much less the effect of the clingon example on any present day of their children’s lives.  And that stupid electorate is your market.

“Do you have a glossary for misrepresenting?  I watched one of the experts you hired say that the majority of southern democrats is black, and I’m thinking you might call that the consultant method of hypocrisy.  I see you begging compassion for owners of million-dollar homes burned in wildfires and for rapist and wife-beating drug-addict sports-so-called-heroes and for drug-addict movie-stars claiming now to be enjoying caffeine, and for pedophile priests.  I have to think maybe you might call that the wish-not-want method of hypocrisy.  How many methods of hypocrisy do you define?

            “If the Taliban and the Baath party are radical Islamists, were the inquisitors and the persons who burned Saint Joan radical Christianists, and how about the pedophile priests and the Archbishop of Boston?  Mr. Grubb, the answer is certainly not, because those people aren’t Islamic or Christian at all.  If you wish to call someone an Islamist, you might do it to me.  I’m not Islamic, but I sympathize with Islamic problems.  And people like you are everybody’s problem.

“You remind me of the movie Ordinary People, about people who can afford psychotherapy and marriage-counselors.  You promote compassion for the neurosis of that rich pedophile adulterer Woody Allen, while children of Calcutta and Crete and California and Cockney counties are dying of your lack of compassion.  You present the horror of the masses as footnotes.

“My personal disfavor comes, as much as from anything else, from your trying to kill Santa.  Santa Clause is a myth whose truth is in generosity with joviality, while you cry and smile trying to debunk that myth from our children, to replace it with increasing monetary wealth for people who are already monetarily wealthy by capitalizing on sickness and silliness.

            “I see your motto as ‘This little piggy went to market.’  Mothers say that to their children, to teach our children the beauty of life from head to toe, while you turn it into a mission to snort up anything you’d stuff into your facetious face.  The business you’re in is corncobs in corncribs to feed death to pigs and cattle and breed children to your private satisfaction. 

            “In other words, I hear you saying that you can’t make money by telling the truth, because people are stupid, and so you lie.  Rather than leading or getting out of the way, you’re following your audience into their ditch and calling it yours.  You’re a sad little man, Mr. Grubbs.  Truth, beauty, frightens you.

            “No, the sick in Africa won’t pay your telecommunication bills.  Yes, helping more-moneyed would-be princesses and popes and political power-mongers will.  And so they trust you, trust you to tell them what they need to know to be happy.

            “And the worst is what you say is best, smiling while children are crying and dying, to sell to your nationwide worldwide audience that a mother should avenge her child against another mother’s.  WMN is worse than its WWF.

“Betraying trust is not a viable response to anything.  Thanks for being frank with me, but you’re slimier than grubs.  And, alive or dead, I’m here to prove that to humanity.

“I’m here to stop the profiting from ignorance.”

            “You’re dwelling in the past,” argued Grubbs.

            “I’m praying for the future,” answered Lev.