Wild Thing: A Novel (44 page)

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When I say I have almost no curiosity about her, I of course exempt the question of how she came to quote Westbrook Pegler in her 2008 speech accepting her nomination as Republican candidate for vice president. (Pegler, a racist so crazy he was expelled from the John Birch Society, wrote among other things that it is “clearly the bounden duty of all intelligent Americans to proclaim and practice bigotry,” and—in 1965—that “some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter [Robert F. Kennedy’s] spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies.”) But since Palin has said that she didn’t write the speech, which she gave six days after meeting John McCain for the first time in person (and, according to some sources, as little as forty-eight hours after McCain chose her as his running mate), and since Palin doesn’t seem to have quoted or mentioned Pegler on any other occasion, the questions raised by his appearance in her speech—Did she know what she was saying? Did anyone? If they did, what did they mean by it, and what audience did they expect to understand that meaning?—aren’t exactly personal.

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What? It was warm out, and my sleeves were tight. No, I was not wearing a tank top.

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This is what being Jewish has come to, by the way. Everyone you meet either believes the myth that Israel is an apartheid state built on land stolen from the Palestinians and given to European Jews by the U.S. and U.K. to make up for the Holocaust, and wants it destroyed, or believes it but wants Israel to stick around long enough to spark the Zombie Apocalypse. Either way it’s unpleasant.

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How I know this:
The
Ely Daily Clarion
, various conversations.

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If I ever have a heart attack, I’ll probably do two hours of material.

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I’m referring to the camping shit, obviously.

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Unless that someone is me.

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How I know this:
Conversation with Teng Wenshu (westernized as “Wayne Teng”), various reference books.

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“Tiananmen” meaning “Gates of Heavenly Peace.” Laugh it up.

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Yongle’s status as an emblem of cruelty in China seems to come in part from his having sentenced historian Fang Xiaoru to “extermination of the ten agnates.” An “agnate” is a generation, so sentencing someone to, for example, extermination of the
three
agnates would involve killing them and all their relatives in their generation, their parents’ generation, and their children’s generation. How, precisely, this would work to the
ten
agnates is unclear, since it can’t be easy to execute someone’s great-great-great-great-grandfather, and if the condemned leaves four or five generations of offspring then it seems like somebody’s not doing their job. But apparently the previous record was nine.

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It’s an
eta
, the Greek long “E” sound. “Jesus” is abbreviated “IHS” in the Greek Bible.

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Then eaten by a fox. I looked it up later.

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Some time you can’t consciously remember, I suppose.

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Personally I don’t think technology’s all that bad. If digital devices really do make children less likely to develop the skills and focus to do things like design more digital devices, how is
that
not a self-limiting problem?

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For longer answers to these questions, see
Beat the Reaper
, by “Josh Bazell,” Little, Brown, 2009.

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I think it’s just this: the sharks I hate and am afraid of are the ones I faced with Magdalena Niemerover years ago. I carry them around, like I carry her around, and no real-life bull shark can compete. I doubt any real-life woman could either, despite any miraculous interlude with Violet Hurst I may or may not have had, and it’s unlikely I’ll get a chance to find out.

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Reggie’s motives are a different issue. I was asked about them numerous times, and had the opportunity to discuss them with Reggie himself. What I think, for whatever that’s worth, is that they weren’t particularly nefarious. Reggie wanted to go live on the beach in Cambodia, and maybe even take Del and Miguel with him. But he probably could have done that with the amount of money he ended up spending on the hoax anyway—an amount he saved up in advance, managing to stay out of debt until the legal fees hit later. I believe him when he says he wanted to honor Chris Jr.’s hoax project and thought there was a chance of finding out who or what killed Autumn Semmel.

Regarding his casual lawbreaking and disregard for the potential consequences of his actions, which placed people in mortal danger in a way he should have foreseen, I consider that part of his character more than the influence of greed. I’m not a psychiatrist, but what I see in Reggie Trager is someone who, apparently since the Vietnam War, has been so consumed by feelings of shock, sadness, and unreality that the outcomes he imagined possible from his scheme—both positive and negative, both to himself and to others—seemed almost weightless. I don’t think he acted out of malice. I think he’s just someone who was made dangerous at a young age and stayed that way.

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How I know this:
See Exhibit C.

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Just:

“Hello, stranger.”

“How are you?”

“I feel like I’ve got splinters in my boobs.”

“Do you, still?”

“Yeah. My surgeon says it would cause more damage to take them all out.”

“Makes sense.”

“You would know.”

“Violet, I am so sorry.”

“You didn’t blow me up.”

“Not directly.”

“And if you hadn’t stopped me from going into that cabin, it would have been a lot worse. I’m not going to say it was worth it, because I don’t know what my boobs are going to look like yet. But I don’t regret it.”

“How could you not regret it?”

“Mostly because they haven’t taken the morphine drip out of my arm. But right now, meeting you seems on balance like a good thing.”

“They could at least turn the drip
down
.”

“Am I ever going to see you again?”

“Probably not. I hope so.”

“Then make sure it happens. You’re going away?”

“Yes.”

“To hide?”

“No. I’m going to try and get these assholes to stop chasing me.”

“You mean by killing them?”

“If that’s what it takes.”

“Don’t. I don’t want you to. I don’t want you to kill anyone. Not even the people who tried to have us blown up.”

“I know.”

“And you
did
indirectly blow me up, so you pretty much have to do what I say.”

“I know that too.”

“But you won’t.”

“No.”

“Is there anything I can say or do to change your mind?”

“No. Come on, don’t cry.”

“Fuck you. Why do you have to be such a dickhead all the time? Will you be careful, at least?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Try to remember, for me, how shitty you are at getting yourself killed.”

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I still don’t know what the correct diagnosis is.

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Meaning me.

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I know: Obama had proved a massive disappointment to anyone with progressive interests, and Democrats in Congress hadn’t done much to mark themselves as either honest or interested in public welfare. But that only explains
apathy
. It doesn’t explain
actively voting Republican
, two years after Republicans caused the worldwide financial meltdown. Write your love of anarchistic nihilism on your Doc Martens, if you must. Shoot your own hand off. Don’t vote
Republican
, for fuck’s sake.

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Laugh it up.

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The bitching about “Climategate,” like the Tea Party itself, was brought to us by oil billionaires Charles and David Koch. Other disinterested parties calling for further “investigation” of “Climategate” include the government of Saudi Arabia.

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The case is
Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission
. Previous Supreme Court cases had addressed the concept of “corporate personhood,” but this one put it over the top, and has the clearest set of fingerprints on it—particularly given that the original decision granting corporations rights (beyond the simple right to enter into a contract),
Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company
(1886), may have mischaracterized the intent of the Supreme Court. Supreme Court decisions are always published with a “head note” by the court reporter that summarizes the action. In
Santa Clara
, the court reporter, who was for some reason J. C. Bancroft Davis, formerly president of the Newburgh and New York Railway, wrote that the justices had unanimously agreed that corporations should enjoy rights under the Fourteenth Amendment, which had been passed eighteen years earlier to establish the rights of former slaves. The actual opinion doesn’t say this, though, and in fact Chief Justice Morrison White specifically told Bancroft that “we avoided meeting the constitutional question in the decision” in deciding
Santa Clara
. Which is why
Santa Clara
—which gave American corporations Fourteenth Amendment protections thirty-four years before American women got them—was, until
Bush v. Gore
, often called the worst Supreme Court decision of all time.

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Guest footnote by Pietro Brnwa :
Similarly, see the June 2009 failure of the Iranian “Green Revolution” after Michael Jackson died and suddenly no one gave a shit.

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Again with the John Boehner.

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1994: Insurance company Riscorp Inc. makes an illegal $20,000 donation to Katherine Harris’s campaign for state senate. 1996: Harris sponsors a bill that makes it harder for companies that aren’t Riscorp to underwrite workers’ compensation insurance in Florida. 2004: Harris, now a member of the U.S. Congress, tells an audience that a Middle Eastern man has been arrested for trying to bomb the electrical power grid in Indiana, although this has not actually happened. 2006: Harris loses a reelection bid after being discovered to have taken illegal contributions from defense contractor MZM, whom she subsequently helped to get federal contracts. Incidentally, Harris’s grandfather Ben Hill Griffin Jr. was one of the 300 richest people in America. I’m not saying this makes her a bad person. I’m saying
What sort of lowlife who’s as rich as Katherine Harris is sells out her constituents for $20,000?

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Current justices Scalia and Thomas are both known to have attended the Koch brothers’ annual meeting of conservative political activists, at which attendance is limited to 200.

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Also tobacco. But mostly oil.

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For example, to his Council on Environmental Quality, which is the primary environmental instrument of the executive branch, George W. Bush appointed (as chairman) James L. Connaughton, who had formerly lobbied for the Aluminum Company of America and the Chemical Manufacturers Association of America, and (as chief of staff) Philip Cooney, a former lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute. After Cooney got whistle-blown for changing the results of government global warming studies to favor the oil industry, he was hired by the public affairs department of ExxonMobil.

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There’s no evidence that the Republicans and Iranians colluded in the election of Ronald Reagan. It’s just that eleven members of the Reagan administration were later convicted of illegally trading weapons to Iran (during an embargo led by the United States!) for a
different
set of hostages. Details about even
that
arms-for-hostages deal are hard to come by, though, because George Bush Sr., as one of his last official acts, pardoned everyone who had been or might be convicted in relation to it. On Christmas Eve. Tis-the-Season act of mercy, or timed so that as few people as possible would read about it in the newspaper the next day? You be the judge.

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I believe the expression “renewable resource” comes from this report.

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For example: between 1819 and 1891 the population of New York City went from a hundred thousand to three million.

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Other shit, even from birds, just doesn’t have the same nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium ratio.

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The most popular is probably Easter Island, where workers cut down all the trees to make statues honoring wealthy people’s ancestors—a process that sped up as it went along, because people became more and more desperate for the spirits of wealthy people’s ancestors to save them from deforestation. Eventually the military took over, 90 percent of the population died, and the survivors started toppling the statues. And that was
before
the Europeans started selling the Easter Islanders into slavery.

Another example: we tend to think of whaling as primarily an olde-timey activity, because of
Moby Dick
and so on, but 75 percent of the world’s whales were actually killed after WW2, by countries looking to use whale oil to supplement their petroleum supplies during the postwar oil shortage.

And one more: before mass human agriculture, most of the Middle East was forested. That’s right: there was a time when people who used the term “the Fertile Crescent” weren’t just being sarcastic.