War of Attrition

Glenn Michael Beckmann was bitterly disappointed about the sudden demise of "Gary", the ventriloquist dummy, but while working out a new plan for undermining Donald Trump, he had discovered that Roger Ailes had been fired for sexually harassing several of Beckmann's favorite Fox News blonds.  "Nobody messes with my patriotic vixens!" he had shouted from his balcony to nobody in particular, followed by, "Vengeance will be mine!"  Now he was addressing a meeting of his militia followers, trying to rally them to kidnap Roger Ailes.

"The man is a menace to our goddesses!" cried Beckmann (who had reserved a room at Martin Luther King Memorial Library for this meeting).

"Don't blaspheme!"

"Huh?"

"There is only one God!"

"Ain't that what Muslims say?"

"Focus, people!" exclaimed Beckmann, pounding his fist on the table.  "Our beloved women, treated like garbage by men in suits!"

"Men in suits!"

"They're the worst!"

"We must kidnap him for punishment!" cried Beckmann.

 "But he's advising Donald Trump now!"

"Trump sucks!"

"Trump rocks!"

"Hillary's gonna take away our guns!"

"Trump's gonna take away our neighbors!"

"Do you like your neighbors?"

"Libertarian's the way to go!"

"Who's the Libertarian candidate?"

"Gary Bussey."

"No, the other Gary."

"That ventriloquist dummy?"

"Shut up!" screamed Beckmann, red in the face.  "Have I ever led you astray?!"

"Well--"

"Never!  The time has come for Ailes to face the reaper!"

"He already got sued.  Isn't that enough?"

Beckmann threw his hands up in disgust and stormed out to chase down Ailes on his own, bumping into an elderly black couple trying to find an anniversary lecture on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s March on Washington.

"I have a dream!" cried Dick Cheney, a few miles away.  The other members of the Heurich Society looked at him in perplexity for a moment, saw the twinkle in his eye, and then burst out laughing.

"No, seriously!" laughed Cheney, mopping his brow with a pile of Au Bon Pain napkins.  (The elevator at the Brewmaster's Castle was out of service.)  "I have a dream of endless war in the Middle East until the population there returns to fourteenth century nomadic levels, the price of oil goes back to $200/barrel, and--"

"Fourteenth century nomadic levels?" crackled Condoleezza Rice over the speakerphone.  (She had recently gotten her Ancestry DNA test back and was still coping with the newly found knowledge that fifteen percent of her genes were Arab.)  "We have never discussed anything like that!  You're talking about gen--"

"Genuine clarity of vision, I know!" said Cheney (who was quickly getting hopped up on a sugary muffin, the likes of which his wife had not allowed in their house since Bill Clinton was President).  "Turks versus Kurds versus Syrians versus Iraqis versus Iranians versus Saudis versus Yemenis versus Houthis versus--"

"Slow down there, cowboy," said the international arms merchant.  "Endless war is one thing when collateral damage is local, but some of these players have nukes!"

"The situation is pretty volatile," said the international banker.  "And no matter how many people get killed, three times as many will be refugees streaming into Europe."

"Well, if Trump gets elected, we don't have to care about Europe anymore!" laughed an army colonel, in an unnaturally loud voice.  (Then he bit his lip.) 

"The State Department is working hard to stabilize our alliance with Turkey," crackled Rice over the speakerphone.  (Everybody in the upper floor conference room rolled their eyes.)  "There won't be endless war."  (Her genes also showed a large amount of Scotch-Irish; she tried to tell herself it was Hume- and Smith- like, but she knew deep in her heart it was cracker.)

"There's been war in the Middle East my entire life," said a 45-year-old Congressman.  "I really don't see what has changed."  He looked around the room expecting his statement to be shot down, but nobody had an answer.

Back in the days when petroleum was $200/barrel, one of the companies that had amassed a large fortune was Chevron.  Income was not as good these days (wind farms!), but Chevron was still sitting on $9 billion in financial assets and $189 billion in capital assets--even after spending hundreds of millions of dollars on legal fees fighting a $8.6 billion judgment levied against the company twenty-three years earlier in Ecuador.  Chevron had won round after round after round, refusing to pay a single dollar to clean up the well-documented pollution its predecessor had left in the rainforest.  And the latest victory for Chevron was in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. 

"They used to ride around in a circuit," said a very drunken D.C. attorney who had done hundreds of hours of pro bono work on the case over the years.  "The judge would get on his horse and ride from one state to another to hear appeals."  She nodded solemnly to emphasize the import of this fact.  (Everybody at the bar was watching the game; only the bartender was paying the slightest attention to her.)  "A circuit," she repeated, drawing a circle on the smooth wood in front of her.  "Maybe New Jersey in April, and Connecticut in May, and New York in--"  (She paused, stumped.)

"June," said the bartender.  (His father was from Brazil; he knew all about sticking it to the indigenous in the Amazon.)

"June!" agreed the attorney.  "Or was it July?  Anyway, the man on the high horse stuck it to the little people again!"  (The bartender nodded, refilling some beer pitchers for some rowdy football fans.)  "But we can appeal to the Supreme Court, yeah!" she cried, sarcastically.  She raised her next pisco sour shot in the air.  "They deserve it!  Half of them are dying of cancer, but Chevron has proven that hundreds of millions of dollars can buy your way out of the tar pit of the Amazon!  How do we explain the Second Circuit to them?"

"Who?" asked the bartender.

"The people of Lago Agrio!" she screamed, looking wildly around at the crowd.  "Why don't any of you care?!  You don't even know their names!"

"Settle down!" the bartender said, grabbing both her wrists gently but firmly.

"Money always wins," she said softly, starting to cry, and the bartender let go of her wrists.  "I've wasted my life on this."  She suddenly smashed her shot glass down, took a jagged edge, and slashed her wrist.

"There's too much evil," said Angela de la Paz, a couple of miles away in Chinatown, sipping herbal tea specially prepared by Lynnette Wong.  "It's an endless war, a war without end."

"You're telling me this," smiled Wong.  "My people have legends going back thousands of years!"

"Why do I even have these powers if I can never win?" sighed Angela.

"You have these powers so that Evil can never win," said Wong.

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COMING UP:  Dr. Esse's new assignment at the CIA!