Steve Martini - Shadow of Power

Eight o’clock Saturday morning, and I’m planted in my favorite chair in the large den of the bungalow I call home, tucked away on Coronado Island.

For the most part, my house is now a sanctuary, safe ground from the snarling media, though occasionally one of the satellite news vans will cruise by to take a look. It doesn’t matter any longer whether your phone is unlisted or your mail is delivered to a post-office box-these people will find you. It’s the one thing you learn about the media: They possess an olfactory nerve that would shame a bloodhound. And as soon as one of them locates you, the rest of the pack is right behind.

I had to live with it for about two weeks just before the trial started. Three mobile video trucks blocking traffic on the narrow street in front of my house, my lawn littered with cigarette butts and decorated with discarded paper coffee cups. Each morning I had to wave, smile, and be polite, since they were filming as I tried to bulldoze my way out of the garage, heading for work.

This was before they met Suki. Suki Kenoko is my Japanese gardener. He drives a 1957 Dodge pickup that once belonged to the original owner, his father. This accounts for the sign on the truck’s door: KENOKO AND SON, YARD SERVICE. Hitched to the truck, he tows a trailer with all his gardening equipment-mowers, rakes, you name it, Suki’s got it. Behind the wheel he never drives faster than ten miles an hour. I can verify this, having been stuck more than once in the train of cars behind him. Regardless of speed, however, you never want to cross an intersection in front of him, because until Suki gets where he’s going, he never stops. It doesn’t matter if there is a stop sign or a traffic light or what the color is, Suki will drive right through it, and everybody on this end of the island knows it. To my knowledge, he has never been ticketed. None of the local traffic cops want the hassle. Suki owns one of the more stately houses on the island, and his brother, who is a lawyer, is on the city council.

Late one afternoon I thought I might inherit another case when Suki showed up to do the garden. He looked at the front lawn, strewn with coffee cups and crushed Coke cans, cigarette butts in the bushes. For a moment I thought there might be blood in the street. He just stood there like a stick in his tan long-sleeved shirt and pith helmet, shoulders hunched forward, and shook his head.

It’s true that you would have to know the man in order to realize that for Suki this was a display of raw emotion; think rattlesnake with the rattles removed. Nonetheless, one of the sound guys was sitting in a folding chair not ten feet from Suki’s trailer, and he was laughing-toying with death.

Suki dropped the ramp on the back of the trailer and was getting a rake and a bag to get all the trash off the lawn. That’s when he saw it. One of the cameramen had migrated with some of his equipment-a camera, a tripod, and cables-into a corner of the front yard, probably angling for a picture through one of my windows. In doing so the guy had snapped a limb off a small tree, a miniature Japanese maple. God help him. Suki wanted him out. And the fool resisted. The next thing I knew, my gardener was going at one of the legs on the camera’s tripod with a large, curved pruning saw, a thing about eighteen inches long, sprouting glinting teeth like Jaws.

Confronted by Asian fury, they not only moved the camera, they moved themselves across the street and behind one of the vans. The tripod, which like Captain Ahab was now missing the better part of one leg, Suki calmly tossed into the street. It was followed a second later by the missing appendage. Through all this the gardener never said a word.

What was more amazing was that after days resting on their haunches outside waiting for something to film, not one of the news guys got a picture, not a single frame of the helmeted, saw-wielding ninja as he drove them out of the yard. They stayed huddled behind the van while Suki picked up the trash, mowed the lawn, and pruned some bushes. They didn’t come out until the truck with the trailer, and the crazy guy driving it, left.

The day the trial started, the gypsy caravan camped in front of my house pulled up stakes and disappeared. Having missed the only pictures worth taking, they motored their movable feast back across the bridge to catch the rock-throwing Renaissance faire taking shape out in front of the courthouse.

I drink tea, Earl Grey, and scan the coroner’s report, prepping for Monday’s testimony. Across the room I have the television on, but with the sound muted. It is a much more peaceful way to catch cable news, without all the frenetic screaming. If somebody blows up a city, I can turn up the sound. Otherwise I’m not missing a thing.

This morning the screen is filled with election news, the presidential primaries, flashes of smiling faces, handshaking, and toothy grins, the political postmortems. Two Republicans and one Democrat are down and out, folding up their tents and tossing in the towel. But the real day of reckoning is just around the bend. The final state primary elections or caucuses. When that party ends, you’ll need a dump truck to pick up all the bunting, banners, buttons, and body parts left over from the fallen candidates. If it isn’t decided by then, within weeks-at most a month-the two principal party candidates, the nominees, will be the only ones left standing.

Then hostilities will begin in earnest, partisan warfare, politics as blood sport, all that matters is that our side wins, at every level, all the marbles-executive, legislative, and judicial.

When it’s over, all the eminent talking heads will wax eloquent, telling us that now, with a new president elected, America and Americans, Democrat and Republican, will once again return to the great tradition of unity, binding up their differences to work together for the common good.

It might have sounded comforting coming from a network anchor a quarter of a century ago or more, but to hear it today is to wonder what weed the speaker is smoking and where he got it. In case you haven’t noticed, the toxin of partisan politics that was once trapped inside the asylum on the Potomac and bottled up in a few other political hot spots around the country has suddenly been pumped, undiluted, into the national vein.

Cable news, much of it political and almost all of that partisan; talk radio, some of it virulent; the graceless decline of network news, until it stood undisguised, naked and seemingly unashamed in its ideological partiality; and major metropolitan newspapers, too many of which have given up the ghost of objectivity in their reporting to become obvious and open house organs for political parties-these were the forces that pushed the plunger on the syringe.

Having been flushed from our lives of political indolence, we suddenly discover that it is no longer possible to cast a vote and run for the sidelines. So we choose up sides, pin on labels-conservative or liberal, Democrat or Republican-and become emotionally invested in the only thing that is important: winning.

And of course the contest, as always, is all or nothing, a tug-of-war to see if we can rip the nation down the middle.

I watch the silent happy-warrior faces on the screen and wonder. In the age of e-mail and the Internet blogger, how long can we survive before those at the polar lunatic edges drag us all to a future where differences in politics and social ideology are settled Beirut style?

The phone rings. I reach over on the side table and answer it. It’s Harry.

“I didn’t call,” I say. “I didn’t think you’d be up yet.”

“Houston, we’ve got a problem,” says Harry. “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be there in ten minutes.” The line goes dead. Harry must be calling from his cell phone in the car.