Walter Williams - The Rift

He turned to Stan Burdett and his two principal speechwriters. “You boys better write me a hell of a speech,” he said.

“Yes, Mr. President,” one of the speechwriters mumbled.

They and the President sat on couches in the Oval Office, and watched the news on a console television carefully disguised as an antique piece of furniture.

“I want drama,” the President said. He waved his hands in the air. “I want compassion. I want a promise of punishment for the guilty along with protection for the helpless. I want to call for reconciliation. I want to appeal to the angels of our better nature. When I go to Mississippi, I want to deliver the best speech heard on this continent since Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. I want this to go down in history as the Vicksburg Address.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“Now get busy.”

“Sir.”

The speechwriters left. The days in which a President scrawled out a speech on the back of an envelope and kept it in his hat were long gone.

Stan Burdett stared for a long moment at the scene on the television. “I can’t believe this happened,” he said.

“I believe it,” the President said. He shrugged and reached for his cup of coffee. “What does it take to make evil come into the world?” he asked. “A can of beer and a cheap handgun. That’s all. In this case, we had a psychopathic sheriff who was in a position to enforce his orders through martial law. He was a weak and malevolent man put into a position of power during a period in which the normal checks on his power ceased to exist. His actions don’t surprise me in the least.”

The President shook his head. “Where Paxton seems to have been naive is that he apparently thought he could do it without anyone finding out. That was absurd of him- we have a whole class of people in this country who do nothing but hunt out the things that people want to hide.”

He shook his head. “You’d better have Bill Marcus contact Jessica Frazetta real soon,” he said. “She showed good political instincts here. We need to get her on the campaign trail soon, and run on our ticket. Oh- look at this.” He pointed at the television. “This guy’s priceless.”

The Grand Wizard had appeared on the television, gazing firmly at the camera through glinting spectacles. “Omar Paxton was a great American,” he said. “He was a hero. Whatever he did, I’m sure it was for the safety of the good people of Spottswood Parish. But now the liberal media are blowing everything out of proportion and trying to make it seem like Omar was some kind of crazed killer! Well, who got killed, that’s what I want to know. Omar Paxton got killed, and his deputies! They got massacred! Cut down in performance of their duty! The liberal media can say anything they want about the dead, I guess, ’cause the dead can’t defend themselves against slander, but I know in my heart that Omar Paxton was right.”

The news program switched to a commentator, one of the legion of pompous talking heads who provide instant analysis for the media. The President reached for his remote and switched off the set.

“How’s that Grand Wizard for spin?” the President asked. “How’s that for the new party line?”

“That’s vile,” Stan said. “That’s beyond putrid.”

“I bet the Klan gets a thousand recruits in the next week,” the President said. He sipped his coffee. It had gone cold, and he put the cup down.

Stan looked at him. “People say I’m cynical,” he said.

“Human evil is bottomless,” the President said. “I suppose we can hope that the same can be said of good, but in my job I don’t deal with good very often.” He looked at Stan, and amusement tugged at his lips. “Do you think if I went to Purgatory Parish, or whatever the place is called, and made a speech eulogizing Omar Paxton and calling for race war, that I couldn’t get a war started?”

Stan looked horrified. “Sir!” he said. “You can’t be serious!”

“No point in it.” The President shrugged. “The experiment’s already been tried, in Bosnia and Rwanda.” He looked at Stan again. “It wouldn’t be hard, though. Plenty of people in rural areas would listen. Their way of life’s been destroyed, and not just by the earthquake. Fifty years ago the U.S. government decided there were too many farmers on the land. Programs were put into place. Congress passed laws. And rural America was wiped out! The farmers- the backbone of the nation, we used to call them, salt of the earth, the yeoman that Thomas Jefferson hoped would guarantee the independence and virtue of the republic- they were all nudged off their own land. Now almost all American agriculture is controlled by a few companies, and folks who work on the land are tenant farmers plowing the land their fathers once owned.

“Why shouldn’t they be angry?” the President asked. “Why shouldn’t they look for someone to blame?” He pointed at the blank television screen. “Sheriff Paxton and that Reverend Dingdong Frankland there, they’re the only people helping the rural poor understand what’s happened to them. Their answers are violent and insane and based on a delusional understanding of how the world works, but at least they have answers. The only answer the government has for those people is, ‘Hey, you’re redundant, you should have abandoned the land and gone to work in a factory years ago.’ No wonder those people start joining apocalyptic cults. To them, the end of the world isn’t a strange idea. The Apocalypse already happened to them! Their whole world was destroyed.”

The President laughed. “And now those poor countryfied bastards have been hit again. Agribusiness won’t be hurt by the quakes, not for long- Congress will make sure that almost all the relief money will go to the big agricultural conglomerates, just the way they’ve done for fifty years- but all the small businesses, and the family farmers, and the small entrepreneurs will be kept living under canvas for months, and when they come out they’ll find out that all their dreams will have been repossessed. Then the next generation of Franklands and Paxtons will tell them who to blame, and then we’ll have a heavily armed rural proletariat- the backbone of the nation, we used to call them, salt of the earth- all lynching all the wrong people, the way they’ve always done.”

The President fell silent. Stan looked at him for a long moment. The President shrugged. “Don’t blame me, Stan,” he said. “I didn’t do it. It all happened practically before I was born.”

“Yes, sir,” Stan said.

The President looked at his friend. “It’s the American way,” he said. “We don’t respect our fathers, we don’t overthrow them, we don’t bury them. We just forget. It’s not like there was a hidden conspiracy to destroy rural America- it was all in the open. All the documents, all the policies, all the legislation … it was all public. People could have read all about it if they’d wanted. But they forgot. The earthquakes of 1811 weren’t a secret, either- people could have read about them if they’d wanted to. But they didn’t know the history. They forgot their fathers. That’s what Americans do- we think about the present, and often about the future, but never about the past. Our fathers have always been dead to us. We just forget.”

The President rose, put his hand on Stan’s shoulder. “Our job is to help them. That’s why I have to go to Vicksburg and make a speech that will help everyone put all this to bed … to help them forget. If no one remembers Omar Paxton in twenty years, then we’ll have done our job.”

He straightened, then walked to his chair behind Rutherford B. Hayes’s desk. “Better get busy, Stan,” he said. “And don’t forget to have Marcus call General Jessica, get her political career started.”