K Nilsen - The Yellowstone Traps

What had become of Bridge Bay and Lake Village, Liz feared? They had been close to the explosion, to the new hydrothermal crater hidden just a few miles out into the lake. There must be nothing left of them. The detonation alone would have staggered the little communities, she reasoned, and the waves would have erased them from the land. Thank God, she muttered to herself, tourists didn’t flock to Yellowstone National Park in November.

Liz backtracked to West Thumb and turned her car northward toward the famous geyser basins and the park headquarters at Mammoth Hot Springs.

Offstage, Abel prepared to present his hallmark lecture on the evils of mass-consumption culture. He picked up a small colorful box housing a commercial frozen dinner and walked out onto the stage of the small auditorium in First Day Hall. Agent Winnie followed the man with her eyes and triggered a pocket recorder.

“Hello, my tired, my poor,” Abel began, speaking through his infectious grin. Some members of the audience chuckled.

“We certainly have put all of you through a steeplechase, haven’t we, in your short time here?” Nods of agreement bobbed about the audience. “Well, I wanted to have one last crack at you before you leave us. So, let’s get underway,” Abel said, turning from the audience to pick up the frozen dinner box from the podium. He held it aloft.

“I will begin this talk—I call it ‘Mass Culture: The Death of Whole Human Life’—with a prop. This is a Bonfleur microwave chicken nuggets dinner. You can buy this in any supermarket in the United States.”

Abel opened the brightly colored box and slipped out the small plastic tray inside. He held up the tray to reveal chicken strips, a few French fries and a chunk of frozen chocolate cake batter.

“This,” insisted Abel, “this is a mass market miracle. It is the very distilled essence of the mass culture that is the United States of America. It seems like a simple enough product. It’s one meal for someone. The emphasis is on one. One!

“Well,” the lecturer paused for emphasis, “this little product that I bought for $1.79 is as dangerous and debilitating to society as anything that has ever been produced. A chicken nuggets dinner.”

Several people in the audience chuckled, and Abel smiled to arrest the seeming absurdity of his remark.

“Let me tell you exactly what this chicken nuggets dinner is for. This food product is not about food. Not at all. The primary purpose of this product is to make money. It is a thing, a thing designed to make as much profit as humanly possible as can be wrung from a $1.79 purchase price.

“To wrest maximum profit from one cheap meal, you need to have at your fingertips a new type of human being, a wholly new creature. This animal is called a hyper-consumer, a carefully-engineered consumptive biological phenomenon. What will this new hyper-consumer be like? The answer is simple. He or she will be completely isolated, alone within a mass society. An isolated mass-culture being is one who must buy every single thing, in single-serve portions, that he or she needs to maintain a singular existence. This consumer has virtually no real life skills with which to fashion much of anything tangible anyway. This creature is also so pressed for time, working impossible hours and often two and even three jobs, that he or she can’t take the time to prepare much of anything, either. So the single-serve product was invented. It saves time and effort and is, by far, the most profitable way for a corporation to wring high profits out of any given ounce of anything, in this case, food.

“This mass culture approach to almost any product we can buy is a systemic attack on the very roots of our ages-old collective human culture, our human heritage. Our hyper-consumer—the crowning achievement of mass culture—is a fabricated construct, a thing, absolutely ideal for moving money from Jack and Jill Citizen to the coffers of mass-culture corporations and the pockets of that hyper-wealthy tiny fraction of the global human population: the ultra-rich.

“Just two hundred years ago such an individual didn’t exist on earth. Today, there is no one left standing. We are, all of us, that consumer. That being the case, we are all, right now, the most at-risk souls in all of human history. We are in grave danger as a culture and as a species. I will tell you why that is.”

Winnie’s tiny digital tape recorder whirred, picking up his every word and filtered out the background din. Now in the den with the wolf, she was thrilled with her good fortune.

After the ninety minutes of continuous banter, Abel concluded his remarks. The small ensemble filled the little theater with thunderous applause. A few stayed behind to talk as the theater emptied. Winnie joined them. Within a few minutes, she was alone with her host, as she had planned.

“You should take that show on the road, Mr. Whittemore,” said the analyst, speaking through a cheery smile.

Abel smiled back and laughed quietly. “Hmm, I do quite a bit of road work, but it wears on me. I don’t much care for life on the road.”

“There must be great demands on your time now that your work is selling everywhere.”

“Yes, but I do try to limit my time away from here somewhat, except during the winter. Then it’s four months nonstop.”

“I must say, Mr. Whittemore, you’ve given all of us a look into the window of your world here, but you haven’t told us anything about you.”

“I don’t like to bore people with my personal history.”

“You wouldn’t bore me.”

Abel took the measure of that last remark. He felt a bit disarmed that this female was showing an interest in him. He did know that he wanted to continue talking with the woman from Kansas City.

“Well, then, Ms., ah… ”

“My name is Winnie.”

“Yes, I guess I do know that, Winnie.” He looked about the lecture hall, avoiding her eyes, then turned to her and made her an offer. “I’ll tell you what, Winnie. I will reveal to you a little about myself if you tell me a little about you. Fifty-fifty.”

The Missourian accepted. “Fifty-fifty.”

Cups of herb tea in hand, the two made their way to Abel’s modest office on the third floor of First Day Hall, a space filled with native woods and stone. Behind the man’s sparse Shaker-style oak desk loomed a floor-to-ceiling mural reproduction of the cave paintings at Vallon Pont d’Arc, France. The grand image depicted ancient renderings of ibex, mammoth, bison, wooly rhinoceros, steppe horses and many other creatures of the Pleistocene, once painted with ochre earth, charcoal, berry extracts and animal fats on cold walls of rock.

Winnie had been juggling thoughts about how to get Abel to open up, but the cave painting image overwhelmed her as she entered the room. Her host noticed her eyes flare wide and her jaw free fall.

“Not to worry, Winnie, they’re all extinct,” joked Abel.

Winnie took a moment to reflect on his little aside. “That is something!”

Abel pulled up a chair and motioned to his guest to have a seat in a second one within a comfortable distance.

“Okay,” he said, “you first. Start from the very beginning.”

Winnie rattled off her personal history, complete with a farm family childhood, college years and interests. She said nothing about the nature of her employment. Abel listened politely, then broke in.

“Okay, you’ve given me the A-B-Cs of your youth. In the theater, you said that I hadn’t revealed to anyone who was attending the classes who I really was. But you haven’t told me who you are. You told me how you were assembled up to this point. But who is the real Winnie, ah, Winnie, isn’t it?”