“I suppose you’ll use this as evidence of your ‘cruel, harsh world’ theory.”
“Not remotely. It’s a mathematical certainty that in a country with such a proliferation of high-powered weaponry, citizens will find use for that weaponry. But still, the odds that our hypothetical child would die at the hands of murderous extremists remain vanishingly small.”
“You know, Ash…” Seth pushed his hands through his thinning hair. “This isn’t theoretical. You can’t quantify why children are important on a fucking spreadsheet. This”—he jabbed a finger at the screen of our opulent television—“is why we need to do this. We can’t control anything at all in this life, but if we can bring just a sliver of kindness and compassion into it, then we are helping. We are doing our part.”
“Seth, you can reconfigure an ignorant bromide all you want but an ignorant bromide it will remain.”
He looked like he wanted to say something more, but instead left for his kundalini yoga class. I poured his cereal down the garbage disposal.
Two days later, Senator L. Victor Love held a rally at Cellular Field baseball stadium in Chicago, assailing “all threats to our democracy, our diversity, and our way of life.” The implications of his speech were clear. Though he led with the attack in Chicago, he spent a great deal of his speech reminding voters of 6Degrees, the al-Bawadis’ slaughter, and the threat of terrorist infiltration along the US-Mexico border, concluding with:
“I have a message for all savages, murderers, and enemies of our country: We will hunt you, we will find you, we will end you.”
The audience thundered its approval. If you recall, Congresswoman, one of the reasons we first came to an accord was over the backroom dealings Senator Love engaged in that transformed PRIRA into an expansion of surveillance and law enforcement while deploying only tepid antipodal climate adaptation measures. He showered his former company with billions in government contracts and walked away a hero of bipartisan deal-making. Ostensibly, this document began as a measured attempt to extrapolate if you and your supporters should throw your weight behind L. Victor Love in the presidential contest, and I apologize if I’ve traveled far afield. I’m told my memos can be convoluted. However, I believe everything I’ve included here is in service to the goal of thinking through the rise of Senator Love. The dynamics of the parties have changed a great deal since I’ve come to Washington. Mary Randall’s near-certain political failure will resonate in perpetuity: The Republican establishment bent over backward to nominate a moderate woman of color, and its own voters and media apparatus rebelled. The conundrum facing the dedicated climate hawk such as Seth or yourself is that Mary Randall, who signed PRIRA, has been chastened and metaphorically gelded by her own party. She is now desperately behind in swing-state polling, and in only thirteen of one hundred simulations of Nate Silver’s 538 models does she manage to win.
Meanwhile, true power in American politics has found other avenues. Wall Street, fossil-fuel interests, pharmaceuticals, and the military-, security-, and prison-industrial complexes all began backing Democratic challengers and pushing the socialist wing of the party into a spoiler role. It is a testament to the rightward march, not of the country but of the financiers of its politicians, that this has occurred in only a few election cycles. L. Victor Love’s nomination is its crowning achievement; a handsome and masculine homosexual military veteran and businessman who, when posing with his husband shirtless in lifestyle magazines with their impressive abdominal muscles on display, seems to check every box. Yet even a dedicated Democrat like Seth can see that Love serves a specific constituency. His mantra this election has been “climate security,” a refrain meant to assuage progressive voters, while signaling that we as a nation will continue to arm the lifeboats, as the expression goes.
You may recall this conversation we had in your office after Love essentially cleared away his competition following the April primaries. You said:
“Vic is not just a corporate, Third Way Democrat. He’s what we used to call a right-wing Republican. He’s a billionaire war profiteer who bought himself a Montana Senate seat. This is about the worst possible outcome I could’ve pictured. I don’t understand how it turned this fast.”
You were very agitated and looked like you hadn’t slept much. I attempted to project optimism:
“He could become a reluctant mechanism for change. After all, Mary Randall came in with a promise to do something about climate and was thwarted. Perhaps if the donor class feels safe with Love, we can shock them.”
Since that conversation, of course, troubling reporting has emerged about Loren Victor Love. Agent Chen’s thumb drive, which I’ve now conveyed to you, suggests the bureau is also greatly worried about his candidacy. The thumb drive, which I’ve included, confirms rumors that during his combat tours he was twice investigated for the unlawful killing of civilians (including that he ate a cold hot dog while standing over a young boy, watching him die). But it also contains troubling information on the unraveling of his primary political opponents. Both Governor Patrick Formisano and Congresswoman Sheila Wang dropped out of the Democratic race not due to a lack of support or delegates but because of carefully designed scandals. The allegations of sexual misconduct by Formisano have never been credibly verified, while the leaking of twenty-thousand pages of Wang’s personal texts and emails dating back to her career as an MMA fighter contained, in my opinion, nothing disqualifying her from office (ribald jokes about MDMA and cocaine use twenty years ago do not impede one’s ability to govern). Following my work for Congresswoman Joy LaFray and her own collision with scandal and ignominy, I’ve become fascinated by what historian Daniel Boorstin calls pseudo-events: orchestrated happenings meant to spark, sway, or deter public opinion. Certain PR firms have become adept at utilizing these bombshell moments for the political and economic advantage of their clients. According to the FBI, Love’s campaign has worked closely with one of these unscrupulous firms.
Your misgivings about L. Victor Love, therefore, are perfectly valid, and the D beside his name seems to lead liberal voters into a perilous cozenage. One thing we’ve learned about dangerous men is that it’s usually how they are dangerous that surprises, and Love remains the down card in the poker game. There is a fear and anger beneath the surface of every society, and certainly every empire, waiting to be activated. The years of the Covid-19 pandemic, economic decline, increasing inequality, news of the plutocratic class gorging itself on the commonweal, widespread addiction, extreme weather events, and psychological despair have, I fear, primed the body politic to accept radical interventions. L. Victor Love, I fear, may prove the lesser evil as figures like Jennifer Braden become increasingly attractive candidates to a lost and desperate citizenry.
This brings me, finally, to a confidential meeting I had in a nondescript virtual worlde. What I’m about to share with you I do so in confidence, and I trust that you will in fact destroy this document upon reading it. For the sake of plausible deniability, I will employ pseudonyms, though these will likely prove transparent, as I find it difficult not to editorialize about these personalities and the dangerous position they have put me in.
On September 29 of this dreadful year, Ned Stark contacted me with directions for how to access an encrypted Slapdish worlde, one in which it would be safe for the assembled to lower our anonymizing avatars and sit face-to-face. Rarely have I encountered such a catastrophizing personality as Ned Stark. He’d called me once, panicked and begging for the use of a government plane to get him to Los Angeles in the midst of the El Demonio-Los Angeles Complex Fire. I obliged only because his child was apparently trapped in the city. I thought I’d never hear from him again. That he found and saved her—the odds were simply unrealistic. He thanked me awkwardly in a handwritten letter.