The click of Cheryl Sparks’ heels echoed as she made her way down the marble hallway. The walls were lined with ornate busts and colorful tapestries, a genealogy in art of a proud family line.
It was not her family, of course. Her family lineage could be traced on the front page of the old family Bible that her grandmother kept, and none of the Sparks line had ever left Indiana since settling there — until Cheryl had a chance encounter with the powerful figure she now preparing to meet again.
Cheryl Sparks had made one impassioned plea on the Internet, one time, about how a tragic school shooting would never have occurred if only no one was allowed to have had guns in the first place. It was basic sense, she said.
Her approach to solving all problems involved this basic sense that no one else she knew seemed to possess. When opining on a horrible automobile accident, Cheryl had fought terribly to get people to realize that such loss of life could be avoided forever if people would simply stop driving cars. She made the argument all the time with the other moms in her car pool.
The night after the horrible school shooting, while the Internet was still buzzing with debates on whose fault it was, how easy guns were to get, and how we should not politicize the tragedy, Cheryl got an email from a name she vaguely recognized, asking for her thoughts on the scourge of gun violence.
She knew she had heard the man’s name on the news before, and thought perhaps he was a reporter with one of the networks. But she soon learned that Hutch Pummel was a figure far more important to the dissemination of mass media than any mere talking head.
And now here she was, the head of the Heroines Against Guns movement, and thus an increasingly important media figure in her own right. The movement had rebranded itself, transitioning away from #WeaponWisdom to capitalize on a hit movie that promoted strong female values, and which featured a woman who could deflect bullets with the slave bracelets she wore on her wrists. Cheryl had decided to begin wearing such bracelets herself, to symbolically deflect all the bullets in the country. Her lower forearms had chafed into blisters, and a greenish tinge showed along the edges of the cheap metallic cuffs, but she refused to give them up.
A little discomfort and early-stage gangrene (which she was almost certain was the shade of coloration the bracelets produced, and why her doctor was so concerned about color she could not begin to imagine) was a small sacrifice to show solidarity with her fellow HAGs.
The hallway turned left, then quickly terminated at a large set of oaken doors. The entrance would have looked more at home in a medieval castle than in a secluded Colorado mansion.
The past few years had nearly convinced her that if America had a secret king, Hutch Pummel would definitely be that man. A billionaire descendant of railroad barons, the Pummel family had built its money by controlling the distribution of all goods throughout the country, earning fractions of cents of profit every time goods were transported from one place to another. It was the slimmest of profit margins, but given the vast scale of Pummel’s operations, it generated immeasurable wealth.
If ninety-five percent of the nation’s wealth was controlled by five percent of the people, Hutch Pummel controlled ninety-five percent of that. With his financing, influence, and canny manipulation of the media, he had taken Cheryl’s “basic sense” idea, and turned it into a real movement for change.
“Sorry I’m late,” Cheryl announced as she pushed her way through the giant doors.
“Not at all, my dear,” a hearty voice responded.
At the end of an epically long hardwood table, polished to a mirror shine, sat Hutch Pummel. His round, jovial face was mapped with laugh lines; his white hair, neatly combed to one side, was tipped with gray. “We wouldn’t think of starting without you.”
Other faces lining the sides of the table turned to look at her, their expressions showing their annoyance at having had to wait.
Cheryl did not care about them. They did not have to suffer the way she suffered, did not care as passionately as she did. She adjusted the metal bands on her forearms and took a seat in one of the high-backed chairs.
“I trust everyone is well,” Pummel said in his usual avuncular way. “I’ve heard many good things, but I confess I don’t hear everything. Does anyone have anything to share?”
Nobody took the initiative to speak.
“How about ladies first,” Hutch offered with a smile. Contessa Shilling bristled at the sexist overtones of the old-fashioned offer, but quickly jumped up before Cheryl could.
“Our organization continues to march to promote feminine values,” she said hoarsely. She jutted her chin forward proudly. “The vagina is fashionable once again.”
“Quite literally fashionable,” smirked Kirk Ehrlichman, a former sportscaster who had leveraged his name recognition to move into the realm of political commentary. “Those pink hats are quite something.”
“It’s all for equality,” Shilling said. “There were already plenty of dickheads out there. Now we’ve struck a balance. Besides, it makes great optics on cable news — especially when we can get our male compatriots to dress up in labia jumpsuits. They get on camera every time.”
She grinned conspiratorially. “All men are finally created equal, and it’s made them women.”
Those seated around the table politely clapped at Contessa’s climactic statement.
“And how do you plan to progress from there?” Hutch asked warmly. It was important that he keep them all thinking about next steps, particularly when those next steps would further his own interests.
Contessa thrust out her chin proudly. “We’re going to protest the cable news networks!”
Hutch raised an eyebrow. “The platforms which have been carrying your message?” he asked. “Do you think that’s wise?”
She shrugged. “What choice do we have?” she asked. “They allowed one of their guests to get away with saying ‘boobs’ on the airwaves. How demeaning! That phrase single-handedly set the woman’s movement back a hundred years! Worse, it’s left Americans with the impression that men can say whatever they want. One so-called ‘alpha male,’ with a national platform, might light a spark in the ‘beta males’ we’ve worked so hard to cultivate.”
Hutch Pummel clucked with amusement. “Oh, I hardly think someone’s puerile reference to female breasts is going to take away the woman’s right to vote,” he said. “But I do think you present an interesting case. You’d be able to pull eyeballs from various competing networks quite easily, I should imagine. They would love the opportunity to put their competition in a bad light. Get me a full proposal, and I’ll approve the funding.”
Hutch Pummel saw no reason to tell Contessa the guest had been booked with his approval, and passed through one of his subordinates, who had scripted both the question and the response — without letting either the interviewer or interviewee know they were being manipulated into a semantic trap.
“Cheryl, how about you? Anything to add after your little…display in Dallas?”
Cheryl Sparks cleared her throat. “Our ‘Heroines Against Guns’ hashtag has dominated social media trending patterns for the past two weeks,” she said boldly. “I think the rebranding is taking hold.”
Hutch waggled his finger at her. “That’s all well and good,” he chided, “But don’t think that gets you off the hook for that Texas debacle. It took a bit of political capital to pull off that conflict between the open carry and anti-gun forces in the first place.” He shook his head. “That was supposed to end with more police bodies than it did. I’m still not sure what happened there.”
Cheryl was puzzled as well. Three men in that position, with the ordinance at their disposal, should have amassed quite the body count — yet something unforeseen had interfered. It appeared that two of the men had shot each other’s arms off, and the third was wounded, and died before he could talk to the authorities. “What’s important is that it couldn’t be traced back to the movement,” Cheryl interjected.
“Yes,” Hutch said with mild sternness. “Thanks to the cleanup crew that I contracted.” His countenance then softened. “Oh, don’t get me wrong, dear,” he said. “It was a good plan, and your heart was in the right place. But I think your strengths lie more with school shootings. The victims create more sympathy for your cause.” He chuckled warmly, “And they’re less likely to shoot back.”
The folks seated around the table joined him in laughing at his joke, except for Cheryl. She took her seat, cheeks crimson with embarrassment. She promised herself she would stage the mother of all school shootings. She just needed to find a really disturbed toddler in a Christian preschool.
“Each of you has come up with good plans,” Hutch continued. “Mr. Ehrlichman has rewritten the rules of journalism with his online broadcasts. And Reverend Bluntman is the undisputed master of using race as a bludgeon against the traditional forces of law and order.”
“Resist, we munch,” Hal Bluntman sputtered in his trademark combination of incoherence and moral turpitude. “And must we munch persist.”
“Exactly as you say,” Hutch smiled. “But we still have a lot to do. We all want this country to be a better place, but there are so few who can appreciate the scope of our overall vision. For generations, much of the country has been…inoculated against our ideas.”
“Anti-buddies, to desist inflection,” said Bluntman, sagely. “We have much desistance in our neighborhoods. It has given them impunity to change.” He nodded confidently, as if he had just made plain to all what they were struggling to understand before.
“That’s right,” Pummel said. “Well, I’m happy to tell you today that your combined efforts are having the desired effect.”
He turned toward the wall behind him, where a flat screen television was mounted. He aimed the remote control at it, and it flickered to life, showing a street stampede of young people wearing bandana masks, looking like bank robbers from an old-time western film.
“Ah, the heroic Fascist Fighters,” Ehrlichman sighed. “I’m a huge fan. Are they going to be joining us?” he asked hopefully.
“No,” Pummel said, his avuncular smile unwavering. “No, they’re not joining us. They’re already with us. They just don’t know it yet.”
The scene changed to a monument of a Confederate war general. “Folks, I believe the key to the next civil war lies, ironically, in the last one.”
“Who gets to be the slaves this time around?” Bluntman asked with surprising lucidity.
“Not to worry, Reverend,” Hutch said. “Our friends here are very angry over the idea of remembering the so-called ‘War Between the States.’ They’ve had their discontentment and disenfranchisement stoked over the last several years, and we’ve given them a target for their anger: statuary!”
The men and women in attendance nodded, feigning understanding. Knowing that they did not follow him, Pummel continued to explain his plan. The scene shifted to another scene, just as familiar to his audience — men and women carrying American flags and torches. The men wore their hair cropped close on the sides, long on top, and sharply combed over.
“Meet our other friends,” he said.
“You can’t be serious,” Contessa spat. “They’re Nazis!”
“Some of them are, yes,” Hutch said. “Some of them are, indeed, actual Nazis. But like many of those in the Fascist Fighters, the majority of them are merely activist actors. Oh, don’t look so sullen, Mr. Ehrlichman, surely you knew. They’re all our actors. And they’re going to face off against each other — in the name of preserving a carved piece of rock.” He chuckled to himself at the brilliance of the plan, knowing that nobody else understood it.
“Middle Americans, the people who sit at home and watch their televisions and absorb all the discontent — they’re the ones who really make a difference. They’ve been told that all the disturbing images they’ve endured are protected by their Constitution. The right to free speech. The right to bear arms. The right to assemble. Rights their grandparents would have died — did die, in many cases — to protect. But we’ve got them rethinking those rights now. Shown the absurd extremes of situations which that archaic document protects, they grow weary of it. This will motivate them to take action when the time is right, to demand a new Constitution, and repeal the old one that has stood in the way of progress for too long.”
Pummel clicked the remote he held, and the image on the screen behind him changed to a woman, her expression pious and pitiful as she cradled a pre-teen girl in her arms. The girl was emaciated, her skin sallow, her weak smile forced as she leaned into her mother’s caring embrace.
“This is Andrea Carruthers,” Pummel said, indicating the woman in the picture. “You’ve seen her on the news. Her daughter, Lindsay, is suffering from a condition so rare that medical science hasn’t been able to name it, let alone diagnose it. Lindsay will go through periods of remission, only to have sudden relapses that nearly kill her. Andrea’s every waking moment is devoted to Lindsay’s care. Andrea can do this, because she has the support of her family, her friends — even complete strangers who have been moved enough by her condition to donate money and resources.”
Those around the table nodded with recognition. Some of them had almost been moved to give themselves, but chose instead the more reasonable road of support, which involved posting online photographs of themselves holding signs displaying the “#SaveLindsay” slogan.
“What nobody realizes,” Pummel said, “is that the cause of Lindsay sickness is none other than her own mother.”
He paused to let the notion sink in. Seeing that his point evaded their understanding, he continued.
“It’s called Munchausen by Proxy,” he said. “It is a psychological condition in which a person gets fulfillment through sympathy from others — not for their own misfortune, but for the misfortunes of someone close to them — misfortunes that they secretly cause. It allows them to play the dual roles of both martyr and savior.”
He began a slow saunter around the table. “This country needs to be taken in a new direction. This country needs to be protected from itself. ‘All enemies, foreign and domestic’ — isn’t that how the oath goes?” Hutch paused behind a silent gentleman, their resident Constitutional scholar, and placed his hand on the shoulder. “If we want to get America on our side — if we want to get the power of the sympathy of the public — we have to take a completely different approach.”
Hutch Pummel stopped pacing, stood next to a fringed United States flag, and did what he always did: he delivered a pragmatic solution.
“If we want to make America well,” he intoned solemnly, “first we have to make it sick.”