Chapter One

 

4:30 p.m. EST

Sunday, May 25, 2020

Pompano Marina

Homestead, Florida

 

With gusts of wind building to thirty knots, Biscayne Bay a churning bowl of four-foot white caps, his Sunday routine jilted by Mother Nature, fate, whatever, Zackary Stearn called it quits and set his heading ten miles south of Miami, his home port, Pompano Marina.

Twenty minutes later, he glided into his rented mooring, tied up, threw out two extra side bumpers and decided to get some back-burner work done before going to dinner.

Sitting in the galley of his RV and home, a forty-foot refurbished Chris Craft he had dubbed Veracity, he nursed a Glenlivet on the rocks and noodled around with what seemed an endless editorial.

The subject sloshed around several things: first, the current President of the United States, Benjamin P. Armstrong; second, Armstrong’s manipulation of the press; third, the shrinking number of newspapers in the U. S. of A; fourth, the cannibalism of information by blogs, social media’s glut of misinformation, the Internet; in general the whoring of information, news and otherwise.

Zack looked over his yellow-pad draft editorial notes:

 

In the beginning, so the story goes, there was darkness upon the face of the deep. From there the tale gets complicated. One supposition suggests there was some sort of Big Bang in the darkness—the Big Bang must have been really big because it was the beginning from which there evolved many mysterious things, earth being one of them, the current President of the U. S. of A. (Benny P. Armstrong) the other.

Moreover, said story reports, following this Big Bang, Planet Earth separated itself out from a plethora of other things and placed its whirling blue-and-white mass in an ordered course around another wondrous object—the sun, of which Benny is the son (work on this). Then along came time (which also had started sometime around or before the big bang, maybe?) and moved forward for some reason in sixty-second minutes—hour cycles (think it has something to do with the sun, earth’s rotation, ancient Babylonians, look it up, etc.)—then, after many evened revolutions around the sun, there came upon Planet Earth living things—one of which evolved into a word-making mammal (credit Cerebellum, Dr. Lande, on that word mammal thing) Homo sapiens (one male and one female); and this species multiplied, subdued the earth and everything in it. Then came capitalism, then came journalism, then came television news, then came the internetso called “news” that makes yellow journalist look like Mother Teresa’s diary

 

He put his stubby pencil down, turned to his computer, accessed Google search engine and keyed in DAILY NEWSPAPERS, clicked search and read the first hit:

 

Dailies, newspapers, circulation - Spurred by the Internet’s ever expanding presence combined with mega-media international corporate takeovers, bloated staffs, albatross plants and soaring newsprint costs, many daily newspapers have gone the way of T. Rex. Adding to their demise is the economics that forced them to share a shrinking piece of the advertising pie dollars with television, radio, Internet, local cable news operations and satellite TV. A few giant newspapers still survive in print form: The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald. It is interesting to note that they are now mostly feature vehicles with hack-fiction writers producing supplements for local PTA groups and high school soccer news inserts. In some larger communities, small, cost-efficient weekly gazettes have become reliable niches for what is called in some circles ‘the meat of local news.’ Two of the more popular are La Voz of Los Angeles and The Boca of Miami.

 

The Boca being his newspaper, “Hear, hear,” Zack said, printed the page then read articles he had clipped as source material for his editorial.

 

The Wall Street Journal

March 15, 2020

 

New York — BLUE CHIP industrial stocks soar to record numbers amid rumors of Armstrong’s global military posturing.

 

WSJ, (Page 1-A) OIL DEMAND FIVE FOLD

With China and India hell bent into the personal car business, the thirst for oil to keep the machines running is causing an insane scramble in international oil markets. Who would have thought a slippery substance buried in the earth for billions of years would become so valuable.

 

World oil producer nations raise prices — In its latest move a cabal of oil producing nations has raised the monthly average basket price of a barrel of oil to an all-time high of $165 per barrel.

 

With alternate fuel production trumped by other concerns, electric vehicle cost out of reach, the price at the gasolene pump in the USA at $8.50 a gallon, President Armstrong promises swift action. He noted that the increase has pushed the cash flow to oil producing nations to over a billion a month of America’s hard-earned dollars. Noting “We being first, Henry Ford and all, are entitled to lower prices.”

 

The New York Times

April 26, 2020

Paris — The Eiffel Tower Toppled

Over 5,000 people lost their lives when an explosive device was detonated in the French capital. An Internet message from the terrorist group UR2 claimed responsibility. Saying violence only begets more violence, France officially remains committed to nonviolence. A government spokesperson blamed the policies of Israel and America’s nuclear support of the Jewish state for the world’s chaos.

 

The Washington Post

May 1, 2020

Washington, D.C. — Vermont’s pugnacious in-your-face Senator Nancy Beno is making a strong November run at incumbent Benjamin P. Armstrong for the Presidency. Beno, the World Socialism candidate, pledges to open a dialog with Islamic States and, while guaranteeing Israel’s security, dismantling Israel’s nuclear threat.

 

The Boca

May 6, 2020

Miami — Johnny-come-lately politician President Benjamin Armstrong has reacquired the historic presidential yacht, U.S.S. Sequoia. In re-naming the storied vessel Benny I, the former ABC sit-com star and converted television evangelist said, “It’s time America got back to her bedrock Christian roots.”Some say Benny should get back to his South Carolina roots too, and for good.

 

Zack sipped his Glenlivet and smiled. Partial to his own writing, he liked the last article best. The others, every time he read them, conjured wonder about words, reality and fiction.

His cell phone began to ring. Checking caller ID, he saw it was Mary O’Brien, thought about answering, decided not to and, the phone still ringing, left for a cold Bohemia beer and his favorite torrid Mexican food at the Bimini Road Café.