(Yes, this is inspired by "Atlas Shrugged." I forced myself to read it in quarantine. I was not impressed. It was overwritten, the heroes were two-dimensional and unsympathetic, and pretty much every unkind thing ever said about that book rings all the more truer for having read it with an open mind. But it did inspire this story. I kind of liked the villains. At least they had sympathetic motivations, if a poor grasp of change.)
Shrug and I Shoot
By C. M. Meggs, ICO-PSNA
(With the assistance of Raven Green)
The
Peoples’ States of North America
Pacific
Northwest Coast
June
3, RY 10
3:32
PM
“Okay,
big boy,” I say, my words traveling by soundwave past the barrel of my gun. “Take
a deep breath and calm down. This isn’t the end of the world. It’s a
retirement, and in two years, nobody will care. You got to be an Olympian. Now
you need to pass the torch. That’s what’s fair. This other shit, you know that
won’t stand. You’d done wrong and you’re caught now, so do the right thing,
now, at least.”
I
doubt my words ease the conscience of the man at the other end of my gun. But I
can only do so much for him. He’s not my primary concern. I have my duties, and
my boundaries. It’s not for this man, we built the world. It’s for everyone,
and he can either be part of everyone, or choose otherwise. It’s his choice. No
one’s taken away his freedom. But no one took away consequences, either.
“It’s
not right, Cuddy. It’s not the way it’s meant to be,” Floyd Lykens says. He
pleads. He’s looking in my eyes as if he expects to find sympathy. I know he
will be disappointed, when he doesn’t, but I have no motivation to hurry him
along to that disappointment. He’ll get there himself, and I won’t have to
expend needless energy either way.
Floyd’s
face is red and flustered, and he stands at my desk. He refuses to sit. I wish
he would sit. I’ve asked him to sit. He won’t. His palms are on the desk and
he’s slightly hunched, but I’m sitting down, so he’s still standing over me. I
don’t like the way his palms claim the wood. I don’t like the way his shadow
falls on the surface. There is something oppressive about it. He is
communicating entitlement with his body. But I can’t blame him, if he wants to
intimidate me. He can try. It’s fair game. My job is to intimidate him.
Eventually, he’ll give up. He’ll pass on the torch to somebody else. Somebody
younger and more progressive, somebody more understanding of our goals and
motivations. That somebody will be easier to control. Eventually, they won’t
need me here. Eventually, I’ll stop finding evidence of sabotage. But until
that time, I have my gun. And what I say here, goes.
But
then, what he says next, is: “It’s slavery. Pure, and simple. Slavery, Cuddy.
They can’t expect a man to live like this.”
“How
do you expect anyone to live?” I ask. “How do you expect your workers to live,
if you don’t think they deserve your same dignity?”
They
call me a government liaison here, but technically, my title in the Civil Service
is “Industrial Compliance Officer.”
I
don’t like pretense or euphemism. But I’m not the one making up terms like that,
I just contribute to the suggestion box, and between fighting inaccurate
language use and fighting the objective reality of evil, I choose to preserve
language and fight evil. It’s evil I spend so much time with. Necessary evil,
but we’re working on that. That’s why I carry a gun for my job. It’s holstered
on the right side of my hip, a grey semi-automatic of industrial countenance. Dull
gunmetal grey, not something ostentatiously gleaming like the guns of the
enemy. I’m supposed to remember that it’s merely a tool, like they used to say
of money. It’s a reminder to that element which I am assigned to oversee, that
if they should step out of line, it is my duty to see that they step back in.
Otherwise, they die, and no, I don’t lose sleep. There are many things that
keep me up at night, but the bruised egos and paranoid fears of these barons do
not disturb my sleep. On the whole, I’d rather not live on the Silicon Coast. I
miss Philadelphia. But there is more work to do here. For now, the West Coast
has more necessary evil than Philadelphia, so this is where I’m needed.
That
might sound harsh, about not losing sleep, but in the Old Times, these people
owned the means of production. Not just production- the means of life. They
owned factories and gem mines, tenement buildings, and even whole neighborhoods.
They owned other humans through their mastery of wealth. They routinely made
decisions that left people poor, homeless, disfigured, or dead. When the People
finally tired of their collective oppression, there were certain groups we
could do without. We executed all the slumlords in one day when housing was
made a public right. It was televised, and most people cheered as the slumlords
were led to stand on chairs with their necks tied. They cheered even louder
when the chairs were kicked away from under these traitors to humanity. I attended
these celebrations with my family, and I knew they were only the beginning.
But
we still need the industrialists. For now. And that is why I carry a gun. It’s
a standard issue weapon from the Peoples’ Armory, in case the reactionaries
attempt my assassination.
On
the whole, the revolution was far less violent than the last four hundred years
of capitalism were. There was no genocide or slavery involved. We simply
redistributed wealth and reorganized production along more rational lines to
satisfy need and optimal contribution based on ability. A lot of people thought
things would get better because you-know-who was out of office. And things did
get a little better. But the country remained racist and patriarchal. It
wasn’t long before people remembered that most of the problems that concerned
them were only exacerbated from the top for four years. That you-know-who
didn’t invent these problems. He was merely a manifestation of capitalism’s
acceleration toward its own destruction. The liberal establishment assumed a
return to normalcy would be greeted with near universal welcome by
“progressives,” but a lot of the people who they dismissively lumped together
as “progressives,” without the man at the top to blame, remembered that they
hadn’t much love for the old status quo, either. And why should they? It was
unequal, and that kind of social stratification was violent in itself. That
violence breeds more violence until the system destroys itself and the People
organize, bottom-up, grassroots style, to replace it with something better. And
that’s exactly what happened. Twenty years ago, people like me were warning
everyone else it would happen. And we got treated like Cassandra in the story
of the Trojan Horse. It was the same with the Christian Right. I was calling
them fascists before it was acceptable, socially, to call them fascists. I used
to tell my friends, who didn’t know why I bothered, that I was afraid. That if
these people didn’t believe in evidence-based public policy when it came to
teaching kids about science or safe sex, that we’d be totally fucking screwed
if there was ever a pandemic.
Then,
there was a pandemic, and all the people who refused to believe in
evolution or evidence-based sex ed, or climate change, unsurprisingly also
refused to wear masks and practice social distancing. If I could see this in
2008, what was everyone else’s excuse?
Look,
there’s reasons people like me have guns. There are reasons people like Floyd
have to do what I say. Unless they want to walk away and forget it. They could.
They could just enjoy themselves. They don’t have to take this seriously
anymore. It’s really not that important. It’s not even about money. We don’t
use money now. It’s just about their fucking egos. All they have left are their
names, and in a generation or two, we will just rename things. A rose, by any
other name, would smell just as sweet, yes?
I
haven’t had to use the gun, yet. Hopefully, I never will. Hopefully, the
element I oversee will come to appreciate that cooperation is in their best
interest. We have no desire to make of them slaves. We merely wish to eliminate
their unique set of socioeconomic privileges. Not by taking away rights, but by
expanding them beyond their set. And we nearly have. Their estates were
confiscated, and they were allocated spacious and comfortable houses and apartments.
They were given choice when we relocated them to make more efficient use of the
resources they had hoarded in their heavily guarded compounds. The grounds that
once filled in the borders of their extended egos now see more practical use.
Their mansions were converted into public housing. Their cars, high-end and
hard to maintain symbols of status, were stripped down to their most useful
components and recycled into more productive machinery. Their private armies
have been disbanded. The police that once protected their property rights have
been abolished and replaced by a different kind of police, no longer conflicted
by the equation of life and property. Their vast collections of art and
artifacts have been relocated across the continent to museums and libraries,
where they can be appreciated without special access. They have been reclaimed
by the People. Culture has been reclaimed. The libraries and community centers
are re-opening. People are taking pride now, in themselves, in a way they
couldn’t before, when they were forced into a high-stakes, daily game of
quotidian survival.
The
People have education, now. They have roofs over their heads. They no longer
must choose between spiritual and material struggle. Not a single house of
worship has been shuttered by the new government, but freely, most of us have
chosen to leave the trappings of religion for the progress of a science and
industry no longer shackled to the interests of class enemies. Rival nations-
warmongering oligarchies like the Russian Federation and the Corporate Republic
of China- call us a slave-state. They claim we know not liberty nor freedom.
But their concept of what these things are is rooted in the value system of the
people we no longer permit to lead us, morally, or through official means. We
deny them the authority they enjoyed. Those were the individuals that nearly
destroyed this country. It was we, the People, who saved it.
My
son, my daughter, once rejected, impoverished, are freer today than they have
ever been. They are students and workers, and no one can tell them they do not
deserve their education, their health, and their homes. No one can tell them
they did not work hard enough, or otherwise they would know success. They know
very well that is possible to do everything the right way and still fail. At
least, it used to be. Under the old system, that was the rule, and success was
the exception. Now, we build success up from the ground.
My
children could never understand the hell I crawled out from, that hateful fire
of dismissal and willing ignorance that threatened to consume all life in the
name of property, before we organized, and changed everything.
No industrialist has been jailed simply for
being rich. They are no longer rich, but they are still free. They have all the
same rights as other workers. The only reason to punish them would be if they
continue to do harm. They are free to do other things, if they should wish it.
They could walk away from all this. Retire unto themselves. Some have done so.
I admire them, as I admire the ones who haven’t, who still come to this office,
to face me every day, sitting in their old seats, or standing, like this one, while
my one hand grips the butt of my gun, the other opens a thick volume to a
middle page on my desk. The book and the gun are both implied threats. No
longer content to shame ourselves into pacifistic submission, no longer willing
to simply accept our material conditions and resign hope to some intangible
faith, we now meet their force with righteous force.
I
long for the day when we Liaisons can leave the running of the factories to the
unarmed. But there is still much work to do: dissuasion, discouragement,
disenfranchisement. These are neither sins nor virtues. They are simply steps
in a plan. There is an end in sight, and that end is freedom. It is liberty. It
is equality, without contradiction or sacrifice. Without caveats, or terms, or
hidden clauses, or very small fonts. This is the thing we fought for- the right
to build for ourselves. If these former barons must live in fear for the rest
of their lives, it is enough, that their children, and our children, will never
know disparity again. They will not grow up to resent each other for being born
into stratification. Never again, will they suffer, isolated, in their ivory
towers, the cannibalistic impulses of their aggressive minds devouring
themselves and each other for sustenance. They are free to wonder, imagine, and
think. They can move, dance, pray, or conduct experiments. No one will stop
them. We simply do not allow them to profit anymore. It is the People that
profit. Wealth that is not shared, is hoarded. When the new government came to
power, we sent our military forces out to all the offshore tax shelters we knew
about, and we took back the wealth they stole. We didn’t make a lot of friends.
But we are stronger, now, and we have justice.
Still,
I have a job to do. The fight is not completely won. Sometimes, we find things,
the old guard has tried to hide from us. Like this factory in Mexico that’s not
in any of the books.
“Look,
we gave you a chance to come clean ten years ago. You were supposed to transfer
all production back into the country. Give the jobs back. Raise your workers’
standard of living. You told us you did. You signed an oath. Now we find out you’ve
been hiding this little operation from us. What’re you paying those Mexican
workers? Are you even paying them?”
“The
Neveras Plant is not your concern. We have a contract…”
“The
Peoples’ State of Mexico declared your contract null and void when they
nationalized your partners. Now, they’re part of the PSNA, too. You’re no
longer dealing with another country. They found out, so we found out, and now,
it has to stop. So, you can shut it down yourself, or I will shut it down for
you. You don’t get to exploit people anymore. You don’t get to pursue ever
cheaper labor until you’ve reinvented slavery. We don’t let you do that
anymore. Never again, Floyd.”
“No,”
said Floyd. “It’s you who exploit them. You exploit what you did not invent and
cannot reproduce without people like me.”
I
shook my head. He still didn’t understand. Not everyone thought like him. There
were enough who believed in the public good that we could replace people like
him, if we needed to. It wasn’t our first choice, and that’s why I was assigned
here, to encourage their cooperation. But we had other means. And we weren’t
afraid to use them against the last bourgeois remnant.
This
naked gun of mine- an expression of force purer, less convoluted than the old
way of money- was still cold. This office- one of many. I walk through the
halls of all the tech giants, and inhabit offices like these, with a shiny
leather briefcase ominously snapping against my starched, militaristic
trousers, my uniform-like dull green shirt with enough open buttons to display
coiled black chest hairs. The clothes were a reminder that I was not one of
them. That I was here to make sure they played along. They still went through
the motions of things the old way. They wore their suits and ties and drove
cars they thought made them respectable, but the bitter resentment against them
that launched the revolution was only spreading.
I
jam the gun in his face, and I lick my lips in a theatrical display of menace,
calculating fear.
“Would
you rather be ugly or dead?” I ask him.
“Huh?”
“Theoretical
question. Ugly? Or dead? Since you don’t seem to not want me to shoot you.
Otherwise you’d cooperate with the new economic program. You wouldn’t be
finding loopholes or hiding shit under the carpet. You would’ve been honest,
and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Do you think I like this?
Man, people like you really piss me off. Your problem is you refuse to take
accountability. You were warned. Many, many times. And you didn’t listen. Face
it man. Class war’s over. Your side lost. But I’d still really like to treat
you like a human being and a willing partner in the uplift of all of us. I just
wish you could see that. I wish you understood you could be part of this.”
“Who
made you so hateful?” Floyd asks me contemptuously. I resent the implication
that it was I who had a problem. So, I don’t answer.
“What
made you so selfish?” I ask him.
“It’s
not ‘selfish,’” he says. “It’s self-interest. That’s different.”
“Not
different enough,” I say. “Not enough to matter. Floyd… go home, okay? Take a
rest week. Then, come back and tell me if you still want to fight this. And if
you do, you can lodge a complaint. But don’t go all hyperbolic and accuse us of
reinventing slavery. It’s intellectually dishonest and it’s insulting to actual
slaves and their descendants. That includes all the people still held in actual
fucking slavery in the capitalist world. So, don’t ever let me hear you say
that word again, you insincere and spoiled little motherfucker. You’ve violated
our labor codes and I’ve caught you. I’ve chosen to deal with you myself rather
than report you to someone who doesn’t know you and doesn’t appreciate your
work. Please, cooperate with me.”
He
had to cooperate! His company was nationalized. It was our business if he was
outsourcing labor to a sweatshop. Humanity was our business.
“Floyd,
under the terms of the new system, you’re not allowed to do this. It’s wrong
and inhumane and you know it.”
“Well,
you like your phone, don’t you? You like video-calling your kids in Philly? You
like browsing FaceWeb on your break? You like the touchscreen and the MeTube
app and the alarm that reminds you about Mother’s Day?”
I
take my phone out of my pocket and hold it up to him, the screen facing him.
“Yeah,
but I don’t love my phone,” I say. I throw it forcefully on the ground
and the screen, satisfyingly, cracks. Things can be replaced.
How
could any human being think a fucking smart phone was worth sweat shops?
I
pick up the now-broken phone and I hold it out for Floyd like I want him to
take it from my hand.
“Here.
You can have your phone back,” I say.
He
looks at me with his jaw hanging slightly open, like a question is frozen on
his face. But unless he asks it, directly, I have no intent to answer.
I
already know what it’s likely to be.
He
still wants to know what makes me so hateful.
He
just doesn’t get it, and maybe he will, one day, and maybe he won’t. That’s not
my problem. I’m not social services. It’s not my job to morally rehabilitate
the old ruling class. It’s my job to find out about things like sweatshops
being run in our own midst. It’s my job to shut them down. I offered to do this
quietly, so it didn’t hurt Floyd. But Floyd couldn’t see the logic in this
proposal. He must have been pocketing foreign money. Someone bribed him. That
was enough. That was all it took. The promise of more than he needed. What a
shallow, despicable man.
“What
I hate,” I tell him, in no uncertain terms, “Is when people like you still
refuse to learn from the past. We tried things your way, and it was bad for a
lot of people. They didn’t like it. So now, things are different. You have to
deal with that. You could still walk away. Please, please walk away.”
He
says nothing. He considers his life. He turns around. He walks away.
I
pull back the slide to dislodge the bullet from the chamber. I eject the clip
from the magazine, and I push the bullet back inside.
Not
a bullet wasted. The only paperwork I’ll have to do is the retirement slip.
This was a victory. Not having to hurt him. To make him comply.
One
day there won’t be a need for men like me. We can be recycled, too.