When Rome Stumbles

by David Kershner

  For assistance with her test analysis, she had partnered with her two former colleagues at the CDC. Her friend and mentor, Dr. Georgia Tipton was a molecular biologist and her husband, Dr. Ethan Caldoro, was a geneticist. This first trial run was performed on one hundred and twenty-five fields of varying size, climate, latitude, and altitude across the country. The field sampling was barely a fraction of a percentage of the commercial agriculture acreage available in the continental United States. By order of the USDA’s approval letter, thirty of the fields being tested for EC31 were GMO fields. These fields were designated as “Sample X” in their authorization.

  Emily had just pulled on her jacket and was reaching for the door when the phone rang. As she looked at the number displayed on the screen, she saw that it had originated from the CDC.

  “Hey, Georgia,” she answered before the caller identified themselves.

  “Nope. This time it’s Ethan. She’s already gone home for the evening. Before I left though, I wanted to stay and finish these tests and give you the results,” he replied.

  “Oh, sorry,” she apologized. “So what’s the word?”

  “Well, it looks like there is a slight abnormality in some of the insect larvae we sampled, but it dissipates quickly the further we get from the fields,” he started. “Also, the abnormalities are limited to the fields the USDA designated as ‘Sample X’. There are no issues with ‘Sample A’ fields.”

  “So is this good or bad news,” she said with a sigh of defeatism.

  “I’d say that given the fact that the abnormality was marginal for ‘Sample X’, at best, and couple that with the analysis that it dissipated so quickly away from the fields, the results are inconclusive at worst,” he continued.

  She was emotionally spent and couldn’t take it anymore. She wanted to scream, but calmly asked, “So what does this mean?” through gritted teeth.

  “It means that it looks like you might possibly have a winner on your hands,” he said.

  She began crying. Her hormones and stress were so amped her body started to break down. She could barely speak.

  “Hello? Are you still there?” Ethan said.

  “Yes... yes!” she corrected and said enthusiastically. “I’ve worked toward this day for so long that I really don’t know what to say,” she replied. Gratefully she gushed, “Thank you, thank you!”

  “Well, let’s not put the cart before the horse just yet. I don’t like these abnormalities in the ‘Sample X’ data so you’ve got some minor adjustments to make, but yeah, it looks like you did it Em. Congratulations,” he finally concluded.

  * * *

  Elias McInerney sat at the head of the table, his usual seat. Not only was it considered Washington-proper for the Secretary of the USDA to occupy the position of prominence, he had discovered years ago that it offered the best view of the Capital Dome.

  Today’s meeting would likely afford the Texan an opportunity for sightseeing as there was nothing pressing on the agenda. As a matter of fact, the only other person attending the regularly scheduled powwow was Mary, the Deputy Secretary of Agriculture.

  They were just finishing the uneventful session when a knock sounded at the door.

  “Come in,” McInerney bellowed in his deep, southern drawl.

  “Umm, sorry to interrupt, sir,” the shy college intern managed to eke out.

  “Yes, what is it Mara,” the Secretary said in a softer tone.

  Noticing his change in demeanor, Mary gave the Secretary a quizzical look.

  Half under his breath, Secretary McInerney explained that Mara was his grandniece and he had created an internship as a favor to his nephew.

  “You wanted me to notify you when the preliminary lab results were in for EC31,” Mara stated quickly without looking up.

  “Mara, I’m your uncle. We’re family. I’m not going to bite you. You can look at me when you speak to me,” the Secretary gently admonished the teen in a grandfatherly tone.

  “Yes, Mr. Secretary, sir,” Mara replied as she slowly raised her gaze to meet his.

  Mary Evans Stockard had never seen this side of the Secretary before. Maybe the presence of his grandniece might soften the old fart’s demeanor, she thought. Elias was known for his conservative, by the book rigidity. Perhaps with the inclusion of family on his staff, and his attitude more malleable, she could finally be more aggressive with some of the policies she wanted to implement. I need to get Mara indoctrinated quickly. I just wish she weren’t so intimidated by Elias.

  Secretary Elias McInerney was a seventy-one year old former cattle rancher from Texas and had been in charge of the USDA through seven presidents. His conservativeness spanned his politics and all national agriculture policies. Elias relished the fact that his position afforded him the opportunity to reserve final approval of anything and everything under his purview.

  He took the folder from Mara and she quickly scuttled her way back out of his office.

  “Sir, if I may,” the Deputy began. “It appears that you intimidate the hell out of that poor girl.”

  “I do not,” he replied indignantly.

  “Come on, Elias,” she said addressing him informally. “I’ve worked here almost twenty years and I’ve been dressed down more times by more bosses than I care to count,” she continued. “I’m a grown woman and stubborn to a fault, but you, frankly, even scare me,” she conceded.

  “Huh, must be the Texan in me that keeps people in line. Don’t mess with Texas,” he replied in his typical sardonic humor without looking up.

  Secretary McInerney slapped the folder closed and exclaimed, “Whatdoyaknow! That little girl in Ohio finally did it! She fixed EC31!”

  “That’s excellent news, sir. We’ve been waiting on that report for months,” she replied as she matched his excitement and then paused.

  Elias noticed.

  “What is it?” the Secretary asked.

  “It’s about Mara. With your permission, I’d like to take her under my wing. You know, show her the real D.C.”

  “Huh, I never would have pegged you for the mentoring type, Mary,” he replied.

  “What? Why not?”

  “Let’s see, and I’ll apologize now for my bluntness. You’re in your forties, you’ve not married, and you have no children. On top of that, there have been plenty of opportunities for you to mentor over the years and you didn’t show any interest in doing so then. Why jump at this one?” Elias asked.

  “I just think that this city and her job have her overwhelmed. It might be nice if another, less intimidating person, showed her around. Maybe someone of the same gender.”

  “You really want to do this?” the Secretary asked.

  “Absolutely,” she answered confidently. “If I’d had a teacher of sorts then perhaps I wouldn’t have spent so many years behind the eight ball... as it were,” Mary replied.

  “Well, if you feel that passionately about it then by all means do so. I won’t stop you from trying,” the Secretary replied.

  “Thank you, sir. I think it will really help her.”

  With that, the Deputy Secretary rose from her chair and left the room. On her way down the hall to her office she heard the Secretary’s booming voice call for Mara and she smiled.

  “Mara, get Administrator Swofford over at the EPA on the horn please,” the Secretary bellowed. “I need to talk to him about this preliminary lab report.”

  * * *

  The head of the Environmental Protection Agency entered the Capital Grill five-minutes early for his noon lunch with Secretary McInerney. The old guy was already waiting for him. How does that ancient bastard beat me here every time?

  “Elias, are you ever late for anything,” Jack asked as he took his seat at the table.

  “Never,” the Secretary replied without taking his eyes or his concentration away from the Politics section of the Washington Post.

  “Have you ordered yet?”

  “Nah, I was waiting for you,” the head of the USDA answe
red.

  The waiter appeared, wrote down their orders, and disappeared.

  “So you called this shindig. What’s up over at the USDA,” Jack asked as he leaned back in his chair. He began to raise his arms up to clasp them behind his head, but then remembered being admonished during a cabinet meeting for doing so. He recalled the older man stating that the gesture conveyed that a person was no longer listening attentively. According to the senior official, such body language was only slightly less insulting to a speaker than someone sitting with their arms crossed. For fear of being scolded again, he raised his hands up and feigned a stretch.

  The Secretary, true to his reputation for avoiding small talk, immediately cut to the crux of the meeting.

  “Just got the little girl’s report about the refactoring of EC31,” Elias began.”

  “Oh, and?” he asked leadingly.

  “She fixed it, Jack.”

  “Excellent!” Jack exclaimed. “The sooner we get Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public off our back about this Bt business the better. So when are you planning on approving a second round of trials?”

  “I thought we’d work together this time around, especially since the EPA has to approve pesticides,” McInerney replied.

  “Interesting. We rubber-stamped it for you on the initial phase. Why the change?” Jack asked curiously.

  “For starters, I am authorizing an increase in the field count from one twenty-five to two thousand. I’m also stipulating that the majority, three-quarters in fact, of the tests be run on the GMO crops.”

  Jack let out a long low whistle at that statement.

  “Elias, you know they have End User License Agreements in place prohibiting the testing of their seeds,” Jack offered.

  “Oh, I know. Nothing makes me madder than a hornet in a rain storm,” the Secretary said through gritted teeth trying to control himself. “But,” he continued. “I’m not testing their seeds. I’m testing EC31 on their seeds. There’s a difference.”

  “That’s a pretty fine line there. You sure you want to risk that?” Jack asked, clearly playing the devil’s advocate.

  “You know as well as I do that their documentation is crap, Jack. I refuse to accept their studies as gospel.”

  Both men knew that when GMOs, or Genetically Modified Organisms, first took off in the early 1990’s, companies like Tomason Industries, Ruhr Chemical, NFCC, and Hyloset forbid the independent testing of their seeds. Presumably, it was to protect what each company, more or less, called their intellectual property rights. In their own labs, each conglomerate had altered the tiny product at the genetic level to achieve different desired results. Each alteration was specific to the type of seed they wanted to market.

  Over the years, engineers had changed the gene sequence for plants like tomatoes, soy, and potatoes to increase shelf life, be resistant to weed killer, and generate its own pesticide respectively. They also re-engineered fruit, various vegetables, and certain grains to contain higher vitamin levels or to carry variant strains of malaria, hepatitis, and cholera as vaccines against these diseases.

  Throughout the last two decades of Secretary McInerney’s tenure at the USDA, independent tests have not been permitted. Therefore, no one knew what effects prolonged exposure to these products would do to the fragile ecosystems, food chains, and most importantly, the human body. To make matters worse, companies like Bathemore were essentially shooting in the dark when they were generating new and improved synthetics in the fertilizer, herbicide, and pesticide markets. They really had no idea as to the compatibility between their research and the GMO plants.

  As head of the USDA, Elias had taken on both the beef and dairy industries. He had discreetly revealed recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rGBH), also known as recombinant Bovine Somatotropin, to the general public. Once the consumers latched on to it, they demanded its removal from the animal diets. In response to the ‘consumer demand’ he had generated, the government agency published better information and implemented best practice policies. There were new regulations for grazing habits and the humane raising of all meat and poultry products. The terms ‘Free Range’, ‘No rGBH’, ‘Grass Fed’, and ‘Grain Finished’ became advertising and political buzzwords that defined the first decade of the century.

  During this same time, the vegetable growers had seen the frenzy Elias had stirred up and began implementing their own standards for what constituted ‘organic’. The produce market as a whole retooled their packaging to bring brand awareness to their naturally grown products and, of course, charged a premium.

  The important thing to the produce firms was that they had beaten Secretary McInerney to the advertising punch. By voluntarily adding a new healthier product line espousing ‘natural’, ‘organic’, and ‘non-processed’ ingredients, they successfully avoided the quagmire of rhetoric and mudslinging. As a result, they weren’t dragged down by negative publicity.

  The lone holdout had been the GMOs.

  “Jack, I’ve taken on some pretty big boys over the years. I won every time. If I can circumvent their agreements with some, oh, let’s call it political loopholes, then that’s what I’m gonna do,” Elias concluded.

  Chapter 2

  October 10th, 2021 - December 30th, 2021

  Former President Thomas Sarkes sat in the kitchen of his Victorian brownstone sipping at his coffee and reading the latest headlines in no less than four newspapers. His Secret Service detail busied themselves with their assigned security duties.

  As he read through the papers, he saw that a suicide bomber had attacked a United Nations (UN) checkpoint in Iran.

  “Damn it all,” he proclaimed to no one in particular.

  An Agent poked his head in the kitchen and said, “What’s that, sir?”

  “Oh, another crazy bugger in the Middle East is all. I knew we should have pulled our remaining troops from that UN led debacle before I left office,” the former President answered.

  In the run up to the election that put a then Senator Sarkes into the White House almost a decade earlier, Israel snapped. The tiny nation had absorbed Hamas and Hezbollah rocket fire from the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights for years. When the two factions started firing Iranian made missiles with greater accuracy and distance, they retaliated and went after the source.

  Diplomatic channels were quickly exhausted. The small country used the continued provocation as justification to attack Iran over its nuclear weapons program. As a result, the world had not seen peace for over twenty years. Not since September 11, 2001.

  The first target hit was Iran’s mythical enrichment and manufacturing facilities at Fordow. Then they waited.

  In response to losing its secreted complex, Syria, at the behest of its neighbor, unleashed all of Saddam Hussein’s hidden weapons of mass destruction on Israel. When the two countries loaded banned chemicals and fired them at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, they ended up uncorking a retaliatory firestorm on the Middle East not unlike Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  The Israeli’s waited a week until Iran began pouring men and equipment into what was left of the Fordow facility, and then they struck with precision and audacity.

  Tactical 1-kiloton nominal yield nuclear missile strikes were launched against the remains of the complex, as well as the manufacturing and military facilities in a number of Iranian cities and ports. Mossad also identified and targeted installations in Syria and Lebanon. All were viewed as being strongholds for munitions and were the staging points for the movement of known terrorist organizations. When Israel stopped shooting, a dozen firestorms had been ignited across the region.

  In the weeks, months, and years that followed, the four nations had effectively crippled the military, communications, and electrical infrastructures in each country. The Middle East was ablaze for half a decade before some semblance of order was restored and oil started to flow again. The UN, and a ‘coalition of the willing’, had stepped in and sent troops to quell the unrest and attempted to broker peace talks. However, as
was the case during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, negotiations took place, agreements were made, and then one of the combatants would violate the negotiated cease-fire, after they had regrouped and rearmed. Then it would start all over again.

  “I’d like to think I did a lot of good while I was in office, didn’t I?” Sarkes asked the Agent rhetorically. “I got the states to recognize an opportunity and two Amendments were written and ratified for Pete’s sake! How many Presidents’ can say that?” he thundered on. “We are no longer suckling on the foreign oil teat and I turned off the spigot that was the entitlement programs. I’ll tell here you now, as God is my witness, my biggest regret from my eight years was not bringing those boys home when I had the chance.”

  “That’s a heavy burden to carry alone, sir,” the man replied compassionately. “You couldn’t have known that giving up the Security Council seat was going to lead to all of this.”

  The President let the corner of his paper fold over so he could see the Agent while he contemplated a response. After a few moments he said, “Probably not, but I keep thinking that I should have had better people around me to help me flesh out some of my bolder plans.”

  Sarkes refolded the newspaper he had been reading and picked up another. The Secret Serviceman winced when he saw which one he grabbed and braced himself for the onslaught. He watched as the man’s face started turning shades of red with anger and contempt.

  “That... What the? Idiot!” the former leader of the free world stammered furiously. “What does he think he’s doing? Is he that deeply entrenched with his campaign financiers that he’d try and repeal my Amendments!” he thundered as he read further. “That putz is trying to get the Security Council seat back too?! The man’s gone insane! What the hell is up to? I’ll be in my office! Hold my calls!”