Rules of Resistance

by I. M. Hunt-Logan

  “Oh,” she says, thinking it through. She purses her lips, suppressing a smile. “I buy that.”

  “Imogen.”

  She turns to me, all innocence. “What?”

  “You put Mrs. McCready up to it. That’s why you were there.”

  Her smile is somewhere between sly and gleeful.

  “Yeah, we worked it out together. Edna practiced it like fifty times with us throwing different potential Reed efforts to shut her down at her. The big guy in the front row, the one who yelled at Reed to let Edna have her say? That guy is her nephew. Pretty good, huh? I score it Commonsense: 1. Symbolism: 0.”

  “Yeah, well, Corey was pretty convinced that Mrs. McCready was going to be painted as anti-religious. 1–0 is a half-time box score. We won’t know the final score until folks like Sean Hannity weigh in. Which I don’t expect to go your way. I think you’ll be lucky to play to a draw. Attacking the virgin birth? What were you thinking?”

  “You’re missing the point, Iz. The virgin birth is a symbol of Christians’ magical thinking when it comes to sex. Akin to thinking everybody’s gonna give up sex, just ’cause some ugly old white guys say they should.”

  “Gimme a break. Like anybody’s gonna get that. You need to get over your animus against Christians.”

  “You’re probably right.” She looks a little deflated. Wow. Imogen demonstrating learning.

  The tea is now drinkable, just about perfect, in fact.

  “Still”—Imogen pumps a fist in the air—“Go LIONS!”

  Incorrigible.

  “And I have to say it again, your guy Corey is a Grade A asshole.”

  “You don’t know the half of it. Corey came by the office afterwards, and there was a nasty scene. Corey started talking about religion and symbolism. Darryl said it was hard to refute that less contraception was likely to mean more abortion. Darryl stood up to him, and Corey just lost it. Yelling at Darryl to nut-up and calling us both pussies. He definitely did not like being challenged by Darryl. Darryl was grossed out by Corey’s behavior, by the way.”

  She looks at me but makes no comment. Instead she asks, “Are you still getting media calls about Dangerous World?”

  The Modesto Bee, Sacramento Bee, and LA Times all ran short pieces, blurbs really, when the ad launched. They quoted Delgado’s criticism and Corey’s tissue-thin defense. Interest has pretty much evaporated since then.

  “No, that’s dried up. We’re still getting visits to the website, viewing the ad, but even that’s starting to taper off. I’m wondering if I need to up the ante.”

  “Up the ante? You already equated Black Lives Matter with terrorists. Seriously, Iz. What if you’re wrong about this? What if there is no racist bridge-too-far?”

  When I don’t answer, she gets up off the couch, headed for the bathroom.

  “I need a long, hot shower.”

  She pauses in the doorway to look back at me. “What you should be wondering about is when you’re going to fire Corey. That guy is dangerous. Seriously, Iz. He needs to go.”

  I’m not defending Corey’s behavior, but it’s always imperatives with Imogen.

  30

  Earnings vs Entitlement

  Friday, October 12th, 25 days until the midterms

  “[R]ace (and racism) isn’t so easily separated from the policy ideas that Ryan has most championed: shrinking the welfare state.”

  Julia Azari, “Why Saying Paul Ryan and Donald Trump Belong to Different Parties Is Kinda Wrong,” FiveThirtyEight.com, April 26, 2018.25

  It’s a little after four when we push through the door to the Branding Iron. We expect it to be dead empty, but there’s a gaggle of twenty-somethings shooting pool in the back room. They provide a pleasant buzz that’s easy to talk over in the front of the bar, which we have to ourselves.

  Charlene’s on duty today, but the twenty-somethings are a thirsty lot. Once she’s made sure we’ve each got a beer in front of us, she’s back to the other end of the bar, busy providing the twenty-somethings with booze and Darryl and me with a view of a rather fine rear sporting scandalously low-slung jeans.

  Settled in on stools, we take big swallows of our beers. I feel the alcohol hit my bloodstream fast, a slipperiness in my arms, and it’s a relief, after the overstimulation of another round of war games at the shooting range.

  Darryl took the afternoon off from his day job for a dentist appointment. The appointment wrapped up early, so he called me at the office to see if there was RAPAC work that needed doing. I made an executive decision that team-building at the firing range was just what the doctor ordered. The only logical choice after target practice was the Branding Iron.

  “Ah, that hits the spot,” sighs Darryl.

  “I’ll say.”

  “How’s your dad? The new clinic working out?”

  “He liked the old one better, but he’s hanging in there.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “But I’m still worried. Since the Trump tax cuts, I’ve been seeing reports that Paul Ryan says the deficit will require cutting entitlements, welfare, maybe even Social Security. A lot of folks really depend on their Social Security. You’re a finance guy, Iz—how do you think making government smaller is gonna play out?”

  I down half the beer with the next swallow. I may need a couple more of these. I thought we were gonna talk shooting and equipment, the way we did last time. You would not believe the reaction I got from Imogen when I opined on the relative merits of the Sig Sauer P238 versus the Glock Model 17, opinions cribbed word for word from Darryl. The same Darryl Gniewek who actually holds a patent on a precision reloader that enjoys a bit of a cult following among gun enthusiasts. Ha! Let me tell you, I never got that kind of rise out of her comparing SRAM or Shimano bicycle derailleurs at Zott’s. (BTW: I only used the word ‘opined’ because Imogen hates that word. I’m not enough of an asshole to actually use it without the intent to inflict brotherly torture.)

  I’m kind of surprised Darryl is asking about small government specifics. Corey said ‘small government’ was a Republican catechism, that the base was careful not to look too closely at the fine print. Maybe the disruption to his father’s drug treatment got Darryl’s attention.

  “Help me out here, Darryl, get me started. ‘Small government,’ tell me what that looks like to you.”

  “Preventing government from messing in areas it has no business in. Burdensome, even ridiculous regulations that make it hard to get business done or create jobs.”

  “Okay,” I say, polishing off the beer and signaling to Charlene for another round. That went down way too easy. “Can you give me an example?”

  Darryl polishes his beer off, too, and sets it close to Charlene’s edge of the bar. “Off the top of my head?” Darryl’s eyebrows approach his hairline. “Well I think there are EPA regulations that really hurt the coal industry, caused a lot of job loss. I don’t know the specifics.”

  “Huh,” I say, “most economists think the low cost of natural gas and automation killed mining jobs. But that’s another conversation. Let’s talk about the EPA. The EPA budget is less than a quarter of 1 percent of the federal budget, 8 billion versus roughly 4 trillion.26, 27 Of course, a lot of the EPA budget isn’t going to regulation, to preventing spills and such. Nowadays, a lot of EPA money is spent on Scott Pruitt. On his first-class travel with his wife to Europe, on his private security guards and his special sound-proof phone booth.”

  Darryl is concentrating but looks confused.

  “Scott Pruitt? President Trump’s pick to head the EPA?”

  I guess Scott Pruitt isn’t getting much coverage on AM talk radio.

  Time to change course. “Never mind. Point is, a lot of the EPA budget goes to cleaning up superfund sites, oil and chemical spills that’ve already happened. Chemicals with unpronounceable names with lots of syllables that begin with ‘hex’ and end with ‘ium’ or ‘ine.’”

  I’m running at the mouth, but I still have Darryl’s full attentio
n. His eyes are narrowed in concentration; this is important to him.

  I say, “Honestly, those names don’t mean much to me. I barely passed chemistry.”

  “Me either,” says Darryl with a shrug, a laconic man’s shorthand for ‘Don’t worry about it, it happens to all of us.’

  We are both pleased to have identified this common ground, even if it’s just ignorance. Too bad it has absolutely no impact on the budget.

  “But it doesn’t matter.”

  “What doesn’t matter?” Darryl’s eyes narrow again in concentration, ready to get back to work.

  “Whether or not we paid attention in chemistry class, hexavalent chromium is still gonna give our kids cancer. It turns out that ignorance provides no protection at all against bad things. Not even if that ignorance is willful. Just like saying global warming is a hoax won’t protect your house from Hurricane Harvey. But we’re talking budgets, not science. Let’s say we have Paul Ryan’s ear and we can eliminate the EPA and poison ourselves and future generations to our hearts’ content. It doesn’t matter because, despite the environmental disaster that would result, it’s not gonna shrink the government so that you’d notice. Math bends to no man, certainly not that putz Paul Ryan. Killing the EPA will save us less than a quarter of a penny on the dollar. I hate to say it, Darryl, but it’s really hard to talk about shrinking government without talking about cutting the entitlement programs, and Social Security is the biggest.”

  Darryl looks a little whiplashed, and I note that my second beer is already half gone. I’m starting to really feel it. Alcohol sometimes makes me a Chatty Cathy. At least that’s what Imogen says.

  “Let’s get rid of all the foreign aid first,” Darryl says, offering up another of Republican orthodoxy’s whipping boys.

  “Foreign aid? Like helping needy people around the world?”

  “Charity begins at home?” says Darryl, like it’s an answer that has worked other places, so maybe it’ll work here.

  “Alright!” I say, slapping the top of the bar for emphasis. “Let’s cut 100 percent of foreign aid. Food aid to skeletal babies in South Sudan and Somalia? Medical aid to babies dying of cholera in Yemen? Gone and gone. You know what you have just saved on behalf of the American taxpayer?”

  “How much?” asks Darryl hopefully.

  “All foreign aid makes up less than 1 percent of the federal budget,28 and now we have lots of dead babies. Of course, they’re all foreign babies, and I mean really foreign, like not from Europe or anything.”

  I pause for a moment, and the thought crosses my mind that ethanol on an empty stomach after an adrenaline dump could get me into trouble. I’m challenging Darryl with the facts, which is to say, making essentially Democratic arguments, and I better be careful or I’m gonna out myself. But instead of shutting up, I start talking again.

  “Which brings us back to Social Security. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid make up the majority of the budget, Darryl. I don’t see how we get around cutting them.”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” says Darryl.

  He sets his beer down and rotates on his barstool, so that he’s facing me. His face is intent.

  Oh man, I think, Darryl’s gonna call me out on my dead-foreign-babies = dead-non-white-babies = who-cares comment. At least I didn’t say ‘brown babies,’ but still. Course, if he calls me on the racism, that’ll put old Imogen in her place.

  Instead he says, like it’s an original thought, “Let’s root out fraud. I heard tens of thousands of people get Social Security who aren’t eligible, something like 22,000 last year alone. Over the last decade they spent like one billion on folks who don’t even have Social Security numbers.”29

  I gotta admit I’m surprised to hear data this specific from Darryl. He is decades from collecting Social Security himself, and I’m surprised he cared enough about Social Security to read up on fraud stats. I’ve heard those numbers, but that’s because I live with Imogen. Imogen keeps numbers like that at her fingertips, along with the context that lets you know what those numbers really mean. I give Darryl the context.

  “Something like 66 million30 Americans get Social Security at any given time, so fraud is the teeniest drop in the bucket. Even if we could track down and cut off every one of those 22,000 people, that would account for an infinitesimal fraction of 1 percent of recipients. The Social Security budget is in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars a year. Trillion with a T. I don’t even know how many zeros that is. Losing a billion over a decade, honestly that’s not even a rounding error. If we’re seriously talking about fixing the Social Security deficit and shrinking the size of government, we’re talking about cutting benefits, maybe by raising the age of eligibility, maybe by reducing payments. Honestly? Probably both.”

  Darryl turns back to the bar, rotating his beer in his hands as he concentrates. I suspect that having exhausted the Republican trinity of small government targets—regulation, foreign aid, and fraud—Darryl finds himself in uncharted territory.

  “Isaiah, Republicans who voted in November of 2016 voted for Donald Trump. And Mr. Trump said he was going to fix Social Security. He said ‘it’s reasonable for people who paid into a system to expect to get paid, that’s not entitlement,’ he said, ‘that’s honoring a deal.’ That’s pretty much word for word.”

  “I know he said that, but he said a lot of things,” I say. “And he sure hasn’t presented any kind of plan that addresses the trillions of dollars in Social Security shortfall. In fact, the Trump tax cut makes the arithmetic a hell of a lot harder.”

  Darryl turns to me, his face full of resolve. Whatever’s coming is Darryl’s last line of defense, a place he’d hoped he wouldn’t have to go.

  “My dad moved back to Ohio five years ago, to help out his mom when she got lung cancer,” he says. “He’s been helping out all his life. He left school early when his dad died, to go to work and help his mom raise his younger siblings. He apprenticed himself out and became a welder and worked as a welder for nearly thirty years. He taught me how to throw a football. He came to every one of my high school games. He taught me how to handle a chainsaw and a rifle.”

  The beer has made Darryl chatty too. I can’t figure out how this is relevant, but Darryl’s face is wide open; he really wants me to understand this.

  “My dad was always the first one to help Mrs. Savage, an older lady down the street from where my grandmother lives in Ohio. He’d shovel her walk or take care of upkeep on her property, a little paint here, a fixed shutter there.”

  I—whose biological father had trouble making it home, let alone to even one of my track meets, whose father was in the wind long before our mother was diagnosed with cancer—I have to admit I’m impressed with this paragon Darryl describes. I am moved almost to envy to hear about this father, and it’s not just the beer. He must be a genuinely decent man to inspire this kind of love and devotion.

  “A couple years ago, while he was cleaning out the gutters on Mrs. Savage’s house, he had a bad fall. Messed up his back pretty bad. Turned out there was nothing the doctors could do for him, except pain meds. Because it didn’t happen at work, he’s not eligible for workers comp. Instead, he’s on Social Security. SSDI, it’s called. It’s not welfare,” Darryl insists. “Dad paid in to Social Security for decades. It’s really more like insurance, and it’s all he has to live on.”

  Ah. So this is why Darryl is concerned enough about Social Security to look at the fine print. But Darryl seems unaware that there is no program called ‘welfare’—unaware that when Republicans talk about entitlement reform, they are absolutely, definitely talking about Social Security.

  “When I hear people talking about cutting Social Security, I have to tell you, I wonder why it’s even legal. I’ve seen Dad’s old paystubs. Every one of them has a Social Security deduction. For thirty years he paid in, thousands of dollars every year, and now somebody wants to change the rules? How is that not breach of contract? My dad did all the right th
ings. He deserves—he . . . he . . . earned his Social Security.”

  The determination in Darryl’s voice has taken on a tinge of desperation. Nothing will be gained by pointing out that Social Security functions more like a Ponzi scheme than insurance.

  When I say nothing, Darryl says, “Real people, people like my dad, will get hurt if you gut Social Security.”

  And because the beer is really hitting me, and because that is exactly what I, and tens of millions of other Democrats believe, I say, “Yeah, a lot of people are relying on Social Security. If Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare are cut, a lot of people will be hurt. I hear you, Darryl.”

  Darryl sits back abruptly in his chair, relief on his face, the relief of being heard and understood.

  I, myself, do not feel heard. I’m not at all sure that once this kumbaya moment fades, that Darryl will remember the simple arithmetic lesson I’ve been trying to impart or recognize that his father’s fundamental decency has no bearing on that arithmetic. Intact Social Security and Medicare are incompatible with small government, incompatible with cutting taxes, and therefore incompatible with the most cherished objectives of the Republican elite. Maybe Corey was right after all. Republican voters really are committed to magical thinking.

  I slide off my barstool to head to the restroom, patting Darryl on the shoulder on my way. “Your dad sounds like a fine man—you’re really lucky,” I say, and again, I mean every word of it.

  I signal to Charlene for another round, knowing it won’t be the last and hoping they have Uber in Modesto.

  It’s not ’til I’m crashed out back at the apartment, wondering if I’m gonna be hungover in the morning, that it occurs to me that Darryl’s belief that Donald Trump would protect Social Security, simply because he said so, raises the question of why Darryl didn’t believe that Donald Trump was a racist when Trump said things like Mexican are rapists and Muslims are terrorists. How can I ask Darryl this question without sounding like I’m accusing him of being a racist?