Rules of Resistance

by I. M. Hunt-Logan

  “They’re all asking about Tamir Rice and all asking to speak to Corey.”

  Corey turns to me. “You added the Tamir Rice photo?”

  “Yeah. The first version of Dangerous World was petering out. So I added the Rice photo. It appears to be making an impact.”

  “It does, indeed. Let’s step into the conference room to discuss our response,” he says, holding the conference room door for me. “Darryl, if you wouldn’t mind taking more messages for a bit?”

  Corey shuts the door and makes himself comfortable at the head of the conference table. I wait to see how he’s going to play this. With the door shut, the room is airless and close. The paintings on the wall are as hideous as the one I took down off my office wall.

  “Well, well, well. You have surely poked the hornets’ nest, Iz Whitman. I didn’t think you had it in you. So did you give some thought to how you wanted to play this?”

  The ad is indefensible: that was the whole point.

  I say, “Managing the liberal media is your wheelhouse, Corey. You promised to give as good as you got from the Rachel Maddows of the world. It’s why I hired you. I was looking forward to seeing how you play them.”

  There is nothing even approaching an apology in my voice. If anything, my voice contains a dare. Not telling him was a setup, and we both know it.

  “It would have been good to have a heads-up, Isaiah, a little time to get my game face on.” Corey gives me a knowing smile.

  It’s a surprisingly restrained rebuke. He knows I don’t like him. No matter how good my poker face, he simply cannot have missed my revulsion. Does he attribute my failure to warn him, give him time to prepare, to that dislike? He, himself, likes to give rein to his pettier impulses. Perhaps he assumes the same of me. Or is he finally beginning to suspect that RAPAC is a Trojan horse?

  “Let’s start with the easy stuff. On the black/white front, the first half pictures are simply the photos of the perpetrators. The photos in the second half are ‘representative.’ Sixty to eighty percent of the armed services are white, so where’s the problem?”

  Evidently my role is to play the liberal media.

  “I’d say the ad appears to equate black and brown people with evil and white with virtue. What would you say to that?”

  “I’d say it’s ridiculous. Is the caller asking that we find photographs of Caucasian jihadists? We simply presented photos of perpetrators. Period. With regard to the policemen and servicemen, while it’s true there are non-white, non-male members of the different armed services, the biggest share of each of the services is white and male. Those photos are merely representative. Is the caller asking us to present the fiction that the Marines look like the United Nations? It does not. Representative Reed is running an ad where he appears in the Oval Office with the president. Does the caller want the Reed campaign to create an alternate ad, where Representative Reed goes to Washington to work with a black female behind the Lincoln desk in the Oval Office? Not only would that be ridiculous PC fiction, it would be confusing as hell.”

  Corey is enjoying himself. He suspects I didn’t tell him about the change in order to show him who’s boss. This little debate is his chance to show I’m not playing in his league.

  “I’d say that the ad fails to ‘represent’ the range of threats here on American soil. Where are the white perpetrators of mass killings? Where is Timothy McVeigh? Where is Dylann Roof?”

  “Given time limitations, the ad can’t be exhaustive. What the ad does, is accurately reflect the average American’s concerns.”

  Corey, as promised, is pretty good at this.

  “Are you saying the ‘average’ American is white?”

  Corey scoffs at me. “Obviously. About 60 percent of America is white. So, obviously, reflecting the concerns of the average citizen will capture concerns of white Americans.”

  It’s making me a little queasy, witnessing how easily Corey skim-coats the blatant racism of Dangerous World 2.0.

  “You haven’t come close to addressing the elephant in the room, or in the ad. Are you saying white Americans are afraid of twelve-year-old children playing with toy guns and think they should be gunned down?”

  “That is a ridiculous cherry-picking of the facts in the case. You’ve whitewashed the context of the incident. The troubled neighborhood, the threatening physicality of Rice, his possession of what appeared to be a firearm. Let me remind you, Officer Loehmann’s actions were deemed justified by the grand jury, which refused to indict. They determined that it was reasonable for Officer Loehmann to consider Rice a threat. The neighbor, a member of the troubled community, who called in the presence of an apparently armed Rice in the playground also believed Rice to be a threat. Rice, like the rioters in the ad, was threatening the peace. Officer Loehmann neutralized the threat.”

  It is utterly and completely indefensible to equate a twelve-year-old child playing with a toy with criminals or terrorists simply because that child is African American. The grand jury that refused to indict Loehmann was racist and gave their blessing to a police lynching. But at least that cover story considered the event a ‘regrettable error.’ Corey has taken it a step further. He makes no mention of ‘regrettable errors.’ He has glibly, cynically, justified the murder of a child because he had a ‘threatening physicality’ (i.e., he was African American) and lived in a ‘troubled’ (i.e., African American) neighborhood. Corey is relying on his audience being with him when he effectively says that to be African American in America is to be presumed guilty. Even African American children may be presumed guilty and gunned down without due process. Corey is morally worse than Loehmann. Worse than the grand jury. He is making the case for more dead African American children.

  Corey’s media calls go as smooth as silk. The man is a monster.

  Before the end of the day, the stories start showing up online. Not just the California outlets—the national news is carrying the story now and national rights organizations are weighing in, the ACLU, NAACP, Southern Poverty Law Center, and every Democratic group and pundit in the country. We have well and truly stirred the hornets’ nest.

  For the millionth time, I had better be right about this.

  41

  Endangered Species 5

  Sunday, October 21st, 16 days until the midterms

  The billboard has been updated again. It would be difficult to get home from the office without having to read this goddammed thing.

  “Republican Men think it’s a better time to be a woman than a man40 and that enough, even too much, has been done for women.41 So, women, shut up about equal opportunity and glass ceilings. Shut up about #metoo and tens of thousands of untested rape kits, hundreds of thousands of rapes, and millions of sexual assaults.42 Shut up about intimate partner violence. You need to Save the White Man!”

  Wow. That is twisted.

  What does Imogen think she’ll accomplish with this? Maybe someday we’ll talk to each other again and I’ll ask her.

  42

  Faceoff

  Thursday, October 25th, 12 days until the midterms

  Latest poll: Reed (R) 48%, Delgado (D) 47%, Undecided 5%

  LA Times/USC Poll, conducted Oct 22–23, 2018

  Officially, despite months of negotiations, the campaigns of Congressman Mike Reed and his Democratic challenger, Sylvia Delgado, could not agree on a debate moderator and format.

  From intel gathered at his weekly religious encounters at North Valley Covenant Church with Reed, Darryl told us not to expect any debates. Reed didn’t want to dignify Delgado’s candidacy by engaging her. He had beaten his 2016 Democratic challenger by eighteen points, comfortably higher than the generic congressional ballot margins, running steady at around eight points for the Democrats. Reed was feeling confident.

  The perspective from the Delgado campaign (i.e., Imogen, back when she was speaking to me) was that Reed’s campaign was cocky and made unreasonable demands. In particular, they insisted on a Fox40 news anchor famous for
speaking over his female guests. Delgado’s campaign suggested multiple moderators from KCRA 3 (the NBC affiliate) or News 10 (the ABC affiliate), but the Reed campaign wouldn’t budge. Why would they? They had no interest in actually having a debate.

  Then an LA Times/USC poll came out, giving Reed a trivial 1 percent lead, well within the polling margin of error. That evidently got Reed’s attention.

  Reed’s campaign okayed the only straight, white, male from the field of moderators okayed by the Delgado campaign, a field that included two white women, an Asian American woman, two Latinos, and a Muslim American man.

  The debate is tonight at 8 p.m. A little before seven, I wrap up the next FECA filing and find Darryl at his desk in the bullpen, paying the penultimate set of RAPAC’s bills, by the look of it.

  “Wanna grab a bite before the debate?”

  Darryl logs out of his computer and grabs the jacket off the back of his chair.

  Corey’s voice is audible through the closed conference room door. Right this moment, he wants to know if someone named Sheila is not just physically challenged, but perhaps intellectually challenged as well.

  Corey insists on using the speaker phone even for one-on-one calls. It’s taken repeated requests to get him to use the conference room (instead of my office) and to shut the door.

  We slip past the closed door and out of the RAPAC office, taking the stairs to the street. Darryl volunteers to drive, and we take his pickup the couple blocks to Firkin & Fox, so we can head directly to the debate afterward. We get burgers and beers. Darryl makes a valiant attempt with his, but I make it through just half of mine and settle for beer carbs. I wasn’t really hungry. I just wanted an excuse to get out of the office so we wouldn’t have to accompany Corey to the debate.

  The debate is being held at Modesto Junior College’s Main Auditorium. The Main Auditorium underwent a $30 million renovation about a decade ago and still looks pretty spiffy, by Modesto standards. Red brick accents frame wide, shallow concrete steps that front a collection of tan and brown cylinders and rectangles. When it was renovated, it was renamed the Performing and Media Arts Center, but Darryl says everybody still calls it the Main Auditorium.

  A good-sized crowd is milling around in the entry hall. Like most political events, folks are older and whiter than Modesto as a whole. But there are a reasonable number of Latinos and folks who look college-aged.

  The beers are working their way through us, so we swing by the restrooms.

  Exiting the men’s room, we come face to face with Imogen and a blond woman exiting the women’s room, on the opposite side of the hallway.

  From the neck down, Imogen is casual chic in a chocolate mock turtleneck, trousers, and dark red suede ankle booties. Her hair is in full tribal mode; a headband barely contains a riot of corkscrews, adding a full four or five inches to her already elegant five foot nine. Imogen and I haven’t spoken a word since the dust-up at Dewdrop. Pretty impressive, given we share an apartment of a thousand square feet. I assumed she’d be here, but this is still a little awkward.

  “Hey, Imogen.”

  She stares at me, dead-eyed, for a couple beats before uttering a terse, “Isaiah.”

  “Darryl.”

  It’s the other woman. She’s maybe five feet six, with blond side-swept bangs and shoulder-length hair, wearing a tailored white blouse and skinny jeans.

  “Kathy,” says Darryl.

  So this is Kathy Gniewek.

  It takes a conscious effort not to glance at Darryl to gauge his reaction. By the tone of their voices, there does not appear to have been a thaw in the Gniewek marriage.

  She’s very pretty. That sounds anodyne. She’s not. She’s got a few lines around the eyes and mouth, but it’s not the mileage. This woman is not a supporting character; she has a command-and-control carriage. I would have noticed her immediately if Imogen weren’t such a flashy character. If her name weren’t Kathy Gniewek, I might have asked for her phone number. Well, and if I hadn’t told Charlene I’d try to swing by the Branding Iron after the debate.

  Without another word, the two women turn and sweep across the entry hall to join a group of Delgado supporters who have a table set up on the left side of the hall. We watch them the whole way.

  The Delgado supporters are easy to spot. They’re a boisterous bunch and a lot of them are sporting yellow rubber gloves, which became a badge of honor after the scene at the Boyet fundraiser. From time to time, groups of yellow-gloved women burst into laughter and raise their yellow hands into the air and wiggle their fingers. It looks like a breeze passing through a field of daffodils in the spring. There are also actual yellow badges, or buttons, which read “Delgado, Ready to clean this mess up.”

  There’s a lot less energy on the right side of the hall. It feels like going to see your team play an away game.

  “Sorry I didn’t introduce you,” says Darryl. “Things aren’t going so well with Kathy and me—we’re kinda going through a rough patch.”

  ‘Rough patch’ seems like a bit of an understatement. Intel from Mo from a couple weeks back was that Kathy had hired a divorce lawyer and expected to upgrade from legally separated to filing for divorce shortly.

  Still, ‘rough patch’ is sharing of a sort. It demands some kind of reciprocity.

  “I hear that. Imogen’s barely speaking to me.”

  “I noticed,” says Darryl. “Like that saying, ‘politics makes strange bedfellows’ got it wrong. Like it should be, ‘politics makes estranged bedfellows.’”

  Estranged doesn’t seem like a Darryl sort of a word. Shit, is that elitist?

  “Speaking of which,” says Darryl, “I don’t know what’s going on with you and Charlene, and I don’t want to know. But don’t get us barred from the Branding Iron. That place is home away from home for me, ’kay?”

  Darryl heads into the auditorium to get us seats. I head to the vending machines to get a bottle of water.

  43

  Preach vs Practice

  Thursday, October 25th, 12 days until the midterms

  Crossing the entry hall, I catch sight of Corey making a beeline across my path. I pull up short, and Corey passes a yard or two in front of me, his attention elsewhere. He’s headed for the Delgado camp, where Mrs. McCready and Imogen stand, watching Corey approach.

  Mrs. McCready has a homemade sign resting upside down at her feet. She turns the sign right side up and even from a distance I can read the large type: “Mike Reed claims to oppose abortion, then blocks access to contraception. Is Mike Reed an idiot or a hypocrite?” Imogen’s hands rest on a sign of her own, balanced on its handle right side up in front of her. It has a lot of headshots on it, but I can’t read the type.

  What the hell does Corey hope to accomplish by confronting these two? Mrs. McCready and Imogen are well within their rights to carry signs at the debate, and they’re hardly alone in doing so. There are easily a couple dozen other handmade signs floating around the entry hall, not to mention all the printed candidate signs. I think Corey, like his idol, the Great DJT, simply cannot abide women, and in particular women of color, having the nerve to express opinions or opposition.

  I could intervene, but then I might be stuck with Corey for the duration of the debate. It’s not as if there’s a microphone to wrestle over. Questions needed to be submitted in advance, and the questions posed to the candidates will be chosen by the moderator.

  I hang back, so I can keep an eye on Corey from a comfortable distance. What started as a staring contest looks like it’s getting ready to heat up. Corey is now close enough to read Imogen’s sign, and evidently, he doesn’t like what it says. Even with his back to me, his roar is completely audible.

  “HOW DARE YOU?! That is SLANDER!”

  He’s leaning in, using his bulk to invade their space, but neither Mrs. McCready nor Imogen is giving ground.

  “Those charges were never proved—he was never even indicted! You lying, slanderous, whore!”

  I’m moving tow
ards them even before he tries to grab the sign. Imogen snatches it out of his reach. Corey draws a meaty paw back. I’m still fifteen feet away when I hear him hissing, “Ugly. Black. Dyke.”

  Followed by the slap of his hand across her face.

  The entrance hall hubbub goes silent, and all eyes are on Imogen and Corey in time for her to grab him by the shoulders, step in, and put all her weight behind her knee as it drives up and into his crotch. She steps back and lets him drop like a felled tree to the ground.

  I get there ahead of security, but not by much. Eight of Modesto’s finest were detailed to the debate as crowd control. A couple of officers were across the hall when the fight, if you can call it that, began. Corey is writhing on the ground but can still gasp out the words “Press charges.”

  It takes two good-sized policemen to haul Corey upright and carry/walk him towards the exit. A single policewoman takes Imogen by the arm. An officer pushes me back, out of Imogen and her minder’s path to the door. I wave over his shoulder to get Imogen’s attention.

  “I’ll call an attorney, have him meet you at the station.”

  I know she hears me because she looks right at me. Just like outside the bathrooms, she dead-eyes me. Which has me taking a step back.

  The entire incident can’t have taken five minutes.

  The pair of police officers who remain encourage folks to go ahead into the auditorium and attend the debate. Slowly, the crowd drifts towards the entrances.

  Imogen’s poster lies face-up on the ground. It reads, “Republicans preach abstinence, they practice sexual harassment, assault and pedophilia.” There are pictures of roughly two dozen men on the poster. The tagline reads: “Stop the War on Women: Vote Democratic.” Some of the faces on the poster are familiar, like Donald Trump, George H. W. Bush, Clarence Thomas, and Roy Moore, but I don’t recognize most of them. I scan their names and the descriptions of their offenses. There are so many. Dennis Hastert, the former Speaker of the House, who molested boys when he was a high school wrestling coach; Patrick Meehan, the Pennsylvania congressman who resigned after using $39,000 in taxpayer money to pay off a congressional aide three decades his junior whom he had sexually harassed; Ben Johnson, the Kentucky congressman who committed suicide following sexual misconduct with a minor—