by Gary Amdahl
“Come again?” asked Andrew.
“We can point to provocations and causes but we never truly know what our next thought or speech will be until it’s over. Even when we have a script. I mean a ‘real life script.’ Examine it for yourself. Don’t take my word for it.”
“That is utterly beside the point,” snapped Amelia. “Are you actually trying to suggest that when a bomb explodes we don’t know what to think?”
“Yes. But I am only suggesting it. A bomb is a good example, the perfect example, of how reality may have holes ripped in it, exposing a truer, deeper reality: you don’t see it coming, you don’t plan on it, it makes your little dreams of control seem childish, and in its wake your thoughts and shouts seem as unpremeditated as they in fact are.”
“Well,” said Andrew, “I don’t know about any of that. Chick may be right, he may be whistling in the dark, he may be wrong, he may be perversely wrong, he may be dead wrong. I don’t know.”
“Your brain is too busy protecting its Little Andrew in the eternal present that it can only make decisions after the fact. The apprehension of cause and effect exists only in the past. President Brain can only register the changes as they occur—slightly after they occur. It’s an illusion of the brain to think it can make changes.”
“Again I must say, reacting helplessly to your thrust, that I just don’t know.”
“I don’t know either, Andy. I say only that I think about the possibility.”
“But why,” asked Pastor Tom, “have you turned so suddenly and decisively away from your ideals? From the shared ideals of millions of people? People from all walks of—from anarchists to Christians, from peasants to presidents! Whatever they don’t have in common, they at least have progressivism!”
“No,” said Vera, “I have to interrupt: anarchists and Christians do not have shared goals, nor do peasants and presidents.”
“Not even in theory,” said Charles, “not even at an ideal source.”
“You are surrounded by the best minds, and most effective leaders, in the Progressive and Social Gospel Movements! I mean, what caused it?”
Dejection was suddenly and dramatically upon him. He began to answer, but stopped, shook his head. Then:
“I don’t know who I am, much less what I am to do.”
Charles and Vera exchanged a glance.
“They’re the same thing,” said Vera.
“That’s the only lesson of the little stage set that came apart at the seams.”
“To be is to do,” said Gus.
“To do is to be,” said Tony.
“Do be a do-bee, and don’t be a don’t-bee.”
“Doo-be doo-be doooo.”
“A do-bee and a don’t-bee,” said Amelia. “Every once in a while I am reminded of how young you boys actually are.”
“Look here, Chick,” said Andrew.
“I’m looking, Andy.”
“You’re working for the governor here, right? Burnquist sits on the MCPS, right?”
“Yes. I think of him as the ‘Affable Man.’ There is a ‘Triangular Man’ and a ‘Silver Man of Wrath’ as well.”
“McGee and the AG, right? Hilton?”
“You know them, I see.”
“Of course I do. I was helping Father.”
“You’ve remarked their names.”
“Of course I have.”
“More than I have done. They are characters without names. Some day, if their legend lives on, their characteristics will give rise to new, truer names, in some language related to ours but indecipherable. Nonsense sounds with meaning forced willy-nilly upon them.”
“Yes. Let me clear my throat and try to move on to a thought, an actual train of thought that I see coming around the bend.”
“You didn’t know you were going to put it so colorfully until the words came tumbling out.”
“Woo-woo!” shouted Gus.
“Chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga,” said Tony.
“Again,” said Charles. “Who could have predicted the arabesques and rim shots of our wee brothers?”
“Two incidents,” said Andrew. “One in the south of the state, in Rock County, Luverne is the town, I believe. Another in the north, Duluth, the port on Lake Superior. Wheat growing and wheat shipping. Nonpartisan League and railroads connecting the two, with stops along the way for the Equity League, two quarreling factions of the IWW, the Minnesota Socialist Party—”
“Featuring the mayor of Minneapolis,” said Charles.
“Featuring the mayor of Minneapolis,” agreed Andrew. “The Minnesota Farmer-Labour camp, and our substantial progressive presence. And God knows who else.”
“Or possibly Vera.”
Pregnant pause.
“I do not know,” said Vera.
“Everybody take a deep breath and relax,” said Charles.
“What Vera knows—” Andrew began.
“I say that to all my actors,” interrupted Charles.
“I don’t know who’s more annoying here: you or Gus and Tony.”
“What happened in Luverne?”
“Elderly farmer with ties to the NPL was escorted out of the state—Rock County borders Iowa, very near—”
“I know where it is,” said Charles. “I’ve been there.”
“—very near South Dakota as well. Ruffians drove him to Iowa and left him in a field. He came back to help his sons with planting and was tarred and feathered.”
“And in Duluth . . .?”
“An immigrant from Finland felt that, because he wasn’t yet a citizen, he was exempt from the draft. He was tarred and feathered. Then hanged.”
“The old man in Luverne survived?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know what’s worse: being tarred and feathered or un-tarred and un-feathered. Some fellows who’ve been tarred and feathered might prefer to be hanged.”
Andrew smiled. “You sound very much like Father when you talk like that.”
“Speaking of Father talking, what does he have to say about Luverne and Duluth? I take it he knows . . .?”
“I’m not sure that he does.”
“I missed the connection,” sighed Amelia, “between Luverne and Duluth and, well, say Father, for starters, and . . . all your ‘characters,’ Charles. And the . . . what’s the word, organizations that, um . . . Vera . . . is . . . how shall I say . . . associated with . . .?”
“Try that one more time without the hesitation, the lack of confidence, the implicit burden of the heavy, dense veil you choose to wear over your hostility, and I’ll see if I can make a little more sense of it.”
“What’s the connection between Father, mob violence, and terrorists?”
“Jesus Christ?” asked Gus.
Charles, at long last, exploded with laughter.
“Well, hush my mouth,” said Tony.
“By Jove, I think he’s got it!” Charles chuckled and sputtered. A few more high-pitched yelps shot out of his mouth, followed by descending ha-ha-has, and finishing up with low, round ho-ho-hoes, each phase of his laughter exploring a new facet of his delight.
“Father’s progressivism is a sham. It always has been, and the best example right now is this Burnquist knucklehead, a pillar of Progressivism, who is sitting on the Minnesota Commission of Public Safety, an organization that is using thugs to incite hatred, fear, and riot, to beat and kill whoever happens to catch their eye, while the splintered Left is tearing itself apart in the shadow of the crackdown, roundup, imprisonment, and deportation of undesirables that the FBI and DOJ is commencing. ‘Undesirables’ of course being people who speak their mind about a given issue and are deemed criminally disloyal. That is to say: traitorous. For which they may be executed. Do you think I’m exaggerating? I ran the Bull Moose campaign in California!”
“The principles of Progressivism,” said Charles, “are just one more badly written script, and the Progressives are just another cast of bad actors. Surely you saw what you were actually doing lo
ng before this.”
“I did indeed! I was caught up in your wacky world of no cause and no effect, thinking, hoping against hope, that I saw causes anyway, and believing I could produce effects.”
“What does Father say?”
“He says not a whole lot. He says—murmurs—that the jig was up when he saw a company he partly owned wasn’t going to be able to deliver water to our burning little city.”
“He also partly owned one of those French restaurants,” said Amelia.
“The Poodle Dog, yes,” said Andrew.
“And had affairs with several women there.”
“And you’ve never forgiven him,” asked Andrew, “is that right?”
“I have not. Why should I? He destroyed Mother’s will to live.”
“Sweetheart, you know very well why you should forgive him.”
“I forgive him.”
“Good.”
“How has the world changed? How has anything changed?”
“Oh, it’s changed, all right,” said Charles. “It’s changing and it won’t stop. Were you expecting applause or a paycheck for your act of forgiveness?”
“Of course I was!”
“Many actors do.”
“He says a man,” said Andrew, “who runs a newspaper called the Minnesota Mascot—”
“Björnsen,” said Charles. “Speaks for ascending Scandinavian Lutheran farmer-businessmen at odds with the small-town elite.”
“Sounds right. Father saw him as the kind of man he saw in Fremont Older and the other Regenerators in the newspaper business, in the Golden Age of Graft. You know what I mean: someone who wasn’t afraid to say startling, painful truths out loud and damn the consequences.”
“One quick note?”
“Go ahead.”
“The consequences are quite different if you don’t have someone like Father approving your truth-telling.”
“Granted. And maybe that’s what Father is seeing now.”
“All right. Tell me more about what you see him seeing.”
“How wonderful Mother has been nearly all the decades of his life?” asked Amelia.
“It’s interesting, Amelia, how you can champion poor Mother who did little more than tell you to shut the fuck up all your life.”
“Shut the fuck up, Charles.”
“Well said, Amelia! Do you feel an exquisite relief?”
“Brava!” shouted Gus.
“Brava!” shouted Tony.
“No, I feel perfectly awful. I’m sorry, Tom.”
“We live,” said Pastor Tom, “around the table at which we have been seated!”
“Because Father thought he knew the sort of man who was in effect talking to him—I mean Björnsen—he was inclined to trust him, believe what he was saying, take it to heart, however you want to put it, and he thought he saw the hollowness of Progressivism, and by extension, the racism and xenophobia in populism, the hypocrisy of, of . . . of the Regenerators, of himself, the tyranny of power that runs under even the most admirable social and political ideas. On what flimsy pretexts that admiration is founded.”
“Even the most admirable applications of Christian ethics?”
“Yes.”
“Aha!” shouted Charles, looking at Amelia.
“Shut the fuck up, Charles,” said Pastor Tom. But he was smiling.
Charles ceased to smile. “So it’s an instance of, a variation on, say, the Timon of Athens transformation? Generous Christian Becomes Disillusioned Misanthrope?”
“Let me appear to ponder this,” said Andrew. “No.”
“No,” said Charles quietly. “I don’t suppose Father could ever become . . . misanthropic. The Old Poker Player probably saw that Progressivism was just a card for shrewd, energetic men to play but that the game was over because it had ceased somehow to be the great hand it had been only moments before.”
“You see, Vera,” said Andrew, addressing her singly and most earnestly—almost ardently, “he came to his principles naturally. As did Colonel Roosevelt.”
Charles laughed shortly, mirthlessly.
“Who does not?” asked Vera.
“Yes, you’re right. What I meant to say is, his political principles appeared, to him and to the people around him as he was developing them, to come directly and immediately from his goodwill and generous nature, from virtue, Christian virtue, I suppose, but virtue nevertheless.”
“Why,” asked Vera, “did it take him so long to see through that shimmering surface? Was he hypnotized? I apologize if I seem cold. Ungenerous. But I really do not understand. Evil and suffering are readily apparent. Ignore it? Sure. But fail to recognize it? I don’t think so.”
“I think he recognized it and wanted to believe that it was . . . nothing if not changeable.”
“Excuse me: I misspoke. I meant the hypocrisy must have been—”
“Excuse me, Vera,” said Amelia. “I’m sure the hypocrisy was as evident as the suffering and the evil. But when you are predisposed to see the good, you may be chagrined at instances of hypocrisy and worse but want more than anything else to shrug it off and—”
“He has sinned,” said Andrew. “He sees at last that he has sinned. I am not making fun. I am dramatizing because that appears to be in the family blood along with everything else. Dramatizing genuine religious conviction being reborn. He has sinned. That is to say, he has missed the mark. He now repents. That is to say, he is thinking again.”
“And,” said Charles, even more quietly, “I imagine the physical experience of his life has vitiated his will to . . . think differently. I mean . . . he must be very tired.”
Amelia’s eyes filled with tears and she murmured indistinctly.
“Yes,” said Pastor Tom, “we are all very tired. So tired, sometimes, that we wish for a sleep like death.”
“A deathlike sleep,” Charles murmured only slightly more distinctly than had Amelia. “A sleep-like death.”
“Mother and Father have both aged quite a lot in the last year. Al looks very bad. And as selfish as it is for me to say so, I feel very bad. I have always looked to Father for guidance and support. I never had a problem doing that. Not looking to him for guidance and support would have been a problem. But that never happened. If I seemed too lighthearted sometimes for that sort of attitude, that sort of dependence, if I worked my mouth . . . over-joyously sometimes—like certain others here today, I won’t name names, it’s in the blood, I guess—it was because I felt free and easy and confident. I was happy to carry on what I always thought of as ‘Father’s work.’ Maybe that was work of expiation for his part in the Spring Park Water disaster, maybe it was something else, I’m not sure. It certainly didn’t start out that way, before the quake and the fires, it wasn’t that way in Arizona, but it may have become that. I say again I’m not at all sure. Maybe when I say that Al looks bad and Mother and Father look old I’m completely wrong. Maybe Al looks great and Mother and Father have never been more perky, vigorous, healthy, wealthy, wise. Maybe I am only talking about myself. I’m not stupid. I know that could easily be the case. I’ll even go so far as to say that’s probably the case. No, tell you what: that is the case.”
“Mother and Father,” said Amelia, with the strange breeziness that had alarmed everybody who knew her all her life, “will be dead before the year is out.”
“Excuse me. I must be rude and cold again. Inexcusably so, but I beg your pardon anyway. I don’t know Mother or Father or any of you around this table except Charles. I will be even more frank and revealing and come, I hope, swiftly to my point. I don’t want to know any of you. I know and love Charles almost against my will. Maybe that’s the nature of that kind of love. I don’t know. But you can’t have been awake while you were manipulating the kind of power you have, or had—and very likely will have in the future if you are honest with yourselves!—and not seen at first hand everywhere you looked the sacrifice of public good for personal power or wealth! You may very well have lied to yourselves abou
t your determination to change things, but all the while you were cultivating power, were you not? Because to change things you must have power, must you not?”
“But Vera,” said Pastor Tom, “surely you are guilty to some degree of the very charges you level against us?”
“Not at all. I have no expectation—”
“Isn’t everyone guilty?” asked Amelia.
“—no expectation of anything remotely like success or change or gain—certainly not increased power. I merely act. I despise power. I love to act.”
“You love to act but have no regard for consequence?” asked Andrew.
“You’re being naïve or foolish or selfish,” said Amelia.
“I don’t care if I live or die.”
“Nonsense,” said Amelia.
“I’m not here to convince you of a thing.”
“Well, neither am I, I guess,” said Andrew. “So allow me to be frank and revealing and come swiftly to my point as well.”
“Please do. I’m sorry I am so rude and cold.”
“There have always been, in my world, in Father’s world, people who were outright villains. And if not exactly, actionably so, at least detestable and ‘worse people’ than we were. I think primarily of the railroaders. The engineers and builders were men of science—”
“And slave drivers too,” said Vera. “Racist slave-driving profiteers.”
“You can no longer apologize for being rude and cold,” said Amelia.
“I no longer wish to.”
“Perhaps because we were so focused on the railroad men, we failed to take notice of all the other . . . characters entering the stage. There were suddenly so many factions, and agents within factions whose motives were never clear, that we became confused. We became confused because we wished to continue to think well of ourselves, and not throw in with anybody who we thought might be worse than we were. We wished, for example, to continue to think of men of science as the clear-thinking, politically neutral allies of the progressive spirit of reform—which was itself a kind of clear-thinking political science. But for every one of those, there were—suddenly, it seemed—ninety-nine of the other. Worse, for every good man and every bad man there were ninety-eight people milling around, haplessly, irrevocably human—and maybe that’s why we found our Christianity, our social gospel, our progressivism to be such a . . . a fortress. It accommodated good and evil and everybody just bobbing along in the river of whatever this is. God wasn’t dead, but if you will allow me to use a popular catchphrase, we were beyond good and evil, beyond bliss of heaven and the torture of hell. Beyond spirit and matter—which is I think what Chick’s been talking about all this time.”
