1600 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W.

by Ares Demertzis (October 2009)

“We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nation will accept the New World Order”
                                       —David Rockefeller

 
He eagerly unfolded the small paper rectangle, tapping anxiously at the edge of the crease, coaxing the white crystals to tumble down to the surface of a hand mirror lying on his desk. Using the sharp blade of a pocket knife, he initiated the practiced ritual of crumbling the tiny, hard white granules, fluffing them up into narrow, elongated powdery lines. He could have accomplished the same task on any hard surface, but the mirror served to make the cocaine appear more abundant; a gratifying illusion.

I looked out of the window beyond Constitution Avenue to the distant, imposing white marble Lincoln Memorial on the periphery of the Reflecting Pool. He followed my gaze.

“That was one awesome President,” he said admiringly.

“A very determined individual; and a Republican.” I added chidingly.

“Ironic, isn´t it?” was his rhetorical reply.

“Seven hundred thousand dead. Fifty thousand in Gettysburg; twenty three thousand on the first day at Antietam. Can you imagine twenty three thousand men who were alive that morning and dead by late afternoon? ”

“They were on the wrong side of history. That war defined the federal government as the kick-ass authority; we don´t answer to the States, it´s the other way around. Lincoln and Grant understood the concept of total war; merciless bloodshed, the indispensable, methodical devastation of the status quo to achieve social justice.”

“When a constitution is threatened by the bayonet, it´s always the bayonet that emerges victorious.” I responded.

Offhandedly coaxing a hundred dollar bill from his pants pocket, he proceeded to roll it tightly, allowing a narrow, empty space in the center, knowledgeably crafting a functional straw. I knew him from the days when he used a crumpled dollar bill, and when that was unavailable, he would just dip his nose to the powder without the use of any expedient artifice. He offered me the rolled bill.

“I pass.”

He shrugged. “You know, I used to love smoking this shit; sprinkling it on my cigarette… inhaling. Terrific high. Gave up my smokes though; bad for your health.”

He snorted two lines noisily, followed by a lingering, satisfied, guttural sigh.

“Whew. Good shit. Sure you don´t want a taste?”

“Not now. Thanks. Where do you think our new President is heading?” I asked, perhaps too abruptly.

“Surprising question, coming from you. Working news these days?”

I smiled, “Nope.”

“How about a wire? You carrying a recorder?”

“You´re doing far too much blow, my friend. Do I detect a touch of paranoia?”

“Yeah. Got to cut down, I know, I can feel it, but I´m making too much money now…Man!”

He bent over the mirror again for another short toot, sharing one line between two nostrils.

“It´s not paranoia; you have no idea. This is really an amazing moment for me. Actually, the whole country. Damn! The entire world. Yeah! The entire world! I never, ever dreamt of sitting here, working in this place. I still can´t believe it, but I know why I´m here…I´m here because no one can challenge my right to be here. No one dares say I can´t be here; that I´m not experienced! That allegation proved irrelevant to the electorate for the candidate during the Presidential campaign, so for sure it’s inappropriate with reference to my job. Now we own the White House and Congress. We can do anything! No. We can do everything. Big time. Yes we can! Yes we have! The plan hasn´t changed, only the tactics. Armed revolution wasn´t going to make it; we found that out the hard way in the sixties. The Man had the power. We learned from that experience that to succeed, the system had to be undermined from within. No HUAC. No McCarthy. Not this time. We did such a permanent job mutilating that right wing program, even the secret Venona Project going public couldn´t revive the reputation of that lush. McCarthyism became a despised generic term, a synonym for demagogue.”

“Venona proved irrefutably that McCarthy was right; the Federal government, even the White House, was infiltrated by Americans working for Soviet Intelligence. I´ll just throw out a couple of names: Hiss, Oppenheimer, Abt, the Rosenberg´s, I.F. Stone, Harry Dexter White, and Larry Duggan. The last two defended tooth and nail by Ed Murrow.” 

“That´s ancient history. No one´s interested in that stuff anymore. And now we have the power. Power. Yeah. Did you know that´s the President´s favorite word? Power. People in this country, important people in this country, have struggled secretly for the collective for too long. A lot of folks thought when the Wall came down in the Democratic Republic that it was all over, but not us. We knew that was false, too many dedicated individuals had spent too many years putting the pieces together for us to surrender; we positioned our people in the press to interpret the news, in academia – grade school through university – to raise student´s consciousness, to re-write textbooks, we got our people elected for legit cover, and we put community organizers on the street to give power to our friends and intimidate our enemies. That´s where our President became a star. He said: ´Community organizing put together the power through which you bring about redistributive change.´ So here we are. Finally. And nothing can stop us now. Nothing.”

He paused just long enough from his rambling, self congratulatory discourse to do two more lines. He was animated, voluble. Cocaine will do that; when it doesn´t make you paranoid, you´re unrealistically euphoric, pretentious and triumphant. Sometimes dangerous.

“One world government. That´s where we´re going; that´s where everyone on this planet has to end up. Yeah. It was a dream dreamt by Marx, Wilson, FDR, and today our Main Man. Why, even the Bushes and the Europeans publicly advocate a New World Order. Everybody who is anybody knows this is a done deal; the question is how and when. Kyoto and the World Court were a disappointment, so we have to go stealth, start small with stuff not too well understood, like the Law of the Sea Treaty. People have no idea what one world government really means. And you know what´s sweet? They assume it´s a crock; that those voices out there warning them of a sinister plot to make everyone on the planet equal are simply the hallucinations of idiots trying to discredit us with lies and innuendo. We have top notch pros working spin; our friends from when we were in the trenches together. There has never been an insurrection kicked off by the masses anywhere. Never. Revolutions are initiated by a small bunch of radical rabble rousers with a dream. The Bolsheviks were a little group no one ever anticipated could take over, ditto the Committee of Thirty when France went bankrupt, and let´s not forget Mao in China.”

After moistening the tip of an index finger with his tongue, he pressed it into the powder and then rubbed the cocaine across the upper gums in his mouth.

“Rahm said ´you never want a serious crisis to go to waste,´ and he´s right. A crisis is an unparalleled opportunity to do things quickly that could never be done under different circumstances. Crisis is that worm hole that always, more swiftly than any other circumstance, leads to change. Read history, I always tell my team. Read history. Yeah. Read history. Unemployment, excessive taxation, extreme national debt, disgraceful military failures, pandemics…those are the crisis scenarios that have always compelled a radical change of society, bringing about a revolution that overthrows the established, conventional government. The status quo. If the crisis doesn´t exist, you have to create it. Those are the rules. Come on, bro, you and I work in this business; you´re a professional, you know where the President´s coming from. You gave me a list of names, now I´ll throw mine back at you: Frank Marshall Davis, Khalid al-Mansour, Rashid Khalidi, Saul Alinsky, Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, those are just some out in the open. Your question´s a no brainer. It doesn´t take a lot of smarts to see where he´s heading.”

“Socialism?”

“Socialism.”

“Communism?”

“Communism. Yeah. Communism. Absolutely. It shouldn´t be a scare word; the entire world´s population joined as one community, one large family, mustn’t be interpreted as a panic expression. Could you ever have imagined our capitalist government owning private enterprise, determining the appropriate business ventures and compensation for banks and traditional international corporations without a financial crisis to facilitate it? Bush W. set it up – whether purposely or out of sheer stupidity is still debatable. Our President just picked up the ball and accomplished a fundamental economic overhaul of this country in a heartbeat. We have a forty year wish list and bringing the dogs on Wall Street to heel is just the beginning. Pelosi said ´we won the election, we wrote the bill.´ We won the election alright; no question about that, and it was the President who promised to ´fundamentally change America.´ I don´t know if anybody was listening, or if anybody was even thinking about what he was saying. But the campaign wasn´t all slyness, he told the people some of what he was going to do: put an end to American exceptionalism; American superiority. This is merely the first part of global restructuring; the New World Order. Next up is to make the U.S. dollar ´one among equals´ with other currencies. Why should the dollar be the dominant international currency? Makes no sense; it isn´t fair.”

“What happens if a crisis doesn’t come around to accomplish that?”

“My answer is what I said a minute ago: manufacture it; make it happen. To destroy today´s America we must first devastate this monster´s massive economy; a bankrupt America, an economically failed America is indispensable to the overthrow of the free enterprise, capitalist system. Satisfied, comfortable citizens will never rock the boat.”

“That´s certainly true. After my father immigrated to this country he always used to say, especially to his Lefty pals, that capitalism was the real worker´s paradise. Pissed them off.”
“Yeah. Of course! That only goes to prove my point. Your father was making an adequate living, taking good care of his family, sucking up a couple of beers on the weekend with friends, sending his kids to college. Without a doubt he thought it was paradise. It was a lifestyle unavailable where he came from; impossible in most of the rest of the world. We have to change that scenario.  When the President was in the Senate he sponsored the Global Poverty Act to give 845 billion to the U.N. to eradicate world poverty.”

“Where´s that money coming from? Will the IRS follow Geldof´s lead: ´Give us yer fokin money!´?”   

“We have to share the wealth to achieve an all inclusive future, sharing our prosperity with poor people not only here, but more importantly with those around the globe who are in even more need. To accomplish that, fathers and their families will have to be inconvenienced. Sorry about that.”

“You think making everyone equally poor is an acceptable solution to inequality?”

“Our wealth was made on their backs; it´s only fair we give some of it back, bro.”

“You know I always worked in politics for the Democrats, but for some time now, like David Horowitz, Chris Hitchens, Dick Morris, and all those others, there are some second thoughts that need to be addressed. Communism has a violent, horrifying resume; a dreadfully bloody footprint.”

“You can´t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

“Fifty million Russians. Seventy million Chinese. One quarter of Cambodia´s population. North Korea, Viet Nam, Cuba. The list goes on and on. Those are a lot of eggs. And the result has always been an unpalatable omelet.”

He fell silent; I could sense the unspoken outrage. The New Left permits no disagreement from the Sacred Texts of Liberalism and Progressive Ideology even from its own offspring. It is unacceptable for a Liberal/Progressive to articulate anathemas. He busied himself, pretending to be thoroughly engaged in the task of unfolding the small paper rectangle again, tapping the edge of the crease, dropping the white crystals to the surface of the mirror, fluffing up the white granules with his pocket knife, making less appear to be more.

I continued my verbal assault by asking the unanswerable: “Has anyone calculated the number of Americans who will be sacrificed to achieve social justice?”

He was quick to respond resentfully: “The dictators on the right aren´t pure as the driven snow either, you know.”

“True. But strictly in the sheer number of political massacres, there´s no comparison. I think the fundamental difference may be that the right commonly perceives politics to be a business endeavor, with tolerable profit and loss scenarios, whereas the left generally considers itself as possessing a moral imperative. Liberal/Progressives are devoted supplicants of an unyielding and determined secular religious movement, despite that seeming to be an oxymoron. Remember it was Oriana Fallaci´s Communist lover who said ´dictatorships of the Right will sooner or later fall, dictatorships of the Left are forever¨”

“Well, he was wrong, wasn´t he?”

“You sound disappointed. Do you think eliminating dictatorships of the Left is bad?”

Inhaling two more ample lines and leaning back into the soft leather cushions of his luxurious chair, he closed his glassy eyes, feigning disinterest. An opaque dribble of mucous seeped from his nose to spread across a numb upper lip. “Flying a little too high. Super shit; got to take it down a touch,” he said with his eyes closed.

I resolved to be insistent and engage him aggressively. “So radical health care reform, considered by economists as a fiscal catastrophe and by the electorate as unnecessary; anthropogenic global warming, exposed as a politically motivated deception by recognized experts in the scientific community; and the energy paradox created by a determined stubbornness not to exploit domestic sources, are manufactured crises – you accept that they are manufactured crises – but they are to be understood for public consumption as serious issues that demand massive government intervention. The sky is falling! The sky is falling! Let’s see if I´ve figured out the game plan: endorse an overwhelming national debt to jeopardize the dollar and increase taxation to rapacious levels in order to service the obligation; that taxation will result in massive unemployment and devastating inflation, more confiscatory taxes on industry will result in fewer jobs and higher prices; disgrace the military, provoke their failures with inconsistent strategies; and finally engage in ineffective, fruitless political dialogue that will further serve to demoralize the nation. Taken individually or in combination these are unmistakably crisis scenarios. You said the rule is that if the crisis doesn´t exist, create it, because crisis is indispensable for revolution. Is this administration doing that? Fabricating Machiavellian crises to provoke revolution? Creating socio-economic chaos? Did I connect the dots?”

Reaching into one of the drawers of his desk he pulled out a glass hip flask of bourbon and swallowed directly from the bottle, the alcohol intended to reduce the cocaine high. “Your arguments are getting tiresome, bro. Big issues demand big government intervention. Yeah. It´s an accepted political axiom. Get over it. Live with it. No one argues about that anymore; even the Republicans buy into that one because when it´s their turn up at bat, they also are the government. Yeah. O.K. Now, let me be clear. To accomplish the change we want for this country and the world, not only must our economy be wrecked, as you shrewdly concluded by connecting the dots, we must also dismantle that other remaining threat: the military. That can be effectively accomplished by insufficient support – and by creating a competing force, ´just as big, and just as well funded,´ to use the President´s own words. The People´s Army; our military. We can´t be one nation equal among many if we´re carrying the biggest stick. We ought to create a New World Order with multiple power centers. The U.S. should be forced to make political decisions based on the same fear of retaliation other countries have to deal with; it´s only fair. We have been privileged and therefore unilateral in our dealings with other countries for far too long; our global influence must be reduced, we should only maintain a defensive army. Jimmy Carter eliminated the draft thinking this was going to minimize our fondness for aggression; he was wrong, so now we have to bring about far more sweeping measures. Food and water are predicted to be scarce resources in the not too distant future. We can´t be the privileged few on the planet with access to survival simply because of our advanced weapons; we could have a better world for everyone tomorrow if we bite the bullet today.”

“You know the CIA and the National Intelligence Council put together an update titled Global Trends 2025. They say a world with multiple power centers has always been less stable than one with a single, or two rival superpowers.”

 

A thin rivulet of crimson trickled from his nose; imprudent cocaine addiction was obviously acutely damaging the blood vessels in his nose, and, I assumed, more significantly what was left of his intellect.

 

“Bullshit.”

 

“Bullshit?”

 

“Yeah. Bullshit. I just don´t believe it.”

 

Not even Socrates could challenge that response. I picked up the mirror. “Let me do that last line.” I felt a familiar sting as the powder rushed through my nose. When I returned the mirror to his desk, he hastily lowered his head to lick clean the residue that had adhered to its reflective surface.

 

“It ain´t over till the fat lady sings,” I admonished. “And that won´t happen for the next five billion years, when this planet finally disappears from the universe and life on earth ceases to exist…Unless of course orbital chaos causes Venus or Mars to smash into our planet first.”

He stared at me blankly for a moment; putting the bottle to his lips, he offered a toast: “Here´s to Abraham!”

“Abraham? Biblical Abraham, or does he have a surname?”

“Yeah. Lincoln.”

With that, both of us, two colleagues, mercenaries whose highly remunerative undertaking is manipulating the political system, burst into irrepressible, rowdy laughter, slapping our hands together in a noisy high five.

The scheme is far more insidious than any of us can ever imagine.

 

To comment on this story, please click here.

To help New English review continue to publish thought provoking and original short stories such as this, please click here.

If you enjoyed this story by Ares Demertzis and want to read more of his work, please click here.