by Editors

 

Chronicles of The Shade©*

Episode 3 -  “Presidential Pastimes”

May 2007.

 

Wilberforce Benjamin Goode was a simple man.  Simple in the sense of believing in the dignity of humankind.  Simple in the sense of thinking that virtue would be rewarded, the miracle of beauty treasured, and the blessing of hope undiminished.  In short, Goode was a man who loved the great and decent causes of liberty and freedom.  Because of his passion, he was willing to die for his country, even as—and perhaps because—his country began to drift from its moorings and seemed not to resemble the nation he once knew.  Fervently sharing the dreams of his forefathers, he openly welcomed immigrants into his society, knowing that it was itself descended from immigrants.  He saluted individual freedoms and answered to no requirement of loyalty but what the Constitution and his conscience declared.  Goode was a man who honored the traditions of his ancestors.

Suddenly, all that he loved had disappeared as through a trap door.  Virtue, beauty, kindness, and loyalty had all vanished.  Hope for humankind had slipped away like grains of sand through an hourglass.  Nothing was familiar anymore.  Strange people inhabited Reagan, D.C.  The strangers had reinterpreted his beloved Constitution and invented a New Order.  They had discounted the past, sneered at reality, and schemed to take over the entire world.  They took over the presses and airwaves to denounce as traitors all who disagreed with them.  They threw dissenters into prisons from which there was no exit.  Goode became confused and disoriented.  He had lost his way, his purpose in life gone.  Disappointments threatened to overwhelm him, and he no longer knew what to hold true.

Seeking something to believe in and for inspiration, he turned on the television to watch “Let’s Play Hardball” with Chris Matthead on MSNBC.  Goode didn’t know what good he could do for his country, but he was determined to do his utmost, just as his father and his father’s father had done, and also as his great-grandfather had done in the Great War.  As he struggled with his thoughts, he feared that he had forgotten what he had loved so much.  Had he only dreamed his life, first at Texas A & M and then in the military service of his country?  Goode felt depressed.  Matthead was yammering away, but he wasn’t offering any advice.  Finally, as a last resort, Goode decided to hire a detective, someone who billed himself as The Shade, someone who could perhaps walk in the corridors of power and obtain information, someone who could observe what transpired when President B. A. Liar and his Secretary of State, Ms. Condominium Spice, met every morning in the dismal, empty library of the Grey House.  Cynics said they met to burn newspapers there.  He had to be sure.

Shade Detective Agency.  That was the name that jumped out at Wil B. Goode from the telephone book.  The ad said that information could be obtained about anyone without attracting notice.  Wil wanted to know what President Liar and Secretary of State Spice were doing to save the Republic.  President Liar talked a slick, folksy game, and Ms. Spice adopted a school-marmish, know-it-all attitude when she was pitched softballs by Slim Buzzert on “Know Your Press.”  But was it true?  Were they trying to keep America safe as Secretary of Defense Fob Skates assured everyone?  Fob himself—fresh from a disastrous presidency at Arkansas A & M, where ten cadets were burned to a crisp at a bonfire rally—was desperately trying to hide his career as a longtime “spook” who was responsible for inexplicable blunders during the Cold War.  How could anyone trust old Fob?  So Wil dialed the number.

“You don’t want to know,” said The Shade grimly when Wil told him what he wanted.  “I want to know the truth,” answered Wil.  “You can’t handle the truth!” said The Shade, remembering to intone it just as Jack Nicholson had in A Few Good Men, an echo of what he had said to Lara six years earlier.  But Wil was persistent, insisting that only the truth could make us free.  So The Shade had finally relented.

Now The Shade stood behind the door to the dank and musty library of The Grey House.  He was quiet, scarcely breathing.  There was no problem getting by the guard at the gate.  There never was.  One moment the guard was giving directions to an apparent tourist who had obviously lost his way in Reagan, D.C., and the next it was as if he had just awakened from a nap.  Ever since Lance Carter had returned from his junket to the Himalayas he had found himself with the power to make it seem as if he were invisible while he observed other people.

The Shade stood listening as President Liar and Secretary Spice pored over the morning newspapers, deciding which ones to burn and which ones to save for the presidential archives.  “What did you expect, Mr. Goode,” he said to himself.  “All your life you deceived yourself into thinking that people were decent and that justice would triumph over evil.  Little did you dream of the evil that infects their minds.”  The Shade knew.  His strange power enabled him to see behind the façade of respectability, to discern the graft, corruption, and lies that under girded the corporate plutocrats who were squeezing the life out of the Republic for their own profit.

Once Lance Carter became aware of these evils, he could no longer take pleasure from the enormous wealth he had inherited from his father.  Yet he was also overcome by a strange lassitude that prevented him from being anything more than an observer—a ghost from another time dimension.  Days and nights of carousing after his accident in the icy chasm had left him empty of purpose and had finally cost him the love of his life when Lara Lane Lamont, unable to persuade him to change his self-destructive ways, sadly bade him goodbye.  That was when he began re-reading Homer’s Odyssey.  The story of Odysseus’s conversations with the shades of Achilles and Ajax in Hades attracted him.  Disgusted with his wretched life, he decided that he was but a shade himself, powerless to act in the world.  Yet he still believed that he might use his awful gift for some greater purpose.  That was when he decided to become The Shade.

As The Shade listened, the President began to speak.  “Dang it, Condo,” he said.  “I hate it when that Senator Sheckter says that he’s the decider, too.  There can’t be more than one decider, can there?”

“Of course not, Mr. President,” said Condo Spice.  “What you’ve got to do is hold another press conference and tell everyone that there’s just one decider, and you’re it.”

“Aw, I thought that’s why I had a press secretary, Stoney what’s-his-name, to do that stuff.  I just want to get dressed up in my flight suit again, fly onto the deck of a carrier.  Boy, that was fun!”

“Now, Mr. President, we have to wait awhile before we do that.  Once we kill a few more thousand Jiraqis in our latest “surge,” we can declare victory in Ragtad, and then you can have another flight.  I’ll have to do a few more talk shows first and tell a few fibs about how much progress there’s been, and how it will take only a few more years to stabilize the country.”

“Well, I’m getting tired of Jiraq, anyway.  I’ll just let General Pantywaist handle it.  Then we can on with invading Iroon with our nucular weapons.  Axis of evil, that’s what Mickey Glerson called it.  Can’t have them controlling all that oil.  Not when me and my buddies got to make a profit.”

“That’s General Petrankis, Mr. President.”

“Well, whoever it is.  I like that General Odoreater better.  Look at the body count he racked up in Faloozie.”

“We don’t do body counts anymore, Mr. President.  They have a way of making people sad when they should be enjoying themselves in Dizzyland.”

“Yeah, whatever.  Hey, look at these oil prices today.  How much do you think Hallibuster is worth today?  Boy, am I glad I put all those shares in a blind trust.  I’ll be richer than my daddy when I get out of this dang office.  Maybe as rich as my veep, ol’ Rick Chancey—but he was in the oil bidness longer’n me.”

“Now, Mr. President, let’s not be too hasty.  What we have to do when we control the oil in Jiraq and Iroon is keep it in the ground awhile.  That way we can make the prices go up even further.  As a bonus we can ration it out to the Peasant’s Republic of Chinosa so that they continue buying more of our paper.  That way our citizens won’t know that we’re mortgaging their futures as well as those of their children.”

“Dang, you’re smart, Condo.  How’d I ever latch onto a jewel like you?”

“I’m flattered, Mr. President, but it’s child’s play.  You should hear me play Rachmaninoff.”

Suddenly the President and the Secretary of State felt a chill in the air. “What was that?” said the President.  “Who turned up the air conditioning?”

Then there came a bitter laugh from the shadows.  But they could see no one. Next came an eerie, disembodied voice—muffled as though spoken through the collar of an overcoat.  “Do you think you can fool The Shade?  Do you think you can trifle with people’s lives all for your own profit and celebrity?”

“Who’s ‘at?” said the President.  “Dang it, if that’s you funnin’ me Cal Stove, I’m gonna give you a thumpin’.”

“No, Mr. Liar, it is not Mr. Stove; and the ‘thumpin’ was what you got in the last election.  Call me The Shade, for that is what I am.  I was hired by an average citizen to determine whether you are interested in the welfare of the country, or just out to benefit yourself and your oily friends.”

“Now, hold on there, Mr. Shade,” said the President.  “How come I can’t see you?”

“You ignoramus,” said The Shade.  “I have the power to cloud your mind.  I can also see inside your heart, and what I see isn’t good.  It’s an emptiness that defies description.”

“Not so fast, Ms. Spice,” continued The Shade, as the Secretary of State tried to duck under the desk.  “You can’t pull a Mona Bejinsky in this room.  I can see into your heart, too; and what I see is what Hannah Arendt accurately described as “the banality of evil.”  Your cold exterior masks an even icier interior.”

As Liar and Spice stood stunned in the center of the room, powerless to move or speak, The Shade continued, “I see the vices hidden in people’s minds.  It’s not a happy gift I have, but I’m going to make the truth about you known to someone who is determined to save the Republic.  He’s going to see that you are both removed from office and your reputations tarnished forever.  You won’t enjoy your ill-gotten gains.  I’m going to help him see to that.  So don’t deceive yourselves.  The Shade sees everything.”  With that, The Shade was done with speaking, leaving the President and his Secretary of State bathed in a cold sweat.

The Shade slipped out of the library undetected.  “Well, Mr. Wil B. Goode,” he said to himself as he patted the tape recorder in his overcoat.  “I’ve got the information you wanted.  Now it’s up to you.”

 

To be continued…

 Next Week – Chapter 4:

“The Veep Weighs In”

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