Because now the joke’s on you.
Your author apologizes if these words seem political. He might point out that the words politics or political themselves have been rendered meaningless in his lifetime. Words that once described a vital project of civic negotiation have become an accusation of artifice. To be accused of making something political is code for you have chosen a side. Of this, your author is innocent. He has no side. He just wants words to mean what they were intended to mean. His job is to communicate information and ideas, and how is he supposed to do that when language itself has become meaningless?
Your author would also like to explain that he didn’t want to put all those guns in his story, but this is a story about America. At last count there were more than four hundred and twenty million guns in America (population 330,000,000). This makes America a Chekhov play, in which a gun shown in Act One must be fired in Act Two. In other words, if you think the next act of American life is going to unfold without gunfire, you’re not paying attention.
In summation, your author would like to apologize for the world he has created. He knows it is ridiculous. He is simply doing his best to re-create reality as he has experienced it.
Boo phooey.
Before
A routine traffic stop. February 2017. A black F-150 outside Blountstown, Florida, with a non-op starboard taillight and a cardboard license plate. The dashboard camera shows the driver’s silhouette clearly. A tall man flip-mouthing a lit cigarette. The passenger is harder to make out, like Bigfoot’s ghostly image in a dusky wood. There’s a red stop sign in the distance, like a blinking jewel. A curving hillock, scrub brush green, rises to the horizon.
The wheel man in the police prowler is Deputy Dave Bullock—though you don’t see him until he exits the vehicle and approaches the cab, and then only in profile—born twenty-nine years earlier in Clearwater. The other officers call him Bull, but not for the reason you’d think. He’s a little guy, actually, neither ferocious nor stubborn. He describes himself as verbal—which in plain English means 60 percent of what comes out of his mouth is bullshit. Thus, the nickname. This may also be why he’s separated from his wife, though it could also have something to do with her developing an Oxy addiction after a car accident and leaving their son with a neighbor while she went to score dope. So now Bullock and Nathaniel, six, live at Grandma’s house, where they like to eat pancakes for dinner and watch nature shows on the DVR.
Deputy Jimenez, in the passenger position, lugged a .50 cal through Fallujah and the surrounding desert extremes for two tours. He still has shrapnel in his left leg from a roadside IED and likes to joke that, left to his own devices, he would walk in an endless circle. Six foot two and weighing in at two hundred and twenty pounds, he’s the mind over matter type—in the gym every morning at six, pressing his weight, fighting the wear and tear. He waits to shower until he gets home, though, because his left thigh is like a topographical map of mountainous terrain. After a few drinks sometimes, his girlfriend traces the angry pink scar tissue with her fingers and cries.
Both deputies exit their vehicle together. It’s a windy day, and Jimenez reaches unconsciously to secure his hat as he moves to the shoulder. Bullock approaches the driver. He is friendly but direct. The ensuing conversation takes nineteen seconds. Voices are quickly raised. On camera you can see Deputy Bullock step back onto the road and put his right hand on the butt of his pistol. He orders the driver from the truck. The door opens. A burly white man rolls free, a white T-shirt showing hard fat. His name—we know, but the cops will never learn—is Avon DeWitt, and he is a sovereign citizen. Avon has to shoulder the driver’s-side door to get it open, metal protesting at the hinge after a recent accident. Deputy Bullock takes a defensive step back as DeWitt straightens to his full height. DeWitt is smiling without joy, his hands spread wide, like a magician showing you there’s nothing up his sleeve.
Shots ring out, a muzzle flashing visibly from inside the cab. On the passenger side, Deputy Jimenez’s hat flies off, blood spray evident, and he tumbles backward into a gulley. On the driver’s side of the truck, Bullock pulls his service weapon—DeWitt ducking reflexively—as the passenger emerges holding a semiautomatic rifle, later identified as an AR-15. He fires across the bed of the F-150, hitting Bullock three times in the head and chest. As the deputy falls, DeWitt, a mustached man in his forties, jumps back into the truck and yells to the passenger to do the same.
“Let’s go. Let’s fucking go!” he screams. The passenger lowers the rifle and folds back into the truck, the vehicle fishtailing back onto the road, even as the passenger door remains open.
After the truck is gone, the dashboard camera continues to record everything, except now the painting is a landscape—Portrait of a Cloudy Florida Day in February, or Still Life with Corpses. The only evidence of the massacre that has just occurred is a single boot visible in the road on the left-hand side of the screen.
And so the viewer is left to ponder how one fact about the shooter stands out over all the others.
He appeared to be a child.
Now
It started with cigarettes, or how to sell people a product that men in Virginia seersucker knew would kill them.
Lucky Strikes. Virginia Slims.
A promise of magic in every puff.
To sell people cancer and lung disease, you have to do more than bury the truth. You have to undermine the idea of truth itself. What is smoking really? Who says it’s bad for you? Some Harvard elites who don’t understand your suffering? Who would keep from you this sweet relief?