and we had several drinks and welsh rabbits and paid our bill and went home, and opened the door with a latchkey and put on pajamas and went to bed and it was comfortable in bed
—John Dos Passos, USA
Wisdom is always wont to arrive late, and to be a little approximate on first possession.
supposed Francis Spufford
c) Charlotte
Charlotte was running for Congress without wasting too much time on it. “Yes,” she would admit at evening meetings, or to her wristpad while commuting to work, “Yes I’m running, and it’s a pain in the ass, but someone has to. Our much unloved Democratic Party has betrayed us yet again with the mayor’s craven response to the hurricane, she’s not even saying the right things this time, and she’s doing the wrong things as always. I know I haven’t played the game, I haven’t climbed the ladder that the party requires of people to make sure they are fully housebroken before they go down and join the clusterfuck in the capital. But that lack on my part is now an advantage, because that career track is part of what has made the Democratic Party so weak. But I’m a Democrat for lack of anything better, and I intend to speak out of the people’s side of our party’s two-sided mouth, and shut the other side that speaks for Denver. That’s why I’m running. My platform is similar to the left wing of the party’s current platform, you can check out the particulars if you like, the Rad Dems, but know that mainly I’m going down there to speak for intertidal people everywhere, and to speak against the global oligarchy every single day. I’m not taking campaign money from anyone and I don’t have any of my own, so I’m mostly doing this in the cloud, like now. Vote for me if you want, and if not, you get what you deserve.”
Many variations on that theme. She didn’t bother with making nice, and she didn’t show up for any number of supposedly crucial events. She did her job at the Householders’ Union, helping people who couldn’t even vote. She spoke to certain cloud personages, and to friends in certain groups around town. It would be an experiment. Similar campaigns had worked before.
Meanwhile autumn in New York played out in ways that helped her. The Householders’ Union’s wildcat noncompliance strike was famous and going strong; not paying rents and mortgages and calling that a political act was proving to be very popular. Markets were holding on by the skin of their teeth, loudly proclaiming everything was fine, but people now spoke of rent using the economists’ definition of the word, as any taking of money with no productive economic work created. Taking a cut, corruption, rent-seeking, these were suddenly used as synonyms. The householders’ strike even looked like a logical response to the bashing of the city by Mother Nature and the clueless intransigence of the absent rich in their empty uptown towers. Strike, therefore! and watch the house of cards fall. Everything that happened seemed to play to her campaign message. The plutocracy hid offshore behind its algorithms, the private security mercenaries continued to play Snidely Whiplash to the NYPD’s Dudley Do-Right. The National Guard stood there in Morningside Heights and tried to have it both ways. Everyone kept playing their parts as if things hadn’t changed, as she never lost an opportunity to point out. Maybe she too was playing her part, but she had been dealt a great hand this time, it seemed to her. And if not, they would get what they deserved, all of them.
“I don’t care!” she kept saying. “Vote for me if you want, and if not, fine. It would save me an enormous hassle to lose this. I’m only doing it because someone has to, some poor public-service bureaucrat schmuck, I can’t believe it’s me but I got talked into it. I’m sorry I’m such a sucker, but my mom read books to me and I guess that did it. I believed the stories. I still do. And I’m a hard worker, having nothing better to do with my time. So vote for me, so I don’t feel like more of an idiot than I already do.”
Her poll numbers trended upward, and this gave her the confidence to start speaking more explicitly about the left wing of the Democratic Party, a burgeoning national movement, and how they intended to usurp the business chickenshits among them once and for all, and see if government could go back to being the people’s company. “Look, finance is blowing up again, another of their gambling bubbles has popped and they are right now going to Congress demanding another taxpayer bailout like they always do. Give us all the money we blew, they’re saying, or we’ll blow up the world. They hope to get paid again before November, when a new Congress might do something different. Which we will, if you elect enough of us Rad Dems. We’ll act in congress in Congress, there’s candidates like me everywhere, and this time we’ll save the economy for us, not for the rich. That’s what’s scaring them now, the fact that a real plan has reared its ugly head, and it’s called this: nationalize the banks. Make that whole giant leech on the real economy into a credit union, and squeeze all that blood money we’ve lost back into us.”
She stopped herself before the image of squeezing a leech to get your blood back into you got too vivid. She could definitely get creative in a bad way when she was on a roll. Have a glass of wine, close her eyes and let it rip. Too angry to care anymore. And her numbers were trending up, so it seemed to be working, which made her even more creative. This was how it was going to work, if it was going to work at all. She even started attending campaign events. But a lot of it was just her talking to her wrist and broadcasting it to whoever. Talking to the city like a crazy person on a soapbox in the park. Dangerous, sure. But so was caution. And because of the Householders’ Union, she had standing.
Also Amelia put out a photo of herself and a leopard under the banner ALL THE GREAT MAMMALS ARE VOTING FOR CHARLOTTE. Leopard sitting on its haunches like a dog, Amelia standing right next to it, both of them unclothed and unrepentantly beautiful. Out on some Africa plain backed by a turquoise sky. Same calm look from both as they stared into the camera. “Okay,” Charlotte said. “I love you.”