Chapter 3: At Black Market

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The Redemption Inquiry by Michael Diamond. Chapter 3: At Black Market. In which
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the author gives the reader an eyeful of the dark underbelly of the beast,
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as spilled by a former pal deep in the pay of the political goons,
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the view from the Redemption in both directions through time's window.
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My pal Seesaw, Seosamh Beag in Gaelic, first-generation Brooklyn,
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changed it to Simon Begg to pass for a big dog.
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I judge him harshly that night, guilty of sin, guilty of democracide.
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Have you read Grisham's latest? His opening gambit.
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Seesaw's unredeemed face, a beacon of pure ferocity.
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With barely a soupçon of unacknowledged irony, poised as if to hear his master's
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voice, the siren call of plutocracy's Victrola.
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It must be August 9, 2008, only six months and change before the world slides
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irretrievably into the next phase of the hostile takeover by the moneyed goons.
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9th of August, the eve of Tisha B'Av on the Jewish lunisolar calendar,
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tipping point of oblivion.
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2008 sees the demise of Adi Da, Guru Mahesh Maharishi Yogi, Opus the Penguin, and S&H Greenstamps.
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No, I've never read any, Grisham, I cop warily. I am prepared for the usual
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tale of corporate derring do.
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I've come to expect on these outings.
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Seesaw and my wife Beth share a birthday, so he and Anya and Beth and I are
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out for the annual birthday ritual, a trendy suburban bistro, Black Market.
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The girls have just stepped out for their obligatory powder.
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This year it's an early dinner on account of me wanting to make the proper ritual
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observance of the Eve of Destruction.
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Thanatos has already gained the upper hand. A little over a century till the
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big trigger will be pulled, the technological singularity.
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Enlightenment out of reach, and the Redemption a whispered dream.
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Let's hit the pause button for a minute here. The year of the fateful birthday
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celebration, when Seesaw spills the beans, is the year before the billionaire
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sociopaths seal the political fate of every citizen of the U.S. of A.
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2009 is the year money becomes Imperatoris in Aeternum, Emperor Forever.
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2008 is the setup. The year markets tank all around the globe. Why?
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Because the sleight of hand now you see me, now you don't boys,
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are handing out credit to losers and then betting on them to lose.
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The fix is in from the bottom feeders to the top hats, from subprime mortgage
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lenders to the mortgage insurers to the bond raters to the Wall Street reporters
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to the credit default swappers.
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Con men and pirates.
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Sociopathy is the plat du jour.
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Seesaw is ahead of the game. A privateer for the Fortune 100 fat cats.
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2009, the year toward which this story arcs, turns out to be a thrilling year
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for tales of piracy, terror, and international criminal regimes.
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Here's what it looks like in the funny papers. Kabuki theater on foreign soil.
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Distraction from the business at home.
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Pirates set sail on the high seas off the coast of Somalia.
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The Japanese, the Chinese, and the Americans send their military heavies to
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apprehend the scurvy crews. Har!
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The Maersk Alabama is boarded by Somali pirates in little motorboats,
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the first pirate seizure of a ship under the American flag since the 1820s. Double har!
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That same year, former Union of Congolese Patriots leader Thomas Lubanga gets
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his mug dragged before a tribunal, the first trial at the International Criminal Court.
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Arraigned for training child soldiers to kill, pillage, and rape. Yikes.
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Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimari is sentenced to 25 years on account
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of ordering murders and kidnappings by his security thugs. Hiss.
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The International Criminal Court also puts out a warrant for Sudanese President
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Omar al-Bashir for slaughtering people and starving others to death in Darfur.
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About time, lads.
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The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime kicks off the Blue Heart Campaign
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against human trafficking.
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Evil bastards on notice. The Tamil Tigers,
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the Hindu terrorist organization in Sri Lanka, who by the by invented suicide
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vests and pioneered the use of air power in terrorist attacks,
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are brought under the boot of the Sri Lankan armed forces.
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However, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security discovers that cyber-thugs
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in the pay of Russia, China, and other nations have penetrated the U.S.
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Electrical grid. Oh, no!
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Vladimir Putin sends clear signals of his intent to retake the helm of the Russian
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ship of state. Watch out, boys and girls.
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The stakes of the international game of cops and robbers keeps going up,
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chasing bad guys across the surface of the planet while the real saboteurs are
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dismantling the system from the inside back home.
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Seesaw, Simon to his high-class confederates, proceeds unbidden.
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Grisham took the whole damn thing right out of our playbook.
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I wait for Seesaw to settle into the tale.
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A professional raconteur, he can weave a presidential election out of a hanging chad.
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In fact, he did just that, but that's another story.
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Yeah, I mean, I didn't want to buy the book and support the douchebag,
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so I sit in the airport bookstore and read it.
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Didn't give Grisham a goddamn dime.
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With a slight nod to himself, Seesaw indicates he's ready to spill.
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The rest of the story is a bona fide jaw-dropper.
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Well, most of it is pretty darn close to the truth.
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Only our main guy is definitely not an adulterer. That just isn't fair. He's a good guy.
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And then, of course, there's the creepy bit at the end of the story,
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the part that Grisham misses.
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That's where they tell the newly elected Chief Justice of West Virginia that,
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if he wants to keep the job that they hand him on a Tupperware platter,
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he'll, of course, hire the clerk of their choice.
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The real kicker is that the clerk will write his opinions for him.
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Spoiler alert, it's the new justice's ex-boss.
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So, you know I work part-time for this organization my firm lends me out to,
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Citizens for Better Governance, right?
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He told me about the shadowy network of Fortune 100 companies convened to
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funnel money into political covert ops, making the world safe for corporate greed.
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I'm not sure why he talks about his cloak-and-dagger dealings so openly,
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like he has to get it off his chest or something. I once mentioned it to the
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lone Republican lobbyist at a family dinner on a palatial estate in the Hamptons.
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She got all excited, said they do great work, important work.
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She has no idea.
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She's so excited that she sings about it to her boss back in D.C.,
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who happens to be a well-placed operative in Seesaw's corporate underworld.
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Word gets back to Seesaw that he should shut up and quit chirping to that Diamond
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guy, but by that time I know.
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Interlude: Partitions. The Mexican manakin, a sparrow in a mourning coat,
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courts his lovers in a lek, a posse of male competitors leaping and hurling
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themselves over each other in a manic dance of lust, a Darwinian two-step,
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a moonwalking Michael Jackson on methamphetamine,
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poor machines made of flesh,
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doomed to the handful of routines for which they are wired.
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Yes, mind can play its heart out on this Aeolian harp of a machine,
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combining and recombining to great effect the full range of possible airs.
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But in the end, it is not the machinery that distinguishes them from the Emperor's Nightingale, is it?
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Or else, the defeat of John Henry, Paul Bunyan, and Garry Kasparov by their
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respective opposing automata would spell the end of humanity as we conceive it. Am I right?
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The only acceptable answer, 1-1-0-0-0-1-0-0-0-1-1-0-1-1-0-0-0-1.
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We are each of us, variations on a theme, lovers on cue.
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So many species, each its unique song and dance, mutually unintelligible to each other.
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The family Pipridae, the breakdancers of the singing and perching order Passeriformis,
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sports 56 species scattered among its 18 genuses.
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You've got your white-crowned manakin, your crimson-hooded,
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your band-tailed and wire-tailed manakin. You have golden-headed,
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red-capped, red-headed, round-tailed, and scarlet-horned manakins.
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Then there's your blue-crowned, blue-rumped, cerulean-capped,
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snow-capped, golden-crowned, opal-crowned, orange-bellied, and white-fronted manakins.
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The helmeted and the arapipi manakins are the sole representatives of the genus Antilophia.
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Next up is the long-tailed, the lance-tailed, the blue-backed,
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the youngest, and the blue manakin.
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Following on, the pin-tailed, the golden-winged, the white-bibbed,
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white-rubbed, and white-throated manakins.
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Fast apace, the white, the orange,
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and the golden-collared, and their white-bearded manakin confrere.
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Shifting genus again, we find the fiery-capped, the eastern,
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and the western-striped, and their near-cousin, the club-winged manakin.
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Then let fly with the black, the olive, the green, the Lita,
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the yellow-headed, and the jet manakin.
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In hot pursuit, the flame, the orange, the yellow and the saffron crested,
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the last a tyrant by genus.
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The other tyrants, the sulfur bellied, the pale bellied, the Wieds,
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the Serra do Mar, the dwarf, and the tiny, tyrant manakins all.
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And last we have the questionable piprites, black capped, gray-headed,
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wing-barred, all vying to be real manakins, nature's wingmen in search of favorable reception.
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from Mulligan, S.P.B., The Medical Alchemist. End of interlude.
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Seesaw is shameless about his work.
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I never can seem to remember the exact name of his covert ops group,
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probably a combination of disbelief about my buddy hanging out with anti-democratic
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thugs, and the generic blandness of the names concocted by these kinds of ersatz operations.
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Citizens like hell. Even his wife Anya isn't so sure she wants in anymore.
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Reminds her too much of her cousins in the Russian mafia.
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But Seesaw is flat-out ebullient in regaling me of the operation.
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It must be intoxicating for him, a blue-collar Irish kid from the Bronx.
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His family are Democrats, all the way back to Adam.
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But when his pop dies in an industrial accident and the company lawyers swindle
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his mother out of any claim on her husband's future income, Seesaw can go one of two ways.
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Seesaw could have grown up to be a zealous crusader against corporate greed
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and its pernicious effects on the little guy.
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Or he could do just what he did, join the winning team.
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He sees firsthand the crushing effects of poverty early on and swears it will
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never happen to his family.
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What can a poor boy do?
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So they send me to West Virginia. It's a real challenge. like the most unfriendly
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judiciary for corporations.
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Seesaw mimes his disgust. I can laugh at that comic look of dismay now,
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kind of like the look on Jughead's face when Archie says he's going to marry
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Veronica instead of Betty.
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Would you get a load of that? These days, even Seesaw thinks his slavish commitment
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to the corporate goons is morbidly funny, now that we're all on the same page,
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the last page, the Redemption.
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The thing about telling stories is it's never exactly the same as the first
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rendition, real life Whisper Down the Lane, and even the first rendition is
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nothing compared to the events themselves.
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By the time the story makes it into Grisham's novel, it's a page-turner,
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but it's definitely missing some of the juice I got from Seesaw.
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I can't even imagine the evil shit he doesn't tell me.
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Whispers. As Elie Wiesel tells it in his introduction to his novel The Gates
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of the Forest, humans play Scheherazade to God's uxoricidal sultan.
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He concludes, God made man because he loves stories.
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I never get tired of Wiesel's story of stories.
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When Rabbi Israel Balshem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, saw that the Jewish
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people was threatened by tragedy,
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he would go to a particular place in the forest where he lit a fire,
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recited a particular prayer, and the miracle was accomplished, averting the tragedy.
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Later, when the Baal Shem Tov's disciple, the Maggid of Mezrich,
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had to intervene with heaven for the same reason,
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he went to the same place in the forest, where he told the Master of the Universe
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that while he did not know how to light the fire, he could still recite the
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prayer, and again the miracle was accomplished.
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Later still, Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sasov, in turn a disciple of the Maggid of
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Mezrich, went into the forest to save his people.
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I do not know how to light the fire, he pleaded with God, and I do not know
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the prayer, but I can find the place, and this must be sufficient.
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Once again, the miracle was accomplished. When it was the turn of Rabbi Israel
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of Rizhyn, the great-grandson of the Maggid of Mezrich, who was named after the Baal Shem Tov,
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to avert the threat, he sat in his armchair,
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holding his head in his hands, and said to God, I am unable to light the fire,
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I do not know the prayer, and I cannot even find the place in the forest.
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All I can do is tell the tale.
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Seesaw inhales sharply through both nostrils, then opens his mouth to exhale
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his fable of magic and miscreants.
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The guy who's Chief Justice of the West Virginia Supreme Court is probably one
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of the most popular politicians ever in the whole state of West Virginia.
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For years he runs his rogue court, deciding cases overwhelmingly in favor of
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plaintiffs, the most anti-corporate judicial environment in the country.
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We're never going to find a Republican to beat him in the state of West Virginia,
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so we've got to pick this conservative Democrat lawyer with no judicial experience whatsoever.
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He's happy as a clam to accept our million-dollar backing, no questions asked, thank you very much.
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Seesaw smiles his cat that got the canary smile, never once looking me in the eye.
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We get this team, this great team of hungry young Turks with blackberries,
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to research the hell out of the judge. Bingo!
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Find an incident where all three judges accidentally sign off on a work release
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to place a convicted child molester, get this, in a school.
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All three douchebags. Can you imagine that? Pay dirt!
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Seesaw grins a supremely self-satisfied grin, shaking his head slowly
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side to side, a dog worrying its prey in slow motion.
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Matter of fact, it never actually happens. They catch the mistake before the creep is released.
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Same difference, though.
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Don Blankenship, the Coal King, is in this one with us.
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Creates a fake grassroots organization, Save the Kids, based on the decision
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that never even frickin' played out. Works every time.
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Astro-turfing. Gotta love it.
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My gut begins to clench. Feels like it wants to expel something rank.
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Seesaw lets out a huge, open-mouthed silent whinny as he shoves back from the table.
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People just start calling in and signing on.
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Big protests, news coverage, the works. It's great.
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Matter of fact, we create a second Astro-turf protest group "'just making sure
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we have all our bases covered.
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"'Really beat the bushes.' "'In the next life, Seesaw comes back as my dog.'.
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A real man's dog. You can see the craftiness in his face.
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A Saluki is nobody's fool. I have to laugh out loud when I figure out who my faithful Caleb is.
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That dog's a real conniving SOB. I have a strong hunch during my tenure with
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Caleb that Moshiach, the savior of humanity, is finally going to show up.
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I'm coming up on retirement in 2121 when I have an uncannily strong premonition.
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The wheels are coming off of Leviathan, the artificial island where all us surviving
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humans are hustled by the A.I.s. Then it happens.
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I sense it, the moment the whole universe changes.
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I know it sounds crazy after all these incarnations.
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I'm a pretty good writer, but
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the spooky certainty I have is hard to describe. I give it my best shot.
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I have to sit down and put it in writing or I'll forget the feel of it.
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When I finally have it all down, I read it out loud. Try it out on Caleb.
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He's my only companion since my husband died. I'm a bit of a mystic in that
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life, though mostly I keep it to myself.
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I know Caleb will keep our secret.
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Listen! This is the day of our release from the Tsar's prison.
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The heavenly mandate has been decided.
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It is permitted, put through. The assembly line of the cosmic demiurge is cranked
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and ready to roll, the distribution of parcels by the divine visage.
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The Holy Rabbi is released, his mission sanctioned, his extraordinary rendition.
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I see my beloved splayed out against the Milky Way, hand-painted toes wriggling in delight.
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He eyes me coyly, a sidelong glance, and I return from the far reaches of the
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Kuiper Belt, redolent of planetissimals. You say that it's a celery root,
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and I say it's a goddamn KBO.
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Bowl me over with interstellar ice balls. Better yet, lob me a slow,
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arching, underhanded pitch, one that I can hit out of the park. Yes, it is permitted.
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Revive all of the dead souls. Pluck the jewel from the crown and crush it.
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Pulverize it and pour each shining bit into the slack-jawed,
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open mouth of the zombie nation.
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Yes, though more than half of it will go to waste, spilling into the void of
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deep interstellar space.
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Oh, the part that gets in, that shines from the heart, from the eyes,
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from the tips of the fingers and the crown of the head. There is no turning back.
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I hear the sound of an implacable machine grinding eternity in its gears.
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The Broad-Faced One smiles his knowing and weary smile.
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I have stared into the underside of the crown, seen bands of every language
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concentric, lining the crown with the tongues of all humanity.
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My heart catches. My entire being sighs.
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I am afraid that is not enough. O lover, O father, O mother,
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I see now that I am small, the Small Face, and the tears that I weep are harsh.
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They mingle with your tears, my beloved.
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The sweet and gentle rain that falls from your eyes softens the hot downpour from mine.
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Mother and father, millions of
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miles away, locked in their intergalactic post-mortem state, move in me.
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The beard on my face is white with age, yet the face itself is small.
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Small as a toddler who's wandered far from the safety of home. Home.
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Meanwhile, Seesaw's candidate never knows about any of the backroom manipulations
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and the millions of out-of-state dollars pouring into West Virginia.
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Plausible deniability. Forbes and Time Magazine describe it as the nastiest
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election of 2004, part of the U.S.
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Chamber of Congress's war on judges. Part of the reason justice is out of reach
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for the average American Joe or Jane.
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For Seesaw, just another well-played game of world domination.
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When the smoke clears, Seesaw's boy is right where they need him.
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It is his thumbs down, bought and paid for by the defendant,
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old Don Blankenship himself, that puts the kibosh on the little guy's appeal.
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No recusal, just a slam dunk for the corporate boogeyman.
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Seesaw doesn't reveal to me at dinner that night that the big plan is to head off the Caperton v.
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Massey Coal case before it reaches the West Virginia Supreme Court on appeal.
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Massey's CEO, Don Blankenship, is a bad hombre straight out of central casting.
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He is eventually convicted as the chief culprit in the Upper Big Branch Mine
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disaster, a complete and utter lack of conscience.
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He can, without compunction, instruct his foreman to force the miners to flip
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their safety badges around while traipsing Pluto's terrain.
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Few molecules of noxious gas will reach the detectors.
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He regularly tightens his grip
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over his capos by plunking down cans of Dad's root beer on their desk.
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It's an intended sign to anyone with eyes in their head. They all know the DADS acronym.
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Do As Don Says.
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The real reason for all the court-stacking shenanigans is that the cabal of
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suits simply have to prop up one of their own, nothing to do with politics per se, strictly bidness.
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A good man and his family are destroyed in the bargain.
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Hugh Caperton's family-run West Virginia Coal Company doesn't stand a chance
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against the well-funded behemoth.
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After I read Grisham's The Appeal, I understand it.
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The societal and legal ramifications that Seesaw omitted from the story are truly horrifying.
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The next year I read about the case in the papers, when it makes it to the U.S. Supremes.
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It still gives me the heebie-jeebies when I remember how Seesaw tells me with
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particular relish the part of the story that never sees the light of day,
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the bit about assigning their hand-picked clerk to write the judge's opinions for him,
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if the dude wants to keep his job. I'm stunned.
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Seesaw has zero qualms about undermining both the electoral and judicial process.
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How does he sleep at night? I'll never forget. We're driving around the Washington
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Beltway when I ask him. His answer?
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It's just a damn shame that people are so friggin' stupid.
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I'm quieter than usual when the ladies return to the table. I feel like my good
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friend Seesaw has been extracted into a spaceship and replaced by an alien.
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I feel sick. In fact, all three of my dinner companions might as well be little green men.
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I can suddenly hear the social fabric fraying and tearing around me.
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They say that Job is a man of infinite patience.
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Bullshit. It's a crock. His mind is blown.
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He has no idea what hit him. He rends his garment and tears his hair.
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He doesn't know what the hell hit him. The voice from the whirlwind,
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the so-called adversary, the left hand of the divine name.
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And just as quickly as he loses it all, he gets it all back. Presto chango.
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Except, is this his beautiful wife? Are these his beautiful children?
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Is this his beautiful house?
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No, they're all replacements.
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Job had Capgras Syndrome. They'd lock him away if he admits what he really knows.
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The previous story has been erased, rewritten.
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They probably wiped his memory.
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I'm not sure, but I don't think Job has the last word on that one.
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So there he is, blinking in the noonday sun at his replacement family and kids and the whole balagan.
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But you see, the thing is, Job never really exists.
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The part we forget, the part we have consistently failed to integrate,
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the failure in the teeth of the success of Western culture's innumerable triumphs, is very simple.
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No matter what they say, no matter what slogan they chant, no matter what banner
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flies overhead, you cannot, nor imagine that you ever can, have it all.
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It's as simple as that, really. Yet that is the poison that eats at the heart of the body politic.
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At last the machine grows quiet. The heat death of the universe. Entropy is satisfied.
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What's left? What story to tell?
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Whatever it is must be entropy driven. Energy is taken.
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I do my best to act festive, but an enormous gulf yawns between me and my old
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pal Seesaw that just isn't likely to be paved over.
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"'You could drive a coal truck through it.
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"'I'm staring into the face of the Fourth Reich.
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"'I won't reconnect with Seesaw in any meaningful way "'until my next life with him, as Caleb.
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"'Sad. "'Since the Redemption, we've actually revived our old poker gang.
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"'Having Seesaw as my faithful canine companion in the intervening incarnation
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"'goes a long way toward mending the breach.'.
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When the dinner's over, maybe thirty minutes or so before sunset,
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I motion for our waitress.
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I have a kind of strange request.
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Now they're all staring at me at the dinner table. Before the sun goes down
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and Tisha B'Av is upon us, I need an egg to stand in for the ancient Temple
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sacrifice and a pile of ashes,
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the Temple itself burned to the ground by the Romans.
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Could you ask the chef to hard boil an egg for me? And when you bring it out,
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could you also bring a lighter or some matches and a paper towel?
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I'll have to ask the manager, sir, the poor girl's tenuous response.
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I tell her it's for a religious observance. I'm a regular customer,
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so I don't expect any trouble.
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Seesaw and Anya are giving each other cockeyed smiles. Another weirdness a la Michael.
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Poor Anya, a good soul. She loves Seesaw.
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She's trying desperately not to get dragged down the moral rat hole with him.
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Neither of them have any idea where I'm going with all this religious stuff.
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Beth knows and sits there staring stiffly, a suppressed eye roll. And I know.
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Probably. Except in my heart, I believe that the purpose of life is to spread bliss.
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Where's the bliss in this? I must be bliss-taken.
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Crack your toe in the bedpost in the dark and cry out, Holy light of eternity,
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infuse me now. I'm just not there.
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Loss, pain, but no bliss in sight.
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When the waitress comes back with the egg and the implements of destruction,
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I look her in the eye and thank her.
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She backs away from the table, mystified.
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I remove the saucer from under my coffee cup, crumple the paper towel on it,
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and before Beth can say, Oh, Michael, don't, I light it ablaze and watch it instantly turn to ash.
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A few glances from nearby tables, but the conflagration is brief and contained.
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Crack and peel the boiled egg, roll it in the pile of ash and, with nary a blessing, down the hatch.
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Chase with a crust of bread and a gulp of tasteless tap water.
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Seesaw and Anya are silent, caught between horror and hilarity.
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Tisha B'Av, I mutter. Tumbling into the spiritual nadir of the Hebrew liturgical calendar.
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Destruction of the temple. I can't explain anymore. The gulf is just too broad.
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Sundown. Time to go. The fast begins.