Ordinary Obsessions

by Tom Corbett

  “Wait Kat. Yes, you say Trump has little chance, but clearly you have doubts about that. The Republican base is just stupid enough to go with this class clown. Being half Irish, I tend to walk on the dark side of pessimism. I can easily see that asshat being elected.”

  Kat appraised her brother with a cool detachment and decided not to pursue Trump’s possibilities any further. “You have been away a long time. Nevertheless, I know you are aware of the well-financed right-wing campaign to shift the foundations of the political debate in this country since the 1970s at least. I have heard you discuss these things much better than I ever could. In fact, it is because of you that I became aware of the world about me. And all that time you thought I was not listening.”

  Chris assumed a bemused look. “We all underestimated you.”

  “No matter. What you may not be fully aware of is how successful the right has been in undermining the democratic process through gerrymandering and voter suppression and widespread misinformation campaigns and, when all else fails, outright fraud. Each success leads them to update and extend their game plan. You can tell when they are upping their game, their hysterics about the Dems cheating cranks up another notch. Have you ever seen a site called Prager U?”

  “No.”

  “It is a full-blown social media effort to flood the youth of this country with right-wing misinformation. It is one of several. This entire campaign has seemingly unlimited resources. Most of us know that the Leadership Institute has been attacking higher education, along with Republican-inspired budget cuts to some of our world-class public universities. Whole segments of the population think that Fox News is truth and that Hillary Clinton is a serial killer and that she and John Podesta run a child sex trafficking ring out of a pizza parlor.”

  “Sure, there are nut jobs out there but…”

  “More than you would ever imagine, dear brother, more than even your darkest side can envision. You have said for years that the American electorate is dumb beyond measure. I scoffed. I only hung with educated people. Now, I agree with you. But listen, my people have been educating me, no easy task I admit.” She caught herself. “My God, why do I throw these softballs in your direction? In any case, I know the business world, but politics and psychology are a bit out of my league. What I am learning is that there is a vast reservoir of people out there afflicted with a debilitating set of pathologies. They are like putty in the hands of would-be authoritarians: easy to manipulate. We are running out of time, so let me run down their set of afflictions for you. First, this group yearns for an unquestioned authoritarian leader, someone they can literally follow without question. Second, they see the world as a structured hierarchy with everyone in an assigned place as ordained by some divine presence. Third, they have a strong sense of tribalism or an identification with a group that, surprisingly enough, looks and believes just like them. Fourth, they are isolated culturally, only associating with like-minded people and listening to their preferred information outlets. Finally, they are in deadly fear that other groups, the ones that they despise, are gaining on them. These people are paranoid, it is a biological panic, programmed right into how they see the world. There are clinical names for all these syndromes; I have something for you to read.”

  “Now Kat?”

  “Not yet. You are going to protest that this is the fringe. Perhaps. But remember this, dear brother, half of the electorate don’t even bother to vote. They are too busy watching the Kardashians. With voter manipulation and those who would never vote anything other than Republican, even if the candidate were Satan’s brother, only 20, maybe 25 percent of the entire population needs to be sick to elect a true Nazi to power. After all, there will still be those who will vote for Lucifer himself if he promised to support their narcissistic self-interest and cater to their personal hates. Republican policies only help a sliver of those at the top but many of the near wealthy can be easily bought with the promise of another tax cut and the elimination of a few more inconvenient regulations. A larger slice is driven by abject fear and vitriolic hate. They really don’t have to get much more than a quarter of the adult population. Once that happens, once they get all the power, who knows? We may never see democracy again.”

  Chris looked deeply at his sister. “Yeah, I keep telling everyone that Von Papen and Hindenburg thought they could control that clown Hitler. After all, he was little more than a bombastic buffoon. That has to be one of my favorite historical vignettes.”

  “Exactly,” Kat agreed as she tried to recall who Von Papen was but refused to admit to her brother that she had no idea. “Now, let’s go next door to the small conference room. I have a couple of key staffers ready to run through some drills. I want you to get to know them. Chris, these are people I trust. Everyone worries about industrial espionage. Well, I worry about political espionage, trolls planted to keep tabs on what I am up to and bugs in phones and walls. Life has become…complicated. I even have this place swept every month.”

  “Did you find electronic bugs?” Chris seemed shocked.

  “What do you think?”

  Chris opened his mouth but did not get a chance to speak. His sister grabbed his arm, guiding him through a door into a moderately sized, windowless room. Two people were already seated, waiting: a petite Asian female sporting a stylishly cut crown of jet-black hair and a male with a round, pleasant face and a receding hairline. Both looked up expectantly. Chris could not escape the impression that they were students waiting to defend their theses.

  Kat spoke first. “This is my much older brother, as you know. Chris, this is April Song and Josef Spiglanin. They both have intriguing backgrounds. Let’s start there. I hope you will get to know them well so a little background from them should be useful. They already know yours.”

  “Wait, I don’t get to give my side?” Chris smiled.

  Kat ignored him. It was business time. “April, you begin.”

  The young woman seemed to start, as if surprised. Then she spoke with a distinct oriental accent but in precise English. “It is good to meet you, Doctor Crawford, your excellent reputation is known to all of us and…”

  Chris stopped her mid-sentence with a quick laugh. “I am sorry April but let’s agree to a few ground rules. First, it is Chris, not Doctor or Professor or His Eminence. I only demand that Kat refer to me as His Eminence. And I hope Kat sends out a general message to that effect. Second, I want equal time to dispute whatever you heard about me from my sister. Wait, you haven’t heard anything about a coat rack, have you?” Chris could see the puzzled look on the girl’s face and quickly moved on. “Never mind. Finally, let’s all relax here. I haven’t bitten anyone since…Tuesday. April, April Song, that is a lovely name, lyrical even.”

  The girl smiled, and then visibly relaxed. “Thank you. My mother birthed three girls over five years, all in the spring. So, she named them April, May, and June. My two brothers were spared such by being born in the fall. I think, this is just my speculation, that the lyrical names, as you say, were chosen to counter the dreary early years my parents endured. We were born in North Korea. My father had technical training and was working on nuclear military projects, don’t ask me the details. He was considered a desirable asset by the West and very careful contacts were made through his academic colleagues. Of course, he would not consider leaving without his family, we would all have been killed, after being tortured. But plans were made, which I cannot discuss…national security.”

  “Fascinating,” Chris murmured.

  “Anyways, after a short time in South Korea, we all moved to the United States where father took up an academic appointment, among other things. We were too vulnerable in any part of Korea. The rulers of the North are not very forgiving, or I should say, the ruler. There is only the one.”

  “I imagine not,” Chris whispered and kicked himself for interrupting.

  When April was certain Chris would say no more, she continued: “I eventually studied mathematics and computer scienc
es at MIT. I did some work on Wall Street, for the quants who make big money mathematically anticipating small shifts in market fluctuations. But that proved dissatisfying. I was never into the money. Then one day, an operative of Ms. Crawford, someone I knew from college, approached me. We talked for some time about where this country is going, the dangers we faced. You must understand, Doctor…I mean Chris, I love this country. I love democracy as only someone who has lived in an authoritarian regime can. There is nothing so oppressive as a regime based on terror, on blind obedience and total control.”

  “And you think that is where we are headed?”

  “I think you should listen to what I, I mean we, have to say and decide for yourself.” April leaned back, now seemingly self-assured. “Josef has an interesting background as well,” She added, confirming to all that she was finished.

  Josef cleared his throat when he realized he was up. “I was also raised in an authoritarian regime, communist Poland. You see, I was a believer when I was young. I was chosen for a bright future, sent to Moscow to study economics at university. Unfortunately, I was too rational, the inconsistencies and failures of the regime were too obvious, hard to ignore. You cannot plan everything from the center. I left Moscow to continue my studies in Warsaw just as the Solidarity Movement gained traction. I nibbled at it in the beginning before getting caught up in the exhilaration of simply the promise of basic freedoms, like speech and association. It was remarkable, it really was. Years of indoctrination melted away in weeks. I am sure I experienced something akin to what your evangelicals do when they are ‘born again’. So, I joined the union of economists, each profession had a union back then, we mimicked the workers in the Gdansk shipyards. I am not sure they were so much unions as they were political or protest clubs. I was suspended from university as many of our more outspoken members were, but we persisted. Then, the day arrived.” He stopped as if reliving an old experience.

  “Go on, please,” Chris encouraged him.

  “Sorry, some of the memories are still raw. I still hung around the university. One day I was alone and printing off flyers for distribution. I knew I was on their list. After all, I had been among the chosen but betrayed them. This day, I heard the front door bang open, some shouting, and then heavy footsteps. I may even have said a prayer at that moment, not that I knew any. In a moment, heavily armed police barged in pointing guns at me. It hit me that this might be my final moment on earth. Instead, I was hit in the head with the butt of a rifle and then dragged off to the police station where I was interrogated, if that is what you want to call it. To put it bluntly, they beat me rather badly. I assumed these were my final days…hours.”

  “Yet, you are here.”

  “Yes, the best part of the story. It turns out that news of my arrest spread like wildfire. They would have been better to come for me at night, when there were no witnesses. They were not a smart lot. In any case, the lawyers also had a union and the economists worked closely with them. Some figured that both lawyers and economists were professions spawned in Satan’s evil mind, so it made sense that they were close allies. Anyways, they organized a mass rally in front of the police station. By this time, they could legitimately threaten to bring what passed as a legal system to its knees. Besides, they had contact with the outside world. I had already published economic and political articles which had been published abroad, so I had a small following in the West. They brought so much pressure on the government that the officials in charge soon released me and basically let me leave the country. Not so much leave as strongly suggested that I do so. I had academic contacts here and was able to pick up my studies at the University of Chicago. It is a little conservative there, but I was able to study under Heckman. One day, as I was debating my future, Ms. Crawford gave a talk, largely on the intersection of business and politics. My future was decided in that moment.”

  For the first time, Kat spoke up: “Chris, as you can see, I have the brightest and most committed working with me. The commitment comes from personal experience, the best kind. They now have a little show-and-tell presentation to make, some of which will be new to me I am sure.”

  April and Josef began their presentation, aided by numbers and graphics that were flashed on a large wall surface that could serve multiple functions. It was a masterful tour through summaries of many data sets along with surprisingly deft interpretations of what the kaleidoscope of numbers meant or might mean at least. There were two main themes. One focused on money flows in support of numerous organizations dedicated to entrenching right-wing thought in the American political dialogue. The second was an illuminating exploration of the belief sets embedded in a large portion of the American electorate.

  Chris was amazed at how adroitly they had integrated several surveys and related data sets to paint a coherent picture of how so many people saw the world about them. He could see the bottom line coming. Unlimited money targeted on those evidencing preexisting personality pathologies could result in a permanent authoritarian rule in what once had been the world’s finest example of a free people, or so the conventional story long presented went. What amazed Chris the most was the detail that was available at the individual level. He was discomforted by the thought that unknown computer whizzes out there knew his food preferences, his reading habits, and his favorite sexual positions. It was not only creepy from a privacy perspective but a potentially devastating tool in the hands of those out to manipulate political divisions. This invasion of his inner world was the work of Cambridge Analytica. It struck Chris that there were so many of these entities out there, plying their dark arts in cyberspace. He was getting lost, but the name Cozy Bear kept coming up which turned out to be a main source of mischief aimed at the American election…a plot straight out of the Kremlin and run by the FSB or the new KGB loyal to Vladimir Putin.

  Chris was rather relieved when their presentation turned to domestic issues. Still, he mostly listened but occasionally weighed in on something that caught his attention. He did not know all that much about the intimate connection between Washington lobbyists, congressional committee assignments, and partisan leadership. “So, let me get this straight. There are levels of committee assignments, A and B and C, based on how much a given seat will generate in political contributions to your reelection. But to get a choice assignment, an A-level committee assignment, you must cough up so much money to the party leadership to help them keep control. An A-level committee, as you say, enables the congressperson to shake down lobbyists for more money, which keeps them both in office and on the lucrative committees. It sounds as if Congress is like the Mafia: all about the foot soldiers raising money for the dons. Doesn’t anyone spend time governing, thinking about the public good?”

  Josef smiled. “Sure, some of the Democrats do but they have little influence and zero power. And, of course, the president does, or did, but Obama is very limited in what he can do with a Republican Congress and so little time remaining in power. Whatever you see coming out of Congress now, or many statehouses, are prepackaged bills that have been spawned and drafted by right-wing enablers like ALEC. Policy debates and thinking are a lost art form. It is government by predesigned script.”

  Chris remained totally absorbed when he noticed Kat glance at her watch. That seemed a cue for April and Josef to wrap things up. As they shifted gears, Chris stopped them. “I get what you are trying to tell me. Bottom line is this: a targeted campaign to shift public perception and undermine our institutions, embedded cognitive and behavioral pathologies among 30 to 35 percent of the whole population, widespread political indifference, and a concerted effort to suppress and distort democratic protocols can result in a permanent authoritarian government in America. Is that pretty much it?”

  “Yes, more or less a permanent fascist government with only nominal gestures to democratic forms,” Kat responded, then smiled. “I remember you saying that Stalin often noted that people could vote anyway they wanted, as long as he got to count the votes. See,
I did listen to you. The hard right in this country are not there yet but are getting quite close.”

  “Let me add a quick historical note,” Chris mused as if thinking to himself. “This has been a long time coming but I must admit that I am alarmed at their progress and the international reach of the operations. It strikes us as amusing now but the Republican Party once had a conscience. Even the icons of the conservative wing like Goldwater and Reagan had principles. They would be outcasts today. You could see the drift over time. In the most recent elections, Romney and McCain managed to hold off the inevitable, but I agree that the red tide has swept away what remains of reason within one of our two major parties. This time, the base will not permit a centrist, by Republican standards, to run. And while I cannot imagine that anyone as damaged as Trump or Cruz could win the general election…you never know, you just never know.”

  Kat arose. “But, as my wonderful people here have shown, they can and might. However, I am afraid we must wrap this up. I am needed elsewhere. Great job.” She nodded to her two staffers.

  Chris also arose and walked around to first shake Josef ’s and then April’s hand. The latter said softly: “I read your book on international needs. I was inspired.” She held his gaze and Chris felt a frisson of emotion stir somewhere. Then both staffers exited.

  Kat remained standing. “I am running a bit late so two quick points. First, I see that April has a crush on you. You touch her, and I will break both your kneecaps.”

  “Wait, I can’t help if I am still adorable.”

  “Oh, barf, you have been warned. And second, I need you.