Wild Thing: A Novel

by Josh Bazell

  On the broad-spectrum monitor I can see they’re wearing infrared chemlights on lariats to differentiate themselves from the target.* That’s okay. I’ve got a bucket of chemlights next to the can of UV-reflecting spray paint I thought they might use to mark themselves instead. Since they didn’t, I go ahead and put on my assault vest.

  The best news, by far, is the helicopter. It’s moving into place right over the house, clear on the monitor, positioned to have a shot at me if I go out any of the doors. Helicopters, and people who can fly them, are expensive. And the house is packed with easily enough TATP to take it down.

  It’s still too early for that, though. Or even for blowing the sniper positions. The paramilitary geeks haven’t tripped any of the anti-personnel mines yet. Once they do, I’ll flip the rest of the switches with one hand, then go outside and hunt down the stragglers. After, naturally, frying out their night-vision goggles with the various exotic-spectrum lamps I’ve put in the trees.

  It’s likely to be a massacre, which is unfortunate. Then again, I didn’t ask anybody to come here. All I did was apply for a notary public license under a false name but with my real thumbprint and this address, something felons sometimes do to get gun licenses. At the time, I worried it might be too subtle.

  Are the things I’m about to do justified? Who knows? If you count Teng, McQuillen’s scheme killed five people. My own trip to Minnesota left Dylan Arntz, four of Debbie Schneke’s Boys, and the eight guys sent by Locano dead—and almost killed Violet Hurst, Sheriff Albin, Debbie Schneke herself, and Albin’s deputy. My fault, yes, for getting involved, but the only way to keep something like that from happening again is to either keep running—meaning never work as a doctor under any name, stay out of public view, don’t associate with anyone, and hope I get a lot luckier than last time—or fight back. Hurt the mob so badly they realize David Locano’s vendetta isn’t worth pursuing. Should I wait until I’m in a corner? Maybe I already am. Corners tend to be where you imagine them.

  What argues against my doing this, I know—besides the fact that I’ve just spent eleven years trying not to kill people, mostly successfully, and to make up for having done so in the past—is how enjoyable it’s likely to be. How enjoyable it already is.

  The skills I’m about to unleash are things to be ashamed of, and I am ashamed of them. They’re also fun as fuck to use, and pretending otherwise won’t change what’s about to happen.

  I put my hand on the switches.

  I mean, why lie?

  APPENDIX

  CANDIDATES FOR POINT OF NO RETURN

  ON CLIMATE CHANGE and WHAT TO DO

  ABOUT IT NOW

  by Violet Hurst

  Part I. Candidates for Point of No Return

  November 2010. Americans who believe that their most pressing problem is that rich people and corporations aren’t free enough to fuck them elect a Republican majority to the House of Representatives.*

  In December, a month before John Boehner becomes Speaker of the House, a spokesman for him says “The Select Committee on Global Warming was created by Democrats simply to provide political cover to pass their job-killing national energy tax. It is unnecessary, and taxpayers will not have to fund it in the 112th Congress.” In February, Republicans introduce legislation prohibiting the Environmental Protection Agency from trying to limit greenhouse gases. Representative Darrell Issa of California, suspected car thief and arsonist and now incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, having already called funding for climate science “a tsunami* of opacity, waste, fraud, and abuse,” promises yet another investigation of “Climategate,” the fake scandal that has already been discredited by five previous investigations.* This while ocean acidity approaches the level past which shellfish won’t be able to make shells.

  This date is important, and it raises the perennial question of which of these assholes know full well that climate change is real and are selling out to secure whatever advantage they can get for themselves and their families before everything goes to hell, and which ones are sufficiently stupid or blinded by fear to actually not see what’s going on.

  But it’s way too late to be a contender for the point of no return.

  January 2010. The U.S. Supreme Court rules that corporations, despite never dying or doing jail time, have the same First Amendment rights as humans—including the right to spend unlimited amounts of money on political advertising.*

  This decision destroys any balance that may have existed between people and corporations in the United States, and cripples U.S. democracy in general, but again is way too late for serious consideration.

  April 2009. Failure of the Copenhagen Climate Conference, an event notable for intransigence on the part of the United States and China and for public indifference following the disclosure that professional golfer Tiger Woods had sex with women he wasn’t married to.*

  Not even close, though it’s nice to see golf and the people who love it* doing even more to fuck up the environment.

  December 2000. After the United States elects Al Gore, the Supreme Court prohibits an accurate counting of votes from Florida, making George W. Bush president.

  Republican scumbag and secretary of state of Florida Katherine Harris,* who despite being co-chair of George W. Bush’s campaign in Florida is also in charge of certifying Florida’s vote, provokes the case by stopping the count in the first place.

  This is such a classic that people forget that prior to it there was still an operating fiction that Supreme Court justices aren’t political. For example, in 1987, Republican senator Orrin Hatch said “If the [Supreme Court] judges themselves begin to base their decisions on political criteria, we will have lost the reasoning processes of the law which have served us so well to check political excesses and fervor over the last 200 years.”*

  It’s also a strong contender. Al Gore’s wealth, like that of George W. Bush, comes from selling political favors to oil companies,* and Gore’s running mate later showed himself to be entirely aligned with corporate interests. But in reality there is very little chance Gore could have done a worse job than Bush on the environment.*

  Still, choosing this option ignores things like the role of “Green” Party spoiler candidate and narcissist Ralph Nader, and ignores the fact that enough people willingly voted for Bush and Nader to make the election stealable. Write it on your tombstones, dipshits.

  July 1997. Unanimous passage by the U.S. Senate (including Al Gore) of the Byrd-Hagel Resolution, which voiced opposition to ratifying the Kyoto Protocol on the grounds that China hadn’t ratified.

  This is a nice “fuck y’all—including us!,” and ratifying Kyoto would have set a precedent for international cooperation on the environment. But on its own the Kyoto Protocol was too weak to significantly slow down climate change anyway.

  November 1979–January 1981. Iran takes sixty-six Americans hostage during the Carter administration, and doesn’t release them until six minutes into the Reagan administration,* thereby convincing a lot of Americans that a slick corporate tool selling sham “morning in America” optimism was somehow an improvement over a (granted) kook who, despite taking money from oil interests himself, at least said he wanted to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil. As environmentalists, Reagan’s appointees—such as EPA head Anne Gorsuch, who didn’t believe the federal government should have an environmental policy, and became the first agency director in history to be charged with contempt of Congress—were actually worse than those of George W. Bush.

  This is another strong possibility. Until 9/11, the Iranian hostilities were the biggest hint Americans got of what happens when the oil industry drives politics. That their response was to flee into shortsighted denial continues to define American politics today.

  Plus, as a year, 1979 has other things going for it. Like that it was the year Saudi billionaires Salem bin Laden (cousin of Osama bin Laden) and Khalid bin Mahfouz (brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden) provided startup funds for Arbusto, G
eorge W. Bush’s first business venture. And that David Koch (see above) ran for vice president, an experience said to have convinced him and his brother to seek political change covertly rather than overtly.

  November 1962. Report commissioned by JFK from the Committee on Natural Resources of the National Academy of Sciences / National Resource Council predicts that endless clean energy from fusion will be achieved “possibly within a decade but more likely within a generation,” thereby (the argument goes) convincing the Kennedy administration and subsequent administrations to ignore conservation or environmental protection.*

  Serious climate nerds often choose this one, but mostly so they can identify each other at conferences. Personally I’m not that into it. If you’re going to believe that anyone read this report, took it seriously, and based policy decisions on it, then you have to assume the same people read—but completely ignored—sentences in the report like this one:

  Man is altering the balance of a relatively stable system by his pollution of the atmosphere with smoke, fumes, and particles from fossil fuels, industrial chemicals, and radioactive material; by his alteration of the energy and water balance at the earth’s surface by deforestation, afforestation [i.e., planting of new forests—not sure this one’s turned out to be that big of a problem], cultivation of land, shading, mulching, overgrazing grasslands, reduction of evapotranspiration [i.e., the vital part of the water cycle where plants evaporate water off the tops of their leaves to produce suction, which draws nutrients up through their circulatory systems], irrigation, draining of large swamp lands, and the building of cities and highways; by his clearing forests and alterations of plant surface cover, changing the reflectivity of the earth’s surface and soil structures; by his land-filling, construction of buildings and seawalls, and pollution, bringing about radical changes in the ecology of estuarine areas; by changes he effects in the biologic balance and the physical relocation of water basins through the erection of dams and channel works; and by the increasing quantities of carbon dioxide an industrial society releases to the atmosphere.

  And besides, the idea that people knew this shit in 1962 and didn’t do anything about it is, even for me, too depressing to dwell on.

  1953. Public relations firm Hill & Knowlton, on behalf of the tobacco industry, devises the strategy of “constructing controversy,” by which corporations pay crackpots to dispute scientifically proven concepts, then accuse the press of partiality if their shills aren’t given equal time with people who know what they’re talking about.

  This is actually a very strong contender, in my opinion. The practice is in wider use than ever (the term “false equivalency” has become a popular way to describe it), and it’s been modified by the understanding that—up to the point where the media won’t tolerate it, which has yet to be located—the more extreme your manufactured dissent, the further you can push the “centrist” position from the truth.

  1895. Henry Ford, then an executive of the Edison Illuminating Company, dedicates himself to researching gasoline engines. Alternately: 1870 (first mobile gasoline engine), 1860 (first mass-produced internal combustion engine), 1823 (first internal combustion engine to be used industrially), etc.

  I don’t like calling inventions and discoveries disasters. Technology’s not evil; it just evolves quickly and without clear goals or ethics, requiring us to constantly defend a place for humanity in the world it makes. What causes technology to behave like it’s evil is corporate greed. Like General Motors establishing a special unit in 1922 to buy and dismantle functioning electric public transportation systems across America. Or Congress making that kind of thing easier for GM and other companies to do by passing the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935.

  1879–83. The War of the Pacific. This is not a cause, but it is a pretty egregiously missed lesson. The war was over deposits of bat and seagull shit in the Caribbean, which had been discovered to be an ideal source of fertilizer, and had enabled a boom in agricultural output—with resulting booms in population and urbanization.* Bat and seagull shit are renewable in the sense that bats and seagulls continue, where available, to shit, but the deposits in the Caribbean had taken millions of years to form and were depleted within sixty years of being found. If petroleum hadn’t been discovered to replace them, there would have been a population crash then.*

  It’s a great illustration of the human tendency to quickly exhaust resources that took what paleontologists call “geologic time” to form, but there are a lot of those.*

  Fifth century BC. Consolidation of the Book of Genesis, with its claim, no doubt useful for the political demographics of the time,* that “God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it…. I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.’ ”

  Now, there are several messages you can imagine taking from this passage. One of the more obvious is that God wants us to be vegetarian. Another is that, once the earth has been filled and subdued, God might want us to fucking stop overbreeding. I mean, most people who read “lather, rinse, repeat” don’t keep doing it until their scalp is a chunky mess of gore. They just can’t seem to apply the same logic to the Bible.* The message they insist on seeing is that God for some reason wants us to pursue maximal reproduction until it kills off us and most of His other non-insect creatures.

  But people will interpret anything in self-serving ways, so it’s hard to blame what ended up being the Bible. Give people a genetics textbook, and when they read that they’re going to pass on only half of their unique genes to their kids, and only a quarter to their grandkids, and only an eighth to their great-grandkids, at least some of them are going to say “Damn—it says I need to have eight kids.”

  If I had to choose, I’d go with Reagan / Carter / Iran 1979–80. It was the great turning-away from reality, and it happened the same year William R. Catton’s Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change was published.

  Because that was such an effective warning.

  Part II: What to Do About It Now

  Easy. First: plant ten billion trees. Then: Rubik’s Vagina. Same pass rate as the cube, only with using the guidebook.

  It’s my idea, but you can have it for free.

  SOURCES

  This book is a work of fiction. While the sources mentioned below have been helpful in conceiving it, the book does not necessarily reflect those sources’ findings or opinions with any accuracy. Nor is it intended to. That said, and strictly for people who care about this kind of thing:

  My understanding of what it’s like to be a doctor in the cruise ship industry owes thanks to the doctors and patients who have shared their experiences with me personally (MW in particular) and those who have seen fit to share them publicly, such as Gary Podolsky, John Bradberry, and Andrew Lucas, not all of whom perceive the industry in a negative light. For background I am indebted to Devils on the Deep Blue Sea: The Dreams, Schemes and Showdowns That Built America’s Cruise-Ship Empires, by Kristoffer A. Garin, 2006 (including for information about the 1981 strike),* and the Cruise Lines International Association guidelines for medical facilities.

  The figure of approximately $7,000 a year for some cruise ship employees is from the “Policy Guidelines Governing the Approval of ITF [International Transport Workers’ Federation] Acceptable CBA’s [collective-bargaining agreements] for Cruise Ships Flying Flags of Convenience,” aka the ITF Miami Guidelines, 2004,* which to my knowledge have not been updated, and which suggest a minimum monthly basic wage for cruise ship workers of $302, rising to $608 when combined with overtime and leave. In “Sovereign Islands: A Special Report; For Cruise Ships’ Workers, Much Toil, Little Protection,” by Douglas Frantz, the New York Times, 24 Dec 1999, Frantz writes that “for laboring as long as 18 hours a day, seven days a week, most galley workers are paid $400 to $450 a month.” Details on some of the expenses of cruise ship w
orkers are from Garin, above. Note also that the flag-of-convenience registry for Liberia is run by a private company in Virginia.*

  The best piece of writing that I know of on the industry from the perspective of a passenger, even if you include The Poseidon Adventure, is the title essay of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments, by David Foster Wallace, 1997. Wallace’s essay is remarkable for how much behind-the-scenes information he was able to intuit even as it was hidden from him.

  As far as I know there is no cruise ship with a Nintendo Dome, but if there is I hope it’s called the Mario D’Orio.

  What Violet Hurst describes as catastrophic paleontology is primarily the mix of sociology, anthropology, and ecology that was pioneered by William R. Catton Jr. in the 1970s, and that is sometimes called either environmental sociology or human ecology. (Catton himself is a sociologist who has concentrated on environmental issues for most of his career.) Obviously the observation that human population growth tends to check itself in unpleasant ways goes back at least to Malthus, and books like The Forest and the Sea, by zoologist Marston Bates,* 1960, and Silent Spring, by marine biologist Rachel Carson, 1962, laid immediate groundwork for Catton. But as far as I know it was Catton who first applied concepts and technical terms from wildlife management, like “carrying capacity,” to human populations. His book Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, 1980, remains definitive. One particularly elegant descendant of Overshoot is A Short History of Progress, by Ronald Wright, 2004, which in fact everyone on earth should read, and which has been particularly helpful to me here. I have also consulted Wright’s other two books, Stolen Continents: The “New World” Through Indian Eyes, 1993, and What Is America?: A Short History of the New World Order, for information about Native American populations. (See below.)