Wild Thing: A Novel

by Josh Bazell

  Regarding his casual lawbreaking and disregard for the potential consequences of his actions, which placed people in mortal danger in a way he should have foreseen, I consider that part of his character more than the influence of greed. I’m not a psychiatrist, but what I see in Reggie Trager is someone who, apparently since the Vietnam War, has been so consumed by feelings of shock, sadness, and unreality that the outcomes he imagined possible from his scheme—both positive and negative, both to himself and to others—seemed almost weightless. I don’t think he acted out of malice. I think he’s just someone who was made dangerous at a young age and stayed that way.

  * How I know this: See Exhibit C.

  * Just:

  “Hello, stranger.”

  “How are you?”

  “I feel like I’ve got splinters in my boobs.”

  “Do you, still?”

  “Yeah. My surgeon says it would cause more damage to take them all out.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “You would know.”

  “Violet, I am so sorry.”

  “You didn’t blow me up.”

  “Not directly.”

  “And if you hadn’t stopped me from going into that cabin, it would have been a lot worse. I’m not going to say it was worth it, because I don’t know what my boobs are going to look like yet. But I don’t regret it.”

  “How could you not regret it?”

  “Mostly because they haven’t taken the morphine drip out of my arm. But right now, meeting you seems on balance like a good thing.”

  “They could at least turn the drip down.”

  “Am I ever going to see you again?”

  “Probably not. I hope so.”

  “Then make sure it happens. You’re going away?”

  “Yes.”

  “To hide?”

  “No. I’m going to try and get these assholes to stop chasing me.”

  “You mean by killing them?”

  “If that’s what it takes.”

  “Don’t. I don’t want you to. I don’t want you to kill anyone. Not even the people who tried to have us blown up.”

  “I know.”

  “And you did indirectly blow me up, so you pretty much have to do what I say.”

  “I know that too.”

  “But you won’t.”

  “No.”

  “Is there anything I can say or do to change your mind?”

  “No. Come on, don’t cry.”

  “Fuck you. Why do you have to be such a dickhead all the time? Will you be careful, at least?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Try to remember, for me, how shitty you are at getting yourself killed.”

  * I still don’t know what the correct diagnosis is.

  * Meaning me.

  * I know: Obama had proved a massive disappointment to anyone with progressive interests, and Democrats in Congress hadn’t done much to mark themselves as either honest or interested in public welfare. But that only explains apathy. It doesn’t explain actively voting Republican, two years after Republicans caused the worldwide financial meltdown. Write your love of anarchistic nihilism on your Doc Martens, if you must. Shoot your own hand off. Don’t vote Republican, for fuck’s sake.

  * Laugh it up.

  * The bitching about “Climategate,” like the Tea Party itself, was brought to us by oil billionaires Charles and David Koch. Other disinterested parties calling for further “investigation” of “Climategate” include the government of Saudi Arabia.

  * The case is Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission. Previous Supreme Court cases had addressed the concept of “corporate personhood,” but this one put it over the top, and has the clearest set of fingerprints on it—particularly given that the original decision granting corporations rights (beyond the simple right to enter into a contract), Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (1886), may have mischaracterized the intent of the Supreme Court. Supreme Court decisions are always published with a “head note” by the court reporter that summarizes the action. In Santa Clara, the court reporter, who was for some reason J. C. Bancroft Davis, formerly president of the Newburgh and New York Railway, wrote that the justices had unanimously agreed that corporations should enjoy rights under the Fourteenth Amendment, which had been passed eighteen years earlier to establish the rights of former slaves. The actual opinion doesn’t say this, though, and in fact Chief Justice Morrison White specifically told Bancroft that “we avoided meeting the constitutional question in the decision” in deciding Santa Clara. Which is why Santa Clara—which gave American corporations Fourteenth Amendment protections thirty-four years before American women got them—was, until Bush v. Gore, often called the worst Supreme Court decision of all time.

  * Guest footnote by Pietro Brnwa : Similarly, see the June 2009 failure of the Iranian “Green Revolution” after Michael Jackson died and suddenly no one gave a shit.

  * Again with the John Boehner.

  * 1994: Insurance company Riscorp Inc. makes an illegal $20,000 donation to Katherine Harris’s campaign for state senate. 1996: Harris sponsors a bill that makes it harder for companies that aren’t Riscorp to underwrite workers’ compensation insurance in Florida. 2004: Harris, now a member of the U.S. Congress, tells an audience that a Middle Eastern man has been arrested for trying to bomb the electrical power grid in Indiana, although this has not actually happened. 2006: Harris loses a reelection bid after being discovered to have taken illegal contributions from defense contractor MZM, whom she subsequently helped to get federal contracts. Incidentally, Harris’s grandfather Ben Hill Griffin Jr. was one of the 300 richest people in America. I’m not saying this makes her a bad person. I’m saying What sort of lowlife who’s as rich as Katherine Harris is sells out her constituents for $20,000?

  * Current justices Scalia and Thomas are both known to have attended the Koch brothers’ annual meeting of conservative political activists, at which attendance is limited to 200.

  * Also tobacco. But mostly oil.

  * For example, to his Council on Environmental Quality, which is the primary environmental instrument of the executive branch, George W. Bush appointed (as chairman) James L. Connaughton, who had formerly lobbied for the Aluminum Company of America and the Chemical Manufacturers Association of America, and (as chief of staff) Philip Cooney, a former lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute. After Cooney got whistle-blown for changing the results of government global warming studies to favor the oil industry, he was hired by the public affairs department of ExxonMobil.

  * There’s no evidence that the Republicans and Iranians colluded in the election of Ronald Reagan. It’s just that eleven members of the Reagan administration were later convicted of illegally trading weapons to Iran (during an embargo led by the United States!) for a different set of hostages. Details about even that arms-for-hostages deal are hard to come by, though, because George Bush Sr., as one of his last official acts, pardoned everyone who had been or might be convicted in relation to it. On Christmas Eve. Tis-the-Season act of mercy, or timed so that as few people as possible would read about it in the newspaper the next day? You be the judge.

  * I believe the expression “renewable resource” comes from this report.

  * For example: between 1819 and 1891 the population of New York City went from a hundred thousand to three million.

  * Other shit, even from birds, just doesn’t have the same nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium ratio.

  * The most popular is probably Easter Island, where workers cut down all the trees to make statues honoring wealthy people’s ancestors—a process that sped up as it went along, because people became more and more desperate for the spirits of wealthy people’s ancestors to save them from deforestation. Eventually the military took over, 90 percent of the population died, and the survivors started toppling the statues. And that was before the Europeans started selling the Easter Islanders into slavery.

  Another example: we tend to think of w
haling as primarily an olde-timey activity, because of Moby Dick and so on, but 75 percent of the world’s whales were actually killed after WW2, by countries looking to use whale oil to supplement their petroleum supplies during the postwar oil shortage.

  And one more: before mass human agriculture, most of the Middle East was forested. That’s right: there was a time when people who used the term “the Fertile Crescent” weren’t just being sarcastic.

  * World population in 500 BC is unknown but is likely to have been under 200 million—less than 3 percent of what it is now.

  * Or to the Constitution: the Second Amendment says “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed,” which people like to interpret as meaning that gun control is unconstitutional. But I’m pretty sure there’s a “well regulated” in there somewhere.

  * Famously at the time, the striking workers held up a sign inviting the press—who instead mocked them from shore for being illiterate—to “COME ON BOARD AND LEARN THE TROUT.”

  * http://www.itfglobal.org/files/seealsodocs/884/Miami%20Guidelines%202004.pdf.

  * http://www.itfseafarers.org/files/publications/4076/globalisingsolidarity.pdf

  * Something I find particularly compelling in Bates is his observation that designed objects (and by extension designed spaces and “realities” and so on) tend to be drearier than natural ones in part simply because they have a lower level of detail—that just as we erase species from our reality, we also erase other kinds of complexity, to our detriment. See The Forest and the Sea, pg. 254.

  * Released by WikiLeaks and published online in “US embassy cables: US queries Saudi Arabia’s influence over oil prices,” guardian.co.uk, 8 Feb 2011.

  * Want to know why Darky Lake is called Darky Lake? Neither do I.

  * For details on the biology of the various regenerative processes, see chapter 17 of Textbook and Color Atlas of Traumatic Injuries to the Teeth, by J. O. Andreasen, Frances M. Andreasen, and Lara Andersson, 2007.

  * Light Elements: Essays in Science from Gravity to Levity, 1991.

  * Consumer Reports blog for 3 Aug 2009. If corporations have rights, why can’t Consumer Reports run for president?

  * When I graduated from medical school the most competitive field to enter was dermatology, because it was considered a sure path to wealth through easy-to-perform (and schedule) procedures. Family practice—which is where the heroes of the medical profession are, and where, demographically, the U.S. most needs doctors—was among the least competitive. For insight on how hard it is to get paid as a family practitioner, see “10 billing and coding tips to boost your reimbursement,” by Joel J. Heidelbaugh and Margaret Riley, The Journal of Family Practice, Nov 2008, Vol. 57, No. 11: 724–730.

  * Notes General Surgery News: “A benign 1.5cm lesion of the face would be billed [to Medicare in Alabama] at $140; if you subsequently remove 3 more lesions of similar size, they would be reimbursed at $70 for a total of $350.” However: “When ultrasound guidance is added to a fine-needle aspiration (FNA; CPT code 10022), the physician can bill with code 76942, which reimburses $120 for the FNA, whereas the ultrasound component reimburses $150.” (“Minor Pay for Minor Procedures? Think Again: General Surgeons May Be Leaving Much on the Table By Passing on Minor Surgery,” by Lucian Newman III, GSN, Dec 2009, 36:12.)

  * A 2009 report from the Committee on Energy and Congress of the U.S. House of Representatives (which at the time was controlled by Democrats) found that insurance companies had been routinely rescinding (without refund) coverage because patients failed to inform insurance companies of pre-existing conditions they didn’t know they had, because of errors in paperwork not committed by the patient, and “for discrepancies unrelated to the conditions for which patients seek medical care,” as well as rescinding coverage to the dependents of rescinded patients and evaluating insurance company employees based on how much money they were able to “save” the insurance companies through rescinding policies. For a PDF of this report, go to http://democrats.energycommerce.house.gov/Press_111/20090616/rescission_supplemental.pdf.

  * Also, the results of poor diet and exercise habits tend to be “pre-existing conditions.”

  * Sam and Max: Freelance Police, Issue #1, 1987.

  * The piece by Pies that Coyne quotes is available (without any obvious date, although it states it was written in response to an essay in the New York Times Magazine of 28 Feb 2010) at http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2010/03/01/the-myth-of-depressions-upside.

  * And said by Ben Dattner, PhD, to have been Jim Morrison’s favorite movie.

  * The lieutenant of Reggie’s River Assault Group would have reported directly to Rear Admiral Ward, who would have reported directly to General Westmoreland, who would have reported directly to Secretary of Defense McNamara. In other words, Reggie would have been five phone calls from President Johnson.

  * http://njscvva.org/vietnam_war_statistics.htm

  * See Molecular, Clinical, and Environmental Toxicology: Volume 2; Clinical Toxicology, by Andreas Luch, 2010, pg. 250.

  * Widely reported. In the case of the Alcor scandal, almost invariably with the word “chilling” in the title. See below note on shellfish.

  * They don’t.

  * The drought continued. See “Rick Perry’s Unanswered Prayers,” by Timothy Egan, the New York Times, 11 Apr 2011, according to which he also answered a question about how he would govern as president with “I think it’s time for us to just hand it over to God, and say, ‘God: You’re going to have to fix this.’ ”

  * For Perry on evolution, see, e.g., “Rick Perry: evolution is ‘theory’ with ‘gaps,’ ” by Catalina Camia, USA Today, 18 Aug 2011. For Perry on climate change, see, e.g., “Perry Tells N.H. Audience He’s a Global-Warming Skeptic—with VIDEO,” by Jim O’Sullivan, on website of National Journal, 17 Aug 2011; note that it’s the article that uses video, not Perry.

  * Although he may have meant that as a compliment.

  * Right from the Beginning, 1990, pg. 31. Buchanan, a turd whose frequent designation as a “paleoconservative” would make Violet Hurst vomit, speaks of Pegler with admiration, although even he notes that “Peg did go overboard—on not a few occasions.”

  * P. 187. She describes Scully, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, as “to use author Rod Dreher’s term, a ‘crunchy con.’ A political conservative, he is a bunny-hugging vegan and gentle, green soul who I think would throw himself in the path of a semitruck to save a squirrel.” I call the seat not next to that guy.

  * If you watch the full 9:47 version (address below), you’ll get to see Muthee call Buddhism and Islam “witchcraft and sorcery” and say “In the economic area [it is] high time that we have top Christian businessmen, businesswomen bankers, you know, who are men and women of integrity running the economics of our nations. That is what we are waiting for. That’s part and parcel of transformation. If you look at the, you know, if you look at the Israelites, that’s how they won, and that’s how they are today.” Address: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jl4HIc-yfgM&feature=player_embedded.

  * Palin’s own relationship to wildlife is less clear. In Going Rogue (pg. 250) she says that a man who had fooled her into thinking he was Nicolas Sarkozy (bear with me) “started talking about hunting, and suggested we get together and hunt from helicopters, which Alaska hunters don’t do (despite circulated Photoshopped images of me drawing a bead on a wolf from the air)…. He’s got to be drunk, I thought.” On the other hand, regardless of whether Alaskans shoot wolves from helicopters, during the Palin administration the Alaskan government offered $150 to anyone who could shoot a wolf from an airplane, and Palin approved a $400,000 “educational” program to advertise the practice. (For more on this, including Palin’s false claims that killing wolves was part of a scientifically sound wildlife management program, see “Her deadly wolf program: With a disdain for science that alarms wildlife expert
s, Sarah Palin continues to promote Alaska’s policy to gun down wolves from planes,” by Mark Benjamin, Salon, 8 Sept 2008; also “Aerial Wolf Gunning 101: What is it, and why does vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin support the practice?,” by Samantha Henig, Slate, 2 Sept 2008.) Also worth noting may be Palin’s successful promotion of construction considered likely to be detrimental to Wasilla Lake in 1998, while she was mayor, including her saying, “I live on that lake. I would not a support a development that wasn’t environmentally friendly” (Benet, ch. 7)—and her then moving to Lake Lucille, the town of Wasilla’s other lake, into a house that seems to have been paid for at least in part by construction contractors. To be fair, both Wasilla Lake and Lake Lucille are now considered “dead” lakes. For questions about funding for the Lake Lucille house, see, e.g., “The Book of Sarah (Palin): Strafing the Palin Record,” by Wayne Barrett, the Village Voice, 8 Oct 2008. For more on Lake Lucille itself, see “Sarah Palin’s dead lake: By promoting runaway development in her hometown, say locals, Palin has ‘fouled her own nest’—and that goes for the lake where she lives,” by David Talbot, Salon, 19 Sept 2008.