Kill the dove!

by Francis Kroncke

  Chapter 2: Conspiracy

  “The State is asking Your Honor to set a fifty-thousand-dollar bond for each defendant.”

  Jared hears that concluding remark to the DA's rambling account of “The Great Catholic Conspiracy” and his charge of “sabotage of the national defense” and his mouth drops.

  Dismissively. “You guys must be nuts! Real loco!”The DA’s not flustered. He formally comments, “This will send a message to these types about the seriousness of what they’re doing. Your Honor, civilized society can no longer tolerate the dangerous few whose cult of violence is masked by a thin veneer of ‘nonviolent civil disobedience.’ These men are true radicals. They aren’t nonviolent like Martin Luther King. They aren’t moral leaders. Absolutely not. They are saboteurs!

  For that reason, they are being arraigned on the charge of sabotage of the national defense. I anticipate the defense's counter-argument. Yes, these young men do come from good families. One is even personally known to me.”

  Of all the things said, this catches Matt and Jared off guard. Who? is shrugged back and forth.

  “This is more the pity, and more a reason for making an example of these misguided few.”

  “Your Honor,” Jared and Matt's public defender protests, “I do not at this time want to question the charge, but the amount of fifty thousand dollars! Your Honor, you know that's the range reserved for heinous criminals, for repeat offenders. These are draft resisters not murderers!” “Bond set as requested,” gavels the magistrate.

  Jared and Matt, handcuffed and leg chained, are stood up by two bailiffs apiece and led awkwardly back to their cell.

  “Can you believe that?”

  “Yep.”

  Jared’s not paying attention to Matt—he’s into a rolling monologue. The guards pay Jared no mind. Jail so often brings out the ravers and ranters.

  “Bejesus, who'd ever think they'd believe that conspiracy bullshit! I mean, do we appear that organized to them? Sabotage of the national defense. Renegade Jesuits? Hell, I'm the only Catholic in this bunch! Shit, they fear us more than I thought. Their own imagination is scaring them. Maybe attacking the symbol of Main Street, USA was more powerful than we thought? But, sweet Jesus, they're taking it out on my ass!”

  Matt’s rarely seen Jared so stuck in self-absorbed silliness. Of course they believe it's a conspiracy. Aren't our after-raid letters to the press signed, The Midwest Conspiracy To Save Lives? Matt wants to say this but surely it must be obvious to Jared. Yet somehow it’s clearly not computing. Why the DA jumped on Catholic Radicals is beyond Matt, but it’s really bugging the hell out of Jared.

  Uncuffed and unchained, Matt sits down on the cell’s lower bunk. Jared continues to ramble on, pacing the cell—six paces this way and turn, six paces that way and turn. The DA, identifying himself as “an active Catholic,” spoke with fervor and conviction about the “Catholic Conspiracy.” He named its Jesuit leaders and detailed how they recruited at seminaries and through specific theological and spiritual journals. He harped on “the Jesuits” as the Conspiracy's ringleaders, and to the uninitiated his case was ironclad.

  The Catholic Conspiracy! Funded by Castro! Money from Moscow! The Jesuit Underground! They really believe it! Jared's internal monologue outpaces his external one.

  Matt lies down and stretches. Stuffs a pillow over his head, muffling Jared's outpourings, and beckons the soporific kiss of sleep.

  Doggedly, Jared goes on. Exclaims and gestures and paces for about twenty minutes. He can't seem to convince himself that they really believe in this conspiracy.

  “They can't believe it. They must be setting a trap for something else.”

  Then a familiar voice frees him.

  “My man, Jared! You poor excuse for the savior of mankind, don't you love me anymore?”

  It’s Sean!

  Four of them. They’ve trapped four of them. Five slipped through. Five, including Aaren and two other women.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It doesn't mean anything,” Sean answers. “We don't know what went down. And let's not spend too much time spooking ourselves. Let's think about what the hell we're going to do about this outrageous bail.”

  Sean is two cells down, bunked with Corey. That's who the DA must know! Until after the bail hearing, they’d been separated, each thinking they were the only ones caught.

  “Four. Four out of nine. Not bad,” shouts Sean. “Means we're still ahead. Three and one-half to one-half. The Good Guys are still winning!”

  “Big joke, Sean, but what good are we in here? We're politically dead. Can't do a damn thing with the action. With that crazy bail we have to get ten thousand apiece for deposit. We'll be here forever!”

  “Maybe my dad will figure something out.”

  “Sure, Sean—your dad, big Mister Republican Big Shot, is gonna risk his reputation helping us? Get real!”

  “Maybe,” Sean mutters unconvincingly.

  “On top of that, now we've got to deal with the media. Shit!”

  With so much going down, Jared doesn't broach the subject of Judas nor risk talking about the FBI beatings. These will have to be dealt with when, if ever, they get released.

  Dealing with the media becomes agenda item number one. Who should speak? What should be said? The idea behind their style was to hit draft boards anonymously. Then political education could be done around draft resistance by anyone who supported the actions, not just by Movement personalities.

  Across the country, other raiders had demonstrated in a more traditional nonviolent manner. Like the Milwaukee 14, who raided offices and burned files, intending to be caught. Their idea was to use their capture as a launching point for their personal public campaign against the war. Jared was not prepared for going public, what his group liked to call Plan C. It was a lot like Plan B. No one ever expected to employ it!

  Fuck! They will have to deal with becoming media personalities. But how to prevent the media from taking control? Prevent them from making the four of them the issue, instead of the war? Like men in battle who don’t spend time working out the details of being captured or dying, so the group had not defined Plan C.

  Like Matt's karma! the media is beyond their control. In the morning paper they see the theme that TV and radio will mimic. Front page: STATEWIDE SWEEP CRUSHES VIOLENT DRAFT RAID RING. Inside headline: FBI DEALS BLOW TO NATIONAL RADICAL CONSPIRACY. On the editorial page: PEACENIK VIOLENCE ON THE ROAD TO JUNGLE LAW. These and accompanying articles set up the raiders as idealistic youths duped by international Communist rhetoric and sympathies.

  The media’s tone is a blush shy of McCarthy era “Red baiting.” They’re granted “former pacifists” and “one-time nonviolence leaders” status but now are labeled as “predators and purveyors of political violence.” They are kept practically nameless, referred to as “The Four” or “radicals” or “Viet Cong sympathizers” throughout. The message is, “We must make an example out of these guys.”

  What’s curious is the lack of description as “Catholic.” For this had been the big point in the bail hearing. There, wild-eyed evocations of anti-Catholicism were slung around with phrases like “Catholic Underground,” “Jesuit rabble rousers,” “anti-American theology,” and similar rank stuff that Jared thought the presidency of JFK had laid to rest.

  “Maybe they're afraid of going public with that? Maybe it's too hot for them to handle ‘religious civil disobedience’ and all that?”

  Jared fails to realize how much the FBI has learned from tracking and putting down Martin Luther King.

  Before they get around to discussing how to handle the press, Jared is told he's been “granted” a meeting with a reporter. Strangely, it's a decision made and personally delivered by Agent Brennan who clearly felt no need to consult with Jared about the arrangement.

  “What's up?” They’re all puzzled. Why would the Feds arrange their press meeting?

  That something queer’s
afoot becomes apparent right after breakfast as “The Four” are separated and scattered throughout the jail. Each is celled with a nonpolitical prisoner. No one is housed near the others. They can’t even communicate by shouting or passing messages. So when Jared is called out, he hasn't a clue about what to expect.

  In the visiting room Jared’s sardonically introduced as “the ringleader” to Charlie Burston from the Tribune. Then the escort agent leaves. Both men sit down.

  “You've read these?” Burston asks as he slides copies of the morning edition articles across the table.

  “Yeah. Sure. Read ’em all.”

  Burston lights a cigarette, drags and in the cloud of smoke asks, “Mind if I smoke?”

  “Nope.”

  Burston flips his notepad open. “Okay, kid, give me your side of the story.”

  Was he a friendly or what? “I thought your byline was Entertainment.”

  Burston doesn’t lift his pen from the pad. “That's true.”

  “Why are you interviewing me? This is a political case.”

  Burston pencil-drums his pad, not looking at Jared; exhales. “All they want is the personal stuff on you guys—you know, bios. Where you were born, went to school, all that stuff. Glamour, if you have any!” He says glamour with a tiny chuckle.

  “Ah,” Jared prolongs the “Ahh,” indicating that his secret plot has been exposed. “Ah, Plan C.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, nothing.” He pauses, then, “Look, who we are, who I am, is of no consequence. What's important is what we did and why we did it.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. It is. What do you think we were doing, going on joy rides?”

  Burston sizes up that this will go nowhere, fast. Contentious SOB! he mutters to himself while sucking a dying smoke and then stubbing it out. Within almost the same motion he lights another. Quickly blows a stream, picks his pen back up, preparing for a more tedious drill than anticipated.

  “Kid, if you want some press, you're going to have to follow my program. I'm not here as your propaganda agent.”

  “Bullshit! Whose propaganda agent are you?!”

  As a distraction Burston begins to doodle. Jared watches him closely, thinking that he's going to start writing something.

  “Kid, let me ask you some questions. First, are you part of a national network, some kind of conspiracy?”

  “That's so much bullshit. I can't believe you'd even honor it with a question.”

  “Maybe. But it's on the Feds' mind.”

  “Yeah. Right. Sure. They wish there was something organized about the Resistance. What they can't handle is that things just keep happening! I mean, man, I hear about draft raids and blockades and actions and all that just happens. What's frightening about all this nonviolent Resistance is that it is unorganized . . . Something powerful, something spiritual's afloat across America. And they can't stop it because it ain't organized!”

  Burston’s observing Jared as closely as Jared’s been following his every move, each trying to read between the lines. He wants more, much more. Characteristically, Jared responds to his silence by talking. Stands and walks, circling the table; compulsion.

  “Conspiracy! Okay. I’ll tell you there's a conspiracy. Of the Spirit! Of the Will! This is a really strange time, let me tell you that. Who'd have thought so much nonviolent Resistance would just pop up here and there around the country? And from white middle-class kids! Dig it! Doesn't that make you stop and think? I mean, I could never figure it out. No one I know studied Nonviolence in America in high school. And we sure as hell didn't learn about the Civil Rights movement in graduate school. There were no Martin Luther Kings in our pulpits!

  Hell, we were programmed for violence, not nonviolence. I was even in ROTC! Believe that, me! Kill a Cong for Christ! So who’s talking about a conspiracy? The only conspiracy's been the conspiracy for violence, and that’s well organized. The damn FBI knows that!”

  As the kid talks—harangues!—Burston can't help but picture him as a soldier. A Big Mick, wild, with a touch of German in his logical intensity. In another life, a Hitler Youth?

  Yes, another life—Burston’s memory is jogged. “Jennings, the Hermit Jock!” Headlines and titles: “All State,” “Minnesota Rookie of the Year,” “College of St. Clement's First Little All-American.” Sure, he’s seen this body of brawn dance and cavort and raise cheerleaders' nipples. But then a stud gone spiritual. Just what those monks wanted . . . or was it?

  Burston knows most of this story. In his senior year Jared made his own self-styled anti-war protest. He dropped out of basketball, refused to talk to any NBA scouts, killing whatever slim chance he had to advertise himself. Then he took to the deep woods behind St. Clement's monastery. He finished his degree as a “commuter”—actually a hermit. A friendly faculty adviser brought him his tasks and his books.

  Jared lived in a hut. No electricity. No plumbing. A veggie diet. Candlelight but no broads. Few knew what he did. All was mystery and rumor. Dope? Talks with Jesus? Running away from himself?

  For the whole senior basketball season his was a running story, often a joke, lampooned. “Does the jock itch?” A pun on his woodsy sanitation or lack thereof and his vaunted—no, crazed love—no, addiction to basketball. But by spring his was a story without ink and a protest forgotten by most on campus as “taking it to the streets” action was everywhere in the air.

  As to the kid's politics, Burston believes he knows it—nonviolent Jesus and all that. Burston isn’t anticipating any great revelation on that topic. Also, he’s seasoned enough not to get pumped by the FBI briefing. He scoffed at them, “You’re really calling him a Benedict Arnold?” All told, Burston doesn't expect Jared to break down and reveal some Pulitzer Prize–winning story exposing the workings of a “Secret Brotherhood of the Nonviolent Cross” or something really far-out like that. “Conspiracy?” he said to the Feds. “What hard evidence do you guys have?” They were noncommittal, but they pushed him to work Jared with it. He agreed.

  Burston draws his line, questioning, “Second, where do you get your funding?”

  “There's no funding. What do you think? We rented Rolls Royces to do these raids? Hey, man, maybe you should take some pictures of Matt's road boat. It's a '57 Chevy clunker. Show them we go in style! …But seriously, we just live simply, that's all.”

  Jared sits down, revved now and jazzed.

  “Should I say you're volunteers?”

  With gritted teeth, Jared leans across the table, face-to-face, snarling, “Don't play the fool with me!”

  “No, I'm serious. How should I describe you guys? You’ve been running around for six months terrorizing Uncle Sam, breaking into his draft boards. You certainly couldn't've been working all that time. Somebody has to be picking up the tab?”

  There’d be no escape today. Ominously, his private guardians—young seminarians all in black with wicker baskets in hand—stand sentinel at the church’s entrance and exits. The habitually “early leavers” know they will be caught today. It’s hopeless. So they wait and watch as Father pulls himself up from his last prostration. Risen, he bows before the tabernacle and reverently turns, takes a step, almost begins to strut as each stride that takes him closer to the ancient, raised pulpit vitalizes him. Atop this promontory Holy Spirit fire blasts forth as he pleads, “GIVE! Give for the poor starving children of China! GIVE!”

  And they give and they give again. Hard-rubbed nickels and bottom-of-the-purse pennies to the Fourth Collection.“For the pagan babies of China!”

  There’s a hint of sincere curiosity behind Burston's questions that softens Jared a tad.

  “Yeah. I see. Maybe that's what it looks like—from the outside. But here's how it is.” He sits back, legs crossed. “We're just a group of guys who've come together sort of spontaneously. Some met at the Draft Resistance Center, others at the Catholic Peace Center. Crazy as it might seem, only a few of us knew each other before the ra
ids.

  For some, it starts out as frustration, mostly with their lack of political clout. For others, it’s with moral outrage just about war itself. Then some are just pissed off in general about lots of things: racism, poverty—you know, lots of things. It sorta all just happens.”

  Curiously, Jared stalls like a plane rising too fast. He’s self-conscious about dictating, uneasy at Burston’s rapid and intent writing. But he lets suspicion fly by and continues.

  “About six months ago we gathered—after Nixon's Christmas raid on Cambodia—and rapped for about a day. Most of us actually live communally. Like we share most everything. Some of our friends give us a little money, some work part-time. We use food stamps. The whole line.”

  Burston chuckles silently and quickly jots down “Food stamps! . . . Commune! Free love! . . . Aroma of marijuana!” Hmmm, maybe there’s a sensational angle here after all!

  Despite his habitual instinct for the superficial, Burston is cooperating with the FBI because he wants a story, something truly politically radical, hopefully explosive! He desperately wants off Entertainment.

  Two puffs. Naw! He reconsiders, blots out the sensational imagery. There has to be something more to this guy. He fidgets a moment or two, trying to focus. He’s frustrated that he can't find a zinging focal point. But he can’t let on. Otherwise he might spook Jared.

  Burston sticks his pen’s tip into his reporter’s pad. He does this once, twice. He’s aware of being both stumped by and fascinated with Jared's innocence.

  Maybe that’s the story?

  “The guy's sure no dope,” the Fed's assured him, briefing him fairly deeply on Jared's background—his education, his theology, and the list of raids and protests they’ve tracked. Taking their slant, Burston came prepared to meet a type of warrior or mercenary not an altar boy. Nevertheless, that’s what he finds. It’s as if he’s seeing Jared in papal white acolyte robes. Burston remembers others of this type. A type that fascinates him, draws forth his admiration, but from whom he distances himself as if they were aliens from another planet. Possibly it’s their physical contradiction that leaves him restless. Possibly he’s afraid.

  He has no doubt that Jared is one of these, the Baby Face Nelson type. Brutes with cherubic demeanors. More, in Jared's case, an angelic air. Guys whose walk screams, “Savage! Animal! Ass-kicker!” but whose actions are rabbit-soft, cousins of Steinbeck's Lennie Small.

  Burston really doesn't understand where “nonviolent resistance” comes from. At this point, he wishes the FBI's “Catholic Conspiracy” angle was true. It would easily resolve many, many of his long-standing unanswered questions.

  Burston follows up on another objective listed during his FBI briefing. “Where’s all of this going?” He punctuates his question by vigorously snubbing out his fourth unfiltered cigarette on “going?”

  Jared leans back, lifting the front feet of his chair. “Going? That's a truly philosophical question. Hmm. Well, here it is, man. Quote me: We’re stopping the war! Okay?”

  “You gotta be kidding!”

  “If not us, who the hell is stopping the war?”

  Burston doesn't want to get mired in that question. “Kid, who's gonna believe you? Do you think Nixon's going to read about your arrest and say to Kissinger, Oh, dear, let's stop the war, Henry, they're rioting in the North Country!”

  Jared half-laughs, snorts. “Are you a jaded motherfucker or what, Burston? Didn't you learn anything from the Civil Rights movement?”

  As if stung by a quick jab to the gut Burston jams his elbows on the table. Sweat beads pop and dance along his brow. He’s fading towards pale. His face is a pasty pallor. The sudden change stuns Jared. He’s uncharacteristically slow in responding.

  “What's the matter—ulcers?”

  Burston wipes his forehead with his coat sleeve. Recovers. Stands up and starts to haltingly circle around the table. Jared eyes him, full circle once or twice, then drops his surveillance. Moved by a monastic habit Jared’s brow tilts forward and he focuses on his own hands, giving Burston some private space. Burston completes five laps before replying, “I'm okay. Just an old problem. Bad coffee.” But he doesn't look okay.

  “. . . killed the nigger.”

  “You in?”

  “Yeah. Okay. … Did you have to kill him?”

  “Don't let it bust yo’ balls.”

  The locker room wasn't ever empty. Others heard. Accepted this way. Knew “truth” would tie his tongue. Make it “one of the guns.”

  No one would ever, ever print the Truth. December 4, 1969. The Pulitzer Prize “Fred Hampton Story” he never wrote.

  Burston never faced the truth about racism in capital letters before the execution of Hampton. “Who would believe me?” he often asks himself when drunk and remembering. “Who’d believe that that big badass Black Panther Fred Hampton – Shit, more charismatic than King! -- was really into nonviolence and serving breakfast to kids?”

  Everyone knew – I’m no one’s fool! Burston boasts—that when Chicago’s Mayor Daley had Hampton shotgunned while he slept—Ya know, one of his inner cadre drugged him with Seconal was the rumor—it was political and career suicide to go up against da Boss.

  “Okay, our goal,” Jared coughs into his hands, shifts in the chair, continues in earnest, “is to create symbols of Resistance. We want the blue-collar kid, the farm boy, the college student, to see that The System is vulnerable. Our raids are sand in the machinery of the Selective Service System. It's all really just that simple.”

  Burston finally finds a workable theme. “So you’re just another chapter in Minnesota Populism!” Certainly not radical, not the pop he wants. But, hell, I gotta get some ink on this. Later. The kid’ll pop later.

  Burston makes a personal mental note to keep this kid tethered to him, somehow. For now, Burston laughs to himself, nothing too offensive. His typical byline style. For sure, this case is hot and he knows his final editor is J. Edgar himself. “Will he let me print even this?” Burston scratches in the notepad's margin, circling and circling the “he.”

  Flipping the pad shut, Burston gathers his things, grinds his umpteenth butt and moves towards departure. “Kid, I'm going to keep a line of communication open for you from here. Don't get me wrong—I don't particularly like what you did. But I owe a favor to someone who might have been one of you, given another time and place.”

  “What do you mean, line of communication?”

  “I mean just that. You need to get something out of here, contact a trustee named Victor. He'll get it to me.”

  In jail’s social order trustees are the odd few who do long County jail time instead of going to prison. Jared didn't care to understand the legality of it all, just that trustees can do things. They’re either good guys or informers. You take a high risk with them but they get things done. Move things from inside out and outside in. Power brokers. Princes of gray eminence.

  Burston knuckle-raps a call to the guard. He speaks while looking for the guard, not at Jared. “Right now, Kid, I just need some fluff on you guys. Like it or not, the politics of your action’s a dead issue.”

  “Free speech,” Jared slowly enunciates, sarcastically.

  Burston steps back towards Jared, leans down to eye level. “Kid, I first went on the Entertainment page by choice. Things happen.” Pauses. Tenses his stare, “ I've been in many jails, more than I want to remember. What's happening to you, I've seen it happen before. When Hoover gets personally involved, there are long strings on a reporter.”

  “Wow, man! So, there is a conspiracy, but just from the other end?!”

  “Something like that. Let's just say, interests of national security are in control here.”

  “Yeah, I can dig that, but where are you—I mean, personally—on all of this?”

  Burston pulls back upright, reaches out to shake Jared's hand. “Kid . . .” but breaks off as the guard keys the door.

  Jared’s puzzled by Burston.
Is he a plant? Who does he “owe”? Did he mean to imply that his former jails were in the South during the Civil Rights days? Is he a guilty liberal? Or a closet “red diaper baby” from the 1930s? Jared knows they abound in the Midwest. But shit, he didn't even get what he came for. Jared didn’t tell him anything glamorous about himself or the guys.

  “Shit shit!” Jared’s interview has pushed his frustration to boil. He fist-bangs, palm-slams on the door, ordering, “Guard, take me back to my cell!”

  Next day, the morning edition headlines show something about the reporter behind Burston's veil of smoke. Front page: DRAFT RAIDERS EXEMPLARY STUDENTS. Inside: MOTHERS SUPPORT SONS IN THEIR PROTESTS. While there’s no editorial on their behalf, the accompanying article, under Burston's byline, is sympathetic. It draws heavily on interviews with their mothers and paints what Jared labels “our Little Lord Fauntleroy biographies.” He could see Burston's touch, making The Four seem like “your boys.” As expected, there’s no political commentary at all. But hell, at least it makes us look human, and it also dims the stereotype of “violent radical revolutionaries” that the DA was pushing.

  All said, Jared feels it’s was a grand waste. Nothing will come of it. Maybe it makes Burston feel better, I don't know. In fact, Jared’s a bit embarrassed. The article plays up his “genius” and “voracious appetite for books.” It casts a romantically mystical aura to his year as a hermit. Not a mention of the demons and ghouls who infest the forest, hungering for wandering monastic souls! Jared tosses the paper aside. Closes his eyes. Murmurs to the ever-present Novice Master, “Maybe it’s good for my pride. This left-handed compliment, painting me—more than the others—as an idealistic fool?”

  The only positive thread Jared sees is the mention of their fathers and brothers who have served in various wars. It places his raider action in the warrior lineage of his brother, Larry, the Korean War hero and his dad, a WWII patriot. It might, just might move someone else to realize that Resistance is the only patriotic act left. Maybe!

  But as discussed in pre-raid retreats, the raiders never expected anything positive from the Establishment media. For they are, as to class and economic status, just part of the anonymous middle class. Maybe upper-middle for Sean and Corey? They are just “someone's kids,” all coming from conservative to middle-of- the-road white-collar families. Sean's is a lawyering family on both sides. Corey’s been president of the university's student body. All have been to college and taken draft deferments. But theirs is a story that only the anti-Establishment underground press like Minneapolis’ Hundred Flowers rag would write as it is. Sadly, that was, in sum, preaching to the converted.

  The everyday citizen would never hear their story: Patriot or Outlaw? Never fully understand how the anti-war movement is fueled by their neighbor's kid who over time has step-by-step become angrier and angrier. Angry that the war’s never been officially declared. Angry that LBJ snake-oiled everybody with his Bay of Tonkin resolution. Angrier when troop deployments keep escalating. Mad and madder as the damn Selective Service gets weirder. Maddest as deferments are willy-nilly removed. And then they run a lottery, bejesus! Beyond maddest when one after another leading liberal gets up and shows that the Emperor Has No Balls. Big fucking story!

  “Fucked, things are just fucked here in Amerika. Got that, Mr. Reporter? Yeah, man, with a ‘k,’ as in Klu Klux Klan. Racists, dumbass, fucked-up Amerika. We hunt niggers for sport. We even have a limited open season on white kids now. See your local college or university for permits!

  “We like to lie to ourselves daily. Just witness our wonderful Evening News where flayed bodies of babies, some burnt to ‘crispy critters,’ are brought to you by our patriotic sponsors, Honeywell and Dow Chemical.”

  Frustrated, Jared knows even he himself can't say that, even if at times he feels that way. For his true story, and that of the others, he believes—except Aaren is a bitter, unvoiced interjection—is the story of nonviolent resistance. A long story going back to the eighteenth-century American anti-slavery Quaker John Woolman, up through nineteenth-century abolitionists and women liberationists, to Martin Luther King, our “dead King.”

  Rolling up the newspaper, Jared starts to pound the bars with it. “No one cares! No one gives a royal fuck!”

  Heavenly Father, why am I here?