Boomsday

by Christopher Taylor Buckley

  “But don’t Americans have the opportunity to protest the government at the polls, on election day?”

  “Theoretically, yeah. But you don’t get real change until you make a loud noise. Until you sit down in the middle of the street and block traffic. You wouldn’t have had the Civil Rights Act of 1964 without the protest marches. You wouldn’t have had a women’s movement without those protests. We wouldn’t have gotten out of Vietnam without the demonstrations. And we aren’t going to get the Congress to act responsibly, to stop piling up endless debt and entitlements and passing it all on to the next generation, without a little dancin’ in the street.”

  “What are you specifically calling for?”

  “I’m calling on every member of my generation to take their iPods out of their ears and send the U.S. government a message. Not a text message, either. It’s simple. If the government can withhold our money, then we can withhold our money.”

  “By that you mean-”

  “A tax revolt, Brian. I’m calling on members of my generation to stop paying taxes.”

  Terry reached her on her cell phone as she was shuttling to her next TV appearance, in the back of a town car.

  “I know, I know,” she said. “Sorry.”

  “Damn fine job, Bob.” It was a line Terry used around the office when particularly displeased by someone’s work. They were the words uttered by the captain of a supertanker after regaining the bridge only to find that his inebriated third mate, a man named Bob, had run it up on a reef, spilling one hundred thousand barrels of crude oil into a fragile ecosystem, resulting in the extinction of several rare species and $10 billion in lawsuits.

  “Allen called,” Terry said. “Your lawyer. The one who told you not to talk to the press? He’s looking up the actual statute. Something to do with advocating overthrow of the U.S. government. He said he’ll have it by morning. At your arraignment. Oh, and your mom called. She tried you, but your cell phone was off. I told her you were in a TV studio hammering nails into your coffin. She too is thrilled at the prospect of your spending your adult life in prison. So, what act of self-destruction do you have planned next? It’s only seven. You ought to be able to fit three or four more career-ending moments in time to make the eleven o’clock news.”

  “Keep your TV on.…?What’s that?”

  “I’m filling my glass with more Scotch. To the brim. Maybe I’ll mix it with sleeping pills. That works, doesn’t it?”

  “Save some for me.”

  “What do you know. This Scotch, it’s older than you.”

  Cassandra’s arraignment the next day at the United States Courthouse drew a big media crowd. As Terry said to her once they’d made it inside, “When it comes to getting your message out there, there’s really nothing like being formally charged with attempting to overthrow the government.”

  The valiant but peeved Allen Snyder explained to Cassandra that normally they would have prosecuted her only for counseling people to violate the tax laws (26 U.S.C. section 7206). But because of the increasingly dire situation-the stock market had lost a thousand points in one week; the dollar had lost 15 percent against the euro-the government was in a sour and paranoid mood. The decision had been made to throw the proverbial book at her and to charge her under 18 U.S.C. section 2385 (“Advocating Overthrow of Government”).

  The U.S. attorney told the judge that Cass should be held in custody as a flight risk. Attorney Snyder did not put up much of a counterargument.

  “Aren’t you going to say something to the judge?” she said.

  “To be honest with you,” Snyder whispered, “I think I’d rather you were somewhere you didn’t have access to a microphone.”

  “What is this, a time-out?”

  Thus Cassandra found herself exchanging her K Street suit for an orange jumpsuit and shackles. As she was helped into the prisoner transport van, she gave the photographers a V-for-victory sign. The shackles kept her hands at waist level. One reporter noted that her hands “looked like two chained birds attempting to take flight.” The gesture appeared on the cover of the next week’s Time with the cover line “She’s Not Gonna Take It!”

  On Cassandra’s first night in detention, four dozen gated Boomer retirement communities around the country were attacked by youth mobs, causing various state governors to have to call out the National Guard. As National Guard units were now massively deployed around the world-in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Bosnia, Bolivia, Quebec, Nagorno-Karabakh, and the Comoro Islands-the incidents caused a tremendous strain, along with renewed calls for bringing the troops home.

  “This Boomsday business,” the White House chief of staff said to the president, “is getting out of hand, don’t you think?”

  Allen Snyder visited Cassandra at the Alexandria Detention Center, along with Terry.

  “I’ve got some good news for you,” he said. “Some very good news. They’re prepared to drop the overthrow-the-government charge. And they’ll consider reducing the advocating-tax-revolt charge. Provided you cease and desist. They’re asking us-you-to sign a statement saying that you didn’t realize that what you were advocating was in violation of federal law.”

  “That’s all?”

  “No. You’re being sued by the owners of the gated retirement communities that were assaulted. Willful incitement to destroy property. So far it comes to a hundred and fifty million in damages. Most of it for repairing the golf greens.”

  “Solidarity’s revolt began in a Gdansk shipyard,” Cass said. “This one seems to be teeing off from a golf course.”

  “I’d seriously consider taking the government up on their offer. They’re nervous right now. They’ve got better things to do. If we say no at this point, they could very well dig in their heels. Once they do that…You must understand this is a very serious charge, overthrowing the government. Technically it’s a capital offense. They wouldn’t try for the death penalty. But they might go for the maximum sentence.”

  “Which would be…?”

  “Life without parole.”

  “Um,” Cassandra said. “Not optimal.”

  Terry said, “Look, kiddo, you made the cover of Time. Let’s declare victory and take the rest of the week off.”

  “That’s not why I’m doing this. Kiddo.”

  “You want to spend the rest of your life here? Wearing orange?”

  “No. But I have to spend the rest of my life with myself one way or the other, and I’d rather not spend it detesting myself for going back on what I believe in.”

  Terry had spent more time wading through swampy bottomland than standing tall on the moral high ground. He made a despairing grunt.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “Would you stop saying that?” Terry said. He looked completely helpless.

  She smiled at him. “Smuggle me in some Scotch? The stuff they serve in here can’t be even thirty days old.”

  Chapter 10

  It had been a few months since Terry had spoken with Senator Randolph K. Jepperson of the great state of Massachusetts.

  Randy had been disappointed in his first attempt to win a Senate seat, the year after the incident in Bosnia. Terry’s herculean efforts to make him into an icon of American heroism had largely succeeded, and going into the final weeks of the campaign, Randy held a small lead in the polls.

  Cass, working for Terry on other client accounts, had declined all press queries pertaining to the Bosnian misadventure. But the pilot of the army Blackhawk helicopter that had plucked them from the minefield did offer a comment when a reporter finally tracked him down. He had retired from the army and was thus no longer restrained by military discipline and discretion. “I never did understand,” he said, “what that gold-plated imbecile was doing driving a vehicle in the middle of a f-- minefield.”

  “Gold-plated imbecile” is not a term one wants applied to oneself in the final days of a fiercely contested political race, especially coming from the lips of a decorated former U.S. military officer. His oppone
nt plastered it on every bumper sticker, website, TV commercial, and leaflet. Randy lost by seven thousand votes.

  People around Randolph K. Jepperson remarked on the change that came over him. He went into what is usually called “seclusion,” with no movie-star girlfriend or ex-rocker’s wife. When he emerged, he had a look in his eyes that one staffer called “kinda spooky.”

  On his first day back in Congress, he fired everyone in his office, including Lillian, who for once was correct in not finding any humor in the situation. He replaced his loyal staff with the equivalent of Capitol Hill mercenaries. He lured away seasoned pros from other congressional offices, paying above-standard salaries. He hired expensive lobbyists and operatives from K Street; trade association sharks and hired guns; legislative dogs of war. By the time the restaffing was complete, his House colleagues were referring to his office as “the Death Star.”

  When Randy called Terry several weeks after his defeat, Terry assumed it was to fire him, too. But instead he told him, in a voice that Terry also thought kinda spooky, “Next time, we win. Whatever. It. Takes.”

  A year later, Randy’s mother, last empress of the Jepperson dynasty, passed away after choking to death on a hairball from one of her eight Pomeranians. The butler was either unskilled at the Heimlich maneuver or-some said-had let nature take its course.

  The governor issued a proclamation. The funeral was a state occasion. Throughout the service, Randy stared at the casket with what some found an inappropriate look.

  “Did you see his expression,” said Mrs. Gardner Peabody Cabot at the reception afterward, “while he was tossing in the first spadeful of earth?”

  “And the way he kept on shoveling,” said Mrs. Templeton Lowell Scrodworthy.

  It was just as well no one knew that Terry Tucker had had to talk Randy into attending.

  “Put it this way,” he told his client. “How many questions do you want, next time you run, about why you didn’t attend your own mother’s funeral? What are we going to say? That you couldn’t miss the vote on extending the debt ceiling?”

  Four years later, Randy ran again for the Senate, this time against the venerable senator Bascombe Smithers. “BS,” as he was called, was an affable if somewhat pointless senior statesman then serving his sixth term in the Senate and happy to serve a seventh “if the good people of this great commonwealth still want me.” He had never said an ill word of anyone (or gotten much accomplished by way of legislation) and was generally beloved by his colleagues for being one of the last of his breed to put aside partisan politics at six sharp every evening and pour the bourbon freely while reminiscing about the days when, as majority leader, Lyndon Johnson would pinch the behinds of the Senate elevator operators. In today’s hyperpartisan atmosphere, such bonding protocols have gone by the wayside, along with pinching the behinds of comely female elevator operators. The bottoms of Senate pages are still available.

  Randy painted a target on Bascombe Smithers’s chest, turned to his campaign operatives, and said, “Commence firing. Fire at will.”

  Randy’s people painted BS as a feckless drunk, tool of special interests, groper of underage women, comforter of terrorists, vile slaughterer of helpless animals (he went on the occasional pheasant hunt), and receiver of stolen property (someone on his staff had bought on eBay a vintage baseball card whose ownership was contested); in the narrative of Randy’s campaign, good old Senator BS deserved not only to lose for these odious crimes against humanity, but also to be dragged from the Capitol building and strung up from the tallest tree, his body left as carrion for crows.

  Randy won by two thousand votes, having spent over $46 million of his dear departed mother’s inheritance. (It worked out to $79 per vote.) His acceptance speech on the night of his election put one pundit in mind of “Mussolini addressing a crowd from a balcony on Beacon Hill.”

  “I take it,” Senator Randy said before Terry had sat down, “that this concerns our mutual friend. She looked a bit peaked on the television, but then I suppose the prospect of prison will do that to a person. Build yourself a drink from the bar. So, just how may I render assistance?”

  “You’re on the Judiciary Committee,” Terry said, leaving the rest for the senator to fill in. So-call the fucking Attorney General.

  “Ah. You want me to…intervene?” He said the word as if holding it with tongs.

  “Yes, Randy.”

  Randy sat back, lifted his artificial leg, and rested it on a leather ottoman kept for that very purpose.

  “It’s not as though I don’t have some history with the lady. I did try to do the decent thing back then.”

  “After driving her into a minefield?”

  The kinda spooky look came into Randy’s eyes. “I paid a price for that myself.”

  “Yeah. And now you’re in the Senate and she’s in jail, looking at life without parole.”

  “Which I regret, but I hardly put her there.”

  “But you can get her out.”

  “Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. Look here, old bean, I’m on thin ice as it is. I’m the most detested member of the United States Senate, according to Washingtonian magazine. They put it on the cover: THE MOST HATED MAN ON CAPITOL HILL. You know what I say to that? Oderint dum metuant.”

  “You’re going to have to translate that for me. I didn’t go to Gratin.”

  “It’s Groton. Means ‘Let them hate, so long as they fear.’ Cato. Quite one of my favorite sayings. Do you know where I first saw it? On a needlepoint pillow. In my mother’s parlor.”

  “Fascinating. You’re missing the big picture.”

  “Moi?”

  “This kid’s your ticket to the top.”

  Randy leaned back in his chair. “And just how do you figure that?”

  “Take a look.” Terry took out his laptop. He and Randy pored through charts of polling data. “Look at those figures for the eighteen to thirty age group,” Terry said. “I’ve never seen them this solid. Sixty-five to eighty percent. This is going to be the hot-button issue in the next presidential race. Assuming this yo-yo in the White House doesn’t get us into another war.” The United States was currently engaged in six wars. The military was stretched to such a point that it was now safe for countries to invite the United States to attack them. The latest humiliation was Bolivia ’s unilateral declaration of war.

  Randy puffed out his cheeks contemplatively. “If I were to perform this…act of mercy, there would hardly be any point in doing it quietly.”

  Terry closed his laptop and grinned. “You know what I like about you, Senator?”

  “My checkbook?”

  “No. With most clients, I have to explain. Never with you.”

  “That’s”-Senator Randy smiled-“because I went to Gratin. You do understand that we could all go down in flames if this thing turns on us? But I do believe it would be the most gorgeous fire.”

  The next day, on the floor of the U.S. Senate with three other senators present, one of them asleep and the other two twiddling with their BlackBerrys, Randolph K. Jepperson stood at his desk and in his best senatorial voice said, “Mr. President, I rise to protest an outrageous wrong, perpetuated upon our children, and our children’s children, from this very chamber, in the heart of what was once a country with a heart.…”

  Terry didn’t want to be observed sitting in the Senate gallery, so he watched his words being uttered on TV, back at the office.

  One of his friends, a lobbyist for the insecticide industry, called. “I’m watching your boy He’s-No-Jefferson on C-SPAN yapping about some Social Security ‘reparations’ bill he’s sponsoring? What’s that about?”

  “Some notion he’s got,” Terry said matter-of-factly. “I like it. Idea is that kids are getting fucked on Social Security, so he’s proposing a moratorium. No one under thirty has to pay in. The second part is Congress has to permanently fix the system, make it solvent, make it pay for itself, instead of this fucking Ponzi scheme we’ve got, where the debt ju
st gets handed on to the next generation. If Congress doesn’t, then the moratorium continues. I like it. And I think it’s going to be hotter than a chili pepper in the presidential.”

  “Oh, sure,” his friend snorted, “that’s got a real good chance.”

  “It’s the fate of many propositions,” Terry said, “to begin as heresies and end as truths. I read that somewhere, anyway.”

  “Yeah, well, you send me a postcard when it becomes a truth. Say, listen, we gotta do a PSA on this mesothamalide-7 thing because we’re getting clobbered by the fucking bird huggers.”

  “I told you,” Terry said, “you gotta rename that shit. It sounds like something they use in concentration camps. Call it…I don’t know, something like poly…poly-pepto…perfumo-honeysuckle-number nine. Something harmless. Look up what they put in ice cream and call it that.”

  “It’s chemicals, Terry. We can’t rename chemicals.”

  “Then brand it. Call it ‘Bug-Away’ or ‘Bug-a-Boo’ or-I got it-‘ Bug-a-Bye.’ Something cute. I gotta go, Larry. My guy’s on the floor here, making a major policy statement. Doesn’t happen every day. Call you later.”

  Randy’s speech might as well have been a pebble dropped into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean for all the coverage it got. But it set the stage for what Terry called “the gathering storm.”

  The next day, Randy showed up outside the Alexandria Detention Center and held an “impromptu” press conference-prearranged by Terry-in which he called on the government to release Cassandra Devine, pending her trial.

  “The whole world is watching,” he intoned gravely. It was a bit of an exaggeration. But a lot of people had gathered outside the detention center, several hundred of Cass’s supporters. One person who was watching on TV was Bucky Trumble, chief political counselor to the president of the United States, and he was having a bad day. The secretary of the Treasury had just informed him that the Bank of China had declined the new issue of U.S. Treasury bills.