CSI: American Carnage (Thursday, April 16, 2020)
THE CENTRAL PLAINS – Far beneath the muddy fields, the rotting crops, and the tractors on autopilot plowing under, beneath the silence of the towns with the collapsing stores and the starving dogs and battered Closed! signs blowing down the street, beneath the corpses stacked behind the Piggly Wiggly and those stored in the idling refrigerator trucks out back, drivers gasping at the steering wheels, the Dark One sits in the vast central plains complex, a brooding figure watching a big high def screen at one end of the Memento Mori Mausoleum. His brother, or what used to be his brother, sifts down at the other end, slowly becoming a pile of sawdust, it seems, chewed up and regurgitated by carpenter bees. The Dark One, the elder brother of a once animated clan, glances at the screen, which shows the Gambler Showman, who says, The announcement will be very strong, very powerful. Bank of America — Brian Moynihan has been great; JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon; Goldman Sachs; Citigroup; Wells Fargo; U.S. Bancorp; Morgan Stanley, James Gorman; Grand Rapids State Bank; Southern Bancorp, all great institutions with lots to say and lots of good ideas which they will say. We have the construction labor workforce, very gritty, the grittiest, they say, the International Union of Operating Engineers, Jim Callahan; North America Building Trades Union, Sean McGarvey. These are a lot of friends of mine. The Laborers’ International Union of North America, Terry O’Sullivan; International Brotherhood of Teamsters, James Hoffa, not the father, not the father, we’re not going that far; the National Electrical Contractors Association, David Long; Bechtel; Fluor; National Association of Homebuilders; Association of Builders and Contractors; Associated General Contractors; Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO; G.H. Palmer. So in defense, we have Lockheed Martin, Honeywell, Northrop Grumman. These are all the top of each company, the CEOs, chairmens, presidents. Raytheon, General Dynamics. Energy. We had a tremendous success recently with energy over the weekend. It finished with tremendous credit going to Russia and Saudi Arabia. And it could be as much as 20 million barrels a day are cut so that we can get rid of some of the tremendous excess oil that’s been produced because of the fact that the virus just knocked out almost 50 percent of the business. It’s been an amazing achievement. Some people say one of the biggest oil deals ever made. Maybe the biggest oil deal ever made, they’re saying. I didn’t know that. The Dark One heaves a great sigh and looks at his brother, a heap of dust. My brother, he is a rancid excuse! Father would not be pleased. What the Gambler Showman is doing, aside from creating a fantasy all-star variety show, is resurrecting an old trick employed by the likes of Ed Sullivan. Keep them tuning in. Who will appear? Who will be the mystery guest? All so cheap for the low information Easter viewers. At the least he kept our interests in mind, but for how long? The energy profits all belong to us, but I heard nothing from the Gambler Showman acknowledging that. It is the natural order. The money comes to us. They have been thieving for years, and now the Showman thinks he is going to take a part of our natural inheritance. No! Father would favor crushing the red menace and seizing the sultan’s fields. That would at least be morally right — a return to the correct order back when all the stars were aligned and all of the oil flowed to our tanks. But those were simpler times. And these days, corpse removal has become so difficult and the bones of the dead so tedious and high. – Thursday, April 16, 2020