CSI: American Carnage (Wednesday, June 17, 2020)
BENEATH THE CENTRAL PLAINS – Beneath the dusty street where doors bang open and closed with every passing breeze and dogs snarl at one another over the gnawed cadavers lying in heaps at curbside; far below the creaking carts pushed by men in torn LL Bean sweaters calling bring out your dead; beneath the stores void of every Scott Paper product and all bags of Fresh Step kitty litter; far down where the air is filtered and the water cleansed, the elder Dark One sits at the far end of the Memento Mori Mausoleum in the vast Central Plains complex. He contemplates the pile of dust and wood shavings that used to be his brother. A tall glass of green tea sits on the table next to him. My Brother, he says, I don’t believe even father could imagine the degree of dysfunction gripping the Gambler Showman and everything he touches. It is a miracle that we have recovered so much revenue via our multple applications through the laudable PPP program. We have managed to extract our payments through every part of the program and all of our soldiers have been dispatched to demand more, more, and more. It is only right. They have stolen from us for so long. Father bitterly complained about the on-going theft, and now we are acting to make him whole again. He would be pleased. Of course he would recognize what the Gambler Showman is up to. I remember so well the stories Father told so lovingly – and with such vigor – of the times he spent helping Stalin. What an empire of oil that started! Wealth poured from the ground, leaked into the rivers, gushed high as the highest white birch! What a miracle father wraught! The pile of dust is silent. The elder brother sips some tea. Remember with what contempt Father spoke of the Timesman in Moscow, Duranty, with his women and his drivers and his liquor? Oh they knew mass death in Olde Russia. Hardly something attributable only to Stalin, the beloved uncle. Duranty knew about the bodies stretching across Ukraine as the crops failed, peasant blood ran in rivulets, and starvation spread everywhere. Father gleefully reported on the hypocrisy and the prevarication of Duranty and the Times. What was it that the paper told its readers? Oh yes. Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda. Unimportant, he called it. An exaggeration. Broken eggs for an omelet. It is nothing, he said, Simply a few million dead Russians. For that sagacity Walter Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize back in 1932. And the Gambler Showman had his perfect model of how to work the media. Father never tired of his Duranty stories, and, apparently, the Gambler Showman holds them dear as well. – Wednesday, June 17, 2020