Pride, More Pride And Quite a Lot of Extreme Prejudice #1

Part One of My Christmas Series (as promised and previewed in my previous post):

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a good army must be in want of a conquest…”
Thus spake Zackary Frussterer.
Zackary Frussterer has recently been elected the President of the United States, promising his electors more glorious times. Less tax, more wealth and more freedom – the usual stuff, but wrapped in hyper-modern gloss. This is the new superman chosen to lead the world’s only superpower, a broke superpower which has been taking from the poor to give to the rich for too many years and is rapidly running out of poor people with ready cash.
Frussterer believes in God. God is all-powerful and consequently not only Frussterer’s employer, but a good role model to boot. In person, the chosen one is a new model President, slightly greying, slightly right of left and slightly left of right, liberalish conservative, a man’s man and a woman’s man, and if absolutely necessary, a man for queers and immigrants, tinged with the hint of ethnic minority (Frussterer is hardly a name that landed on Plymouth Rock). But above everything else, he’s a ‘my-nation-first’ American with good teeth and a good-looking wife.
He now bestrides the Oval Office carpet like a colossus, taking stock of the crisis into which he has just been thrust, the first hiccup of his otherwise hiccup-less tenure of 90 days.
Poised to his left, or is it his right, since he keeps turning back and bestriding in the other direction when he reaches a wall, are his three appointed Yes men. A fourth man enters the room, his eyes dart around the scene. This Mr Nayshore is the uncertain voice of reason in the present administration, Jiminy Cricket to the Presidential Pinocchio. The others hate him.
“I just got the call. What’s happening?” says Nayshore.
“Hush, we’re waiting. He’s read the memo,” says Sicanto. The other two Yeses – Javitz and Ayeland – hold hushing fingers to their lips.
“The memo?”
“Of course, the memo,” says Sicanto.
“We found it?” asks Nayshore. “Are you sure it’s the right one?”
The three Yeses nod solemnly, like old-style murder trial judges, minus the black hats.
This memo – this death sentence – slipped into the White House on Day One of the presidency. Nearly three months later it confirms the crisis, putting in train the great gearwheels that will eventually slice away at the President’s manhood. The delay, while the memo was read and misread, misplaced, misfiled, refound, reread, misunderstood, misrepresented and finally assimilated, will surely prove difficult to explain to the inevitable Senate Inquiry.
It’s true that when the Yeses found it, they considered burning it, or shredding it Enron-style. It’s often said that government would be better if only it adopted the efficient practice of industry.
“Couldn’t we send it attached to an email?” Javitz had suggested.
“Couldn’t we leak it to the papers and then let him read the headlines tomorrow?” was the Ayeland approach.
“Couldn’t we put it off until after the next election; it’s only three and a bit years away?” Sicanto asked.
They considered all options, all last minute reinterpretations of the words. No angles there. And three and a bit years is too long to spin, even for a politician. It was a moot point anyway; the egg-shell confidence that once sat on Wall Street had already crashed down. Only an outright and brilliant lie could put Humpty back together again. Merely obscuring the facts was not an option.
Eventually, the Yeses had to face the unfaceable and find a face to carry the news to the President. They settled on the face of an Intern, one who worked in Sicanto’s office.
“She’s very pretty. She’ll do,” he said.
The Yeses liked this idea: a sacrificial virgin. Interns lack all pretence of political cunning or guile. When questioned, they give it to you straight. It’s not that they’re not smart. In fact, they’re so smart they’re stupid.
So the Intern, her life and career over before it had begun, drew the short straw, unaware that all other straws had been marked. She took the memo to the President.
Now, it is an assumption, oft proven by history, that messengers bearing bad news into a lair or throne room will be killed, and possibly eaten, or perhaps, on occasion, if they are very very pretty, slept with.
She had taken the precaution of wearing a short skirt. She was in there seven and a half minutes. Then she popped her head around the door, mildly flushed, to summon the others back in.
That’s when his bestriding began. Thirty minutes ago and counting.
“How?” the President says at last. His voice is quiet. He has to say it several times before he gets it above a whisper.
He looks at the Yeses, standing shoulder to shoulder, but since they only know how to agree with the President once he has formed an opinion, they are unable to answer. Explaining something he doesn’t understand is beyond them.
“Er.. it seems we asked for a conservative estimate of oil reserves and a worse-case scenario on fossil fuel emissions,” Nayshore says helpfully.
“And?” says the President.
“We might have mixed them up,” says Nayshore. “And now it seems we might be about to run out.”
“Run out? Run out where? Not run out of office. I’ve only just been elected.”
“No, sir, run out of oil.”
Frussterer sighs. The legacy left by previous neglectful incumbents of his office lands upon him like the tax bill from a seven-year audit, though in this case, the count back is somewhat longer than seven years.
“Oil?” he says.
“Yes, sir,” says Sicanto, Javitz and Ayeland in unison. The President has finally said something they can agree with.

< ….. to be continued: Part 2 on 14/12/2015>