CHAPTER 11

Noah had lost count of the refills after his first pint, but by then he was averaging around thirty‑ two ounces of suds per special guest speaker. He’d briefly considered playing a drinking game with himself, wherein he would pound one back each time he heard one of the dirty words progressive, socialist, or globalism, but by those rules he’d have drunk himself under the table within a few minutes. Their spiels were all different but the highlights were mostly the same, with only minor deviations in two areas: where to place the blame for their country’s troubles, and what to do about it.

He was still in his lonely seat by the stage. After he’d struck out with Molly there was no real reason to hang around but he felt too beat to get up and leave. Besides, the angry beer buzz he was stoking seemed like the best medicine for putting this malignant night into remission.

The nearby crowd parted at the end of another onstage musical interlude. He’d been hoping to see the waitress bringing him another tall one, but instead it was a familiar, enormous bearded man who walked up to the table.

Hollis‑ no last name had been offered for him‑ gently touched the barstool across from Noah with a finger. The expression on the part of his face not covered with bristly hair asked politely if that seat was taken.

“Please, ” Noah said, “be my guest. ” The barstool looked like doll‑ house furniture next to this soft‑ spoken behemoth, but somehow it held up as he sat down. “Though I’ll tell you the truth, when you’ve got your choice of a few hundred people here who I guarantee are better company than me, I wonder why you’d decide to sit here. ”

The waitress came and put a beer down for Noah and a bottle of Coca‑ Cola for his new tablemate. Hollis waited until she was gone to answer.

“I don’t know, ” he said. “You looked kinda sad, I guess. ”

As if to drip gasoline on Noah’s already smoldering mood, tonight’s headliner, the illustrious Danny Bailey, now took to the stage in a swell of heavy‑ metal music and an ovation that rattled every shelf of glassware behind the bar.

“Hello, New York! ” Bailey shouted, like an aging rock star kicking off his annual farewell tour. He held out the microphone to pump up the roar of the answering crowd and made no move to settle them down. On the contrary, the clamor continued until he produced a piece of paper and took back the mike almost a full deafening minute later.

“Thank you, really. I could listen to that all night long. Let me see if this is my crowd, though. How can we tell if a politician is lying? ” He turned the mike briefly to the crowd again for their answer.

“Their lips are moving! ” the people shouted.

“That’s right, ” Bailey said. “And watch what they name things, especially those bills they’re all voting on without even reading them. If they call something the Patriot Act, you can bet it won’t be long before they’re using it to hunt down us patriots. If it’s called Net Neutrality, it’s going to be used to neutralize their enemies. If it’s called the Fairness Doctrine, it’s meant to un fairly put free speech under government control and create a chilling effect on your First Amendment rights. Immigration reform, health‑ care reform‑ do me a favor, when you hear them say the word ‘reform, ’ I want you to hear the word ’transform! And the next question you’ve got to ask is, What are they trying to transform us into? A better, stronger, freer country? Or a place filled with more and more people who are easier to control, easier to exploit, easier to keep under their thumb? ”

This drew a loud and positive reaction from the crowd, which continued until Bailey produced a piece of paper and made a motion to quiet them down.

“Hey, is anybody out there looking for a job? Unemployment just shot up past twenty percent, real unemployment that is, not the bogus numbers we get spoon‑ fed on the nightly news. And that’s nothing; it’s almost forty percent if you’re a young black man in this free country of ours. Since I thought maybe some of you might be looking for a new career, I brought this job opportunity for you. ”

He held the printout in his hands at an angle so he could read from it under the lights. “I found this last week on a government website. It’s a really good job for what they call an Internment and Resettlement Specialist. ”

The crowd’s reaction was immediate, loud, and angry.

“Now, calm down, give it a chance. Of all the world’s prisoners, we’ve got twenty‑ five percent of them right here in this country. And hell, the U. S. has only five percent of the planet’s population, so there must be a disproportionate number of undesirables in America, don’t you think? ”

A man just outside the circle of the spotlight handed up a stack of stapled papers.

“Oh, wait, ” Bailey continued, hamming up an incredulous reaction to the new document on top. “What’s this? I don’t believe we’re supposed to see this. This is Army Regulation 210‑ 35, dated almost five years ago. And will you look at that? The title is ‘Civilian Inmate Labor Program. ’ Maybe this is what they need all those new internment and resettlement specialists for. ”

Another burst of outrage from the crowd.

“Now hold your horses. These are dangerous criminals. After all, somebody’s got to keep them in line, right? Why not put ‘em in a military work camp, where we can get some free labor out of them? As long as we’re not the criminals we’ve got nothing to worry about. ”

He flipped to another one of the documents in his hands. “But what do we have here? A memo from 1970, written by a man who later became the director of FEMA, advocating the rounding‑ up and internment of twenty‑ one million quote‑ American Negroes‑ unquote, in the event of civil disorder. Now, I left my exact figures at home, but I believe at that time twenty‑ one million would have been roughly all of the black people in America.

“And here”‑ he squinted as he read briefly from the document on top of his stack‑ “United States Air Force Civil Disturbance Plan 55‑ 2 will authorize and direct the secretary of defense to use the U. S. armed forces to restore law and order in the event of a crisis. Under this umbrella plan they ran an exercise in 1984‑ so you see they do have a sense of humor‑ and that exercise was called Rex‑ 84. The purpose was to see how efficiently they could pick up and corral all those disobedient Americans on their lists. ”

Bailey held up document after document as he continued. “What lists, you ask? All kinds of them. The FBI’s ADEX list from the late 1960s‑ ADEX, that stands for Agitator Index‑ it was full of dangerous intellectuals, union organizers, and people who spoke out against the Vietnam War. Now there’s almost a million and a half people on the DHS Terrorist Watch List, and it’s growing by twenty thousand names every month.

“Have you registered a firearm? You’re on a list! Have you made a political contribution to a third‑ party candidate? You’re on a list! Have you visited my website? You’re on a list! Have you given a speech about government lists to a rowdy group of patriots? You’re on a list!

“But who needs a list when they can monitor you whenever they want? You’ve all heard of that ‘Digital Angel’ device that can be implanted under your skin, right? They say it’s to store medical information and for the safety of children and Alzheimer’s patients. ”

At that, the crowd began to boo and hiss.

“Now, now… maybe for once they are being honest with us, but you know what? It doesn’t matter! ‘Digital Angel’ is a Red Herring. We’re all busy worrying about implantable chips as we’re standing in line to buy the next iPhone or BlackBerry. Read the fine print, people! They don’t need to sell new technologies to track us, we’re eagerly signing up for the old ones!

“Oh, and this just in, thanks to our friends on the Internet‑ a place where, at least for now, we can track them as easily as they can track us. ”

Noah felt his face getting hot. In Bailey’s hand was a printout of the leaked government memorandum from that afternoon meeting at the office, the one he’d spent his entire morning trying to nullify. It was effectively harmless now, it was a nonissue, and he repeated that to himself, but the smug look coming from the guy onstage had already gotten under his skin.

“… if you speak out against abortion, ” Bailey continued, reading from the memo, “are a returning veteran, are a defender of the Second Amendment, oppose illegal immigration, are a homeschooler, if you’ve got a bumper sticker on your car that says ‘Chuck Baldwin for President’ or, heaven help us, if you’re found to be in possession of a copy of the U. S. Constitution, then you good American patriots, you moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas, you guardians of liberty are to be approached with extreme caution and guns at the ready, because you may be a terrorist! ”

The overall tone of the crowd’s response had been taking a decided turn for the worse. It wasn’t everybody who was into this line of rhetoric, maybe only a vocal ten percent or so. And while this minority wasn’t quite to the torches‑ and‑ pitchforks line yet, they didn’t have too much farther to go.

“But wait now, just wait. So they’ve got us all on a list, but it’s not like they’re gonna pick us up and send us to a concentration camp out of the blue, right? That could happen only if there’s something they can blame on us, some sort of a big emergency. So who decides if and when we’re in that kind of a crisis? The Congress, maybe? The same toothless Congress that hasn’t actually declared a war on any of the seventy countries where we’ve sent our young men and women to fight and die since 1945? The same Congress that hasn’t even been allowed to read most of the Orwellian continuity‑ of‑ government provisions put in place since the 1980s?

“No, the Congress doesn’t decide. ” Bailey held up another document. “It’s much worse than that. Since Presidential Decision Directive number fifty‑ one, it’s official. The president decides. The duly selected president takes control of the whole enchilada, what they call in Presidential Decision Directive number sixty‑ seven ‘the Enduring Constitutional Government. ’ On his command the U. S. A. becomes the ECG, and it stays that way until our new benevolent emperor decides the coast is clear again. The truth is that it could happen anytime they want. In case you don’t know it, the powers that be have kept this country in an official, continuous state of national emergency almost every day since 1933.

“Do you realize that if you live within a hundred miles of a coastline or a U. S. border you’re in what they call a ‘Constitution Free Zone, ’ where the entire Bill of Rights can disappear in a heartbeat? That’s not me talking, that’s the ACLU. Two‑ thirds of us live in that zone; that’s two hundred million American citizens. Do you know that tonight, in this very city, our kind leaders have set up what they call a ‘Free Speech Zone’ where we’re allowed to exercise our First Amendment rights, but it’s way uptown in a fenced‑ off parking lot where our rulers and the media don’t have to be distracted by what we have to say.

“Well, ladies and gentlemen, I hereby declare this spot where I’m standing now, and every single square inch of this great land from sea to shining sea, according to the unalienable rights and powers endowed to me by my Creator, to be a Free Speech Zone! ”

Noah had to catch his beer glass before it tipped over as his table was jostled by the nearby revelers. They were already clapping as loudly as they could and were now on the verge of getting physical in their reactions. From the stage, Danny Bailey indicated that he wanted to be heard again.

“It looks bad, I know it does, ” Bailey began. “But do you know why we’re going to beat them? We’re going to beat them because once the truth gets out there’ll be no stopping it. When enough people wake up they’ll have no choice but to come out of the shadows and fight, and then we’ve got them. Remember what a great man once told us: First they ignore you‑ then they ridicule you‑ then they fight you‑ ”

“And then they win, ” Noah said.

It was one of those nightmare moments, like when you dream about showing up to ninth‑ grade homeroom without your pants. Just as he’d spoken those four words, out loud but only to himself, the entire room had gone dead quiet in anticipation of Bailey’s big triumphant finish. And by some cruel trick of acoustics, Noah’s sarcastic twist of that Gandhi quote seemed to have carried to every ear in the room.

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