Chapter Thirty-nine
"What have you got against being nice?" Oprah asks.
"Being nice is anything but," the old guy says. "Being nice is the glue that holds the gulag together."
"Gulag, schmulag, what gulag?"
"The gulag of poverty overseen by obscene wealth, the gulag of slaves and slave owners, the global gulag of gluttony that has starved and murdered and enslaved more people than Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot put together, that's what gulag. Rich guys pay propaganda sluts to hype the notion that the more you consume the better you are and that being rich is the highest calling a person can have, that being rich is right and good and necessary and nice. Ha! In order to get rich you have to lie and cheat and steal and subjugate everyone else on the the planet. The more people you can buy and sell the more successful you are, the more useless junk you consume the better you are. Propaganda sluts have made a ton of money making making a ton of money the highest aspiration a person can have."
Oprah moves her hands like a flapper and sings a smirky imitation of The Lumberjack Song:
"I'm a propaganda slut and I'm okay.
I sleep all night and I lie all day."
"Hey, you're way more than just okay." He seems unable to keep himself from smiling. "You're the most successful propaganda slut of all time. You're the Muhammed Ali of propaganda sluts. Do you have any idea how many fewer greedy, misanthropic, moneygrubbing slave owners there'd be if it weren't for you? As long as you keep promoting and protecting and defending and deifying the notion that making money is the only thing worth doing on this earth you'll keep churning out an endless supply of mindless, thoughtless, worthless slaves overseen by smarmy, mid-level managers and sycophants who willingly martyr themselves and their children to make more and more money for their owners. What higher calling could there be?"
"You know, for someone who goes around acting all holier-than-thou, your attitude toward people in general isn't very generous or thoughtful or kind."
"Oh, people in general just don't know any better, it's your owners and your sponsors and the guys who pay you and guys like you to divide people up into demographic packages and turn them into an all-consuming swarm of locusts that I could do without. Once they've used everything all up, then what?"
"If this is gonna be more of your apocalyptic claptrap, save your breath, but just out of curiosity, how's that all gonna work, again?" Oprah wrinkles her nose. "The armies of good and evil are gonna fly in to Ben Gurion International, take taxis to the plains of Armageddon and duke it out once and for all? How do they figure out who's on which side, though? That's the part that always got too confusing."
"You're on the side you think you're not on," Abraham says.
"How convenient." Oprah shoots a bored look toward her son.
"You don't have to fly anywhere," the old guy says. "We all come up with our own revelations. Armageddon's in your head. You spend your life with an army of equal and opposite notions going back and forth in your brain, good and bad, right and wrong, love and money, war and peace, justice and mercy, blah, blah, blah—whether to lie or tell the truth, whether to speak up or stifle yourself—and what gets revealed at the end of each little skirmish turns into another piece of the puzzle."
"What puzzle?"
"The puzzle of who you are. It's your job to find the pieces and put them together. Whether you do it or not is up to you. If you want beasts and horsemen and whores and seals and the second coming, cool, rely on somebody else's apocalypse—if you want your own, pay attention to yourself."
"Wouldn't you be better off working at a real job, a job you got paid for? So you could quit whining about dentists and get your teeth fixed?"
"Well, there's better off and better off. Working at a job to get your teeth fixed is just another link in the chain that keeps you a stupid slave. You can be a worthless, chicken-hearted, moneygrubbing maggot with a nice smile and a mind full of mush or you can know who you are and die of a sore tooth. Take your pick."
"I pick a nice smile, thanks. If you want to let your teeth rot out of spite, fine, go for it, but if that's your choice, why whine about it?"
"I like whining. That's who I am. Well, so far." He smiles a crooked smile.
"I'm glad we got that settled." Oprah smiles a mouthful of sparkly-white capped teeth. "Now, are you gonna keep hogging Isaac or can I have him?"
The old guy shifts Isaac from one place to another in his lap as if the kid might be putting his right arm to sleep. "The only thing we've settled so far is that everything I've said to you has gone in one ear and out the other. You're gonna get your fill of the kid, don't worry, but he's who I want to talk to you about."
"Fine. Talk. But I'm not buying your bogus jigsaw puzzle gulag baloney. Things are getting better all the time."
"Better for you, maybe, but what about everyone else? The rich can only get so rich. Then what? No empire ever rose that didn't fall. It might not happen in your lifetime or mine, but what about Isaac's? I was his age in World War Two. The population has tripled since then. Ice caps weren't melting. The ozone was fine and dandy. There weren't any nuclear weapons. Nazi Germany at the height of its military might didn't have anywhere near the power to destroy people that the piddly little State of Israel has today—and Israel didn't even exist back then. By the time the kid's my age there's gonna that many more people and who know who all's gonna have nuclear weapons? We're having a hard time sustaining six billion people, what the hell are we gonna do with three times that many? There's gonna be mass starvation and carnage like you can't imagine."
"People have been worried about mass starvation and carnage for a hundred thousand years. Neanderthals worried about mass starvation and carnage."
"Yeah, and look what happened to them." Abraham smiles.
"Maybe the population could use a little winnowing, who's to say?"
"Hey, winnow away," the old guy says. "Anyone who can't afford food to eat, fine, let 'em die, but they're not gonna just roll over and do that without causing some trouble first. Whoever has the most money will last the longest, sure—that's gotta be partly why people want to make money in the first place—but why go around being nice about it? Call a spade a spade. There are ten million people with a million dollars or more. Maybe that's the plan. For a million bucks you can buy yourself a one-way ticket to paradise and sing sappy seventies songs happily ever after, anything less and it's all she wrote. You'd have to go clear back to before The Book of Job was written to find the last time there were so few people inhabiting the planet. What a great day in the morning it's gonna be when nothing but millionaires inherit the Earth."
"It might interest you to know that the standard of living among billions of people all over the world has gone through the roof in the last twenty years."
"Yeah? From what to what? A dollar a day to two? So now some goat herder in Kandahar can buy himself a Ford Focus if he's frugal and manages to grow a little opium on the side? It might interest you to know that Bill Gates has twice as much money as all thirty million people in Afghanistan put together."
"He made twice as much money as they did. Good for him. The more money Bill Gates makes the quicker that goat herder's gonna get his car."
"What if the goat herder doesn't want a car?"
"All goat herders want cars. It's a well-known fact."
"That's the difference between you and me. It's your job to con some poor goat herder into working himself to death to buy the stuff people pay you to want him to want. It's my job to get you to leave the poor goat herder alone. Rich guys pay you and all the other media and entertainment sluts to preach the devil's own hogwash that making and spending and conserving money is the only thing of any consequence a person can do, or should do, or would want to do and that's created the most all-encompassing slave-based police state the species has ever known. Do you have any idea what that means?" His eyes bug out like Jimmy Carter's.
"Tell me, oh, wise one." Oprah winks at Giselle.
"It means nothing's free. It means there's no free speech, no free press, no free anything, just the poor making the rich richer and the rich making the richer richer and so on and so on until pretty soon the only thing that's gonna be left is Bill Gates and Warren Buffett sitting among mountains of rotting corpses, sticking their thumbs in each other's Christmas pies, pulling out each other's plums and saying, 'What a good boy am I!' over and over 'til they die of boredom and sloth. How fun."
"Bill Gates and Warren Buffett give away more money than any fifty people put together."
"Ah, yes, noblesse oblige, who could forget the cornerstone of any well-oiled feudal society? Give a gladiator his freedom once in a blue moon and the rest of the slaves will think there's hope for them. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and the rest of the really rich guys who run things got conned into thinking that giving away money was another way of being a good boy the same way they got conned into thinking making money was what made them good boys in the first place. Making money's the most entertaining game ever invented. You get to lie and cheat and steal and subjugate your fellow man—the more you do those things the more money you make and the more money you make the better you are. Talk about turning language on its ear. I can name you twenty million kids under the age of six who are better than Bill Gates...and he'd be the first to agree. War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. Your owners have got you singing the praises of a gigantic, worldwide Orwellian oligarchy the really rich need us to think we're living happily ever after in in order to make more money. Do unto your neighbor before he does unto you. There is no God but Money and Oprah Winfrey is His messenger." The old guy raises his right arm in a Nazi salute. "Nobody can say or do or think anything that goes against the dogma of making nothing but money and money and more money at all costs and to the exclusion of making any other thing."
"Like making anything worth making," Abraham says.
"Don't be absurd." Spirals of Oprah's still-wet hair seem to tremble around her animated, un-made-up face. "Nobody's got me singing any such thing."
"Oh, so you sing it all on your own? For free? Wow. How altruistic. I'll tell you what, stop saying what your owners pay you to say and see who listens. You'll get blacklisted so fast you won't know your own name. Oprah who? I'm telling you, man, they've had you living in the gulag of all gulags your whole life."
"You're both nuts. There's more free everything than there ever was. Have you looked at the Internet lately—the Internet that Bill Gates and Paul Allen and Sergey Brin and a bunch of other really rich guys built, by the way? You can stick up any kind of crackpot crap you wanna stick up for next to nothing. If that's not free speech and a free press I don't know what is."
"Oh, it's free, all right, but it ain't speech and it ain't press. It's gibberish, it's glut, it's moronic bloggers kvetching in a vacuum on a million mindless blogs, it's frat boy Face Book narcissim and You Tube twaddle, it's trillions of terabytes of tripe that gets totally tuned out unless someone can make some money from it. Nobody notices anything that someone didn't get paid to tell 'em to notice. Hype is all that matters and hype is far from free—you of all people should appreciate that. It's a chicken and egg thing. If something doesn't make money you can't pay anyone to hype it, right? And nothing that doesn't get hyped ever gets heard or seen or paid any attention to whatsoever. The only speech you're privy to and the only press you have any hope of noticing is speech and press that was bought and paid for—which precludes it by definition from being free speech and a free press, which is what I said. There's no free speech and there's no free press. Go ahead and argue all you want, but you're wrong. The only speech that ever sees the light of day is expensive speech preached by high-priced propaganda sluts who keep people brainwahsed beyond belief. You only know what people get paid to tell you and that means you only know what's gonna make someone some money. Teachers, preachers, politicians, musicians, magicians and every other kind of media and entertainment slut there is, from Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone to Big Bird, Tom Brokaw and Pikachu, they all get paid to tell people what to know and nobody can tell anyone anything that goes against the core concept of making money at all costs."
"Oh, yeah," Oprah says.
"Yeah." The old guy cranks the foot rest of the La-Z-Boy down and stands up with Isaac in his arms. "You think what your owners want you to think. Your owners pay the media and entertainment monopoly to manipulate your poor pea brain into going along with the whole heartless system. Your owners want you to be nice so you're nice. You don't do or say or think anything your owners don't want you to do or say or think. You don't even have the rudiments of a mind of your own." He stands over her, keeping the kid balanced, still sleeping, against his chest.
"You keep calling people my owners. What's up with that?"
"Your owners are the guys who own you, the guys who bought you fair and square and use you to keep people like them away from people like me."
"Ooo, big bad scary you." Oprah fixes a place among the folds of her soft blue shirt, reaches up, slips her hands under Isaac's arms and takes him from his grandfather. He yawns but doesn't open his eyes as he sinks gingerly into Oprah's chest with his fingers next to his mouth like if he got hungry in his sleep he could chew on his knuckles. The baby-smell of his amber-black hair seems to overwhelm her with an emotion without a name; grandmotherliness, maybe. Oprah taps Giselle's shoulder and whispers, "It feels like I'm gonna start lactating."
"I wish you could've been around when he was just born," Giselle says.
Oprah holds Isaac close, makes a cooing sound, smoothes one of his almost nonexistent eyebrows and says with an utterly satisfied sigh, "You're just pissed off that nobody read your stupid hippie book."
"It was a smart hippie book." The old guy stops in the middle of the room, turns back to Oprah, smiles and says, "Well, you know, as hippie books go."
"Which obviously isn't very far," Oprah whispers.
"Hey, it was far enough for me. I adore my stupid hippie book. Writing it and getting it published the way I wanted it published made me as happy as I've ever wanted to be...and when I made it into a free, fifteen-hour audio book all on my own that made me even happier still."
"But you're still pissed off that nobody paid any attention to it, right?"
"Sure. Well, you know, technically. Yeah. Sometimes. Not for my sake, particularly. For my sake I could give a rat's ass whether anyone read the fucker or not. I wrote it the way I wanted to write it. It's done. I'm glad. The end. Am I a little ticked that no one got a chance to read it due to being too brainwashed to know his ass from his elbow? You bet. Wouldn't you be? How'd you like to spend thirty years writing one of the few books worth reading or writing so far this century, then have nobody read the sucker 'cause the few people who still even read books anymore are nothing but two-bit twits who don't read anything but the putrid puke some bunch of money grubbing propaganda sluts get paid to tell 'em to read? So I said, okay, I'll make it easier. The poor darlings don't even have to read the thing. I'll turn it into an audio book and give it away for free. All anyone has to do is sit there—then nobody listened to that, either. What the fuck? What if you made something you knew was really good, something new, something nobody's ever done or ever could do in the history of all literature going clear back to whoever wrote The Book of Job, then had nobody know the son of a bitch even existed? I have half a mind to play some of it for you. How'd you like to hear the single greatest chapter of literary art ever made?"
"I wouldn't."
"Why not? It's forty-five minutes long. What have you got to lose?"
"Forty-five minutes."
"Fine. Don't." He sits down and stretches out in the La-Z-Boy again.
"You can lead a horse to water," Abraham says.
"I've never run into any two people more deluded than you." Oprah blows a whisper of laughter into wisps of Isaac's hair. "If your stupid hippie book was half as good as you think, wouldn't it be on every bestseller list from here to Bombay?"
"Nope," the old guy says. "Bestsellers are just books that sell. What sells is hype, hype you buy from propaganda sluts, hype that gets injected directly into to the brainwashed brains of slaves, sycophants and the swarm of all-consuming insects rich guys have paid the media and entertainment monopoly to make for them."
"Wouldn't it have won some kind of chichi literary prize?"
"Not if nobody ever heard of it, no, and nobody's ever gonna hear of it unless some propaganda slut gets paid to sing its praises. It's a closed system. What opens the system is money, plain and simple. You can buy a bestseller or a Pulitzer or a National Book Award as easily as you can buy a loaf of bread. Propaganda sluts have turned literary and artistic sensibilities to such glop that the silliest schlock you can think up is modern masterpiece. Your show accounts for close to ten percent of adult trade book sales. You've made a billion dollars turning people's minds to mush."
"The love of money is the root of all evil," Abraham quotes.
"That's not exactly the newest idea I've ever heard," Oprah says.
"Oh, it seems to be taking awhile to sink in, I agree," the old guy chimes back in. "How many more times does someone like Jesus Christ have to come along and chase moneychangers around with a whip before people begin to have the slightest clue what the hell he's talking about? What good is it if you gain the whole world and lose your own soul? It can't be said any more plainly than that, but who listens? Nobody, 'cause nobody's getting paid to tell 'em it's worth listening to."
"Jesus would've had a hard time getting sponsors, I suppose. You don't want to bite the hand that feeds you. But do you have any idea how boring this all is? I mean, seriously? What's a person supposed to do? Not make money? Hole himself up in a cabin in the woods, rag on rich people and bitch about getting your teeth fixed for free in Cuba? Are we supposed to dismantle capitalism?"
"That would be a start, sure."
"And replace it with what?"
"Isn't it odd that nobody's turned in Bin Laden to collect the twenty-five million dollar reward? Some things matter more than money."
"Hey, let's all live in a Seventh Century Islamic theocracy."
"You could do worse, but you're probably right. We should just leave well enough alone." The old guy sounds somber, deflated. "Let nature take its course. Empires come and go. Species come and go. Let Bill Gates and Warren Buffett make all the money there is to make and when they're done devouring everything there is to devour maybe a whole new empire will come along, a whole new species, a whole new world. Nobody knows how things are gonna turn out. That night you crawled into bed with me you never thought you'd be sitting here with our grandson on your lap, right?"
"I have no recollection of any of that." Oprah shakes her head.
"That's not what you said before," Giselle says. "You told us how the two of you listened to Ian and Sylvia songs on an old record player."
"That had to be the next day. The night before I don't remember at all. I was in no condition to be conceiving a child, that much I know for a fact."
"Oh, no!" Abraham pushes against his forehead with the heel of his hand and says in a mocking tone of voice, "I'm just some fop got 'tween sleep and wake?"
"Nah," the old guy says. "I was there. I knew what was going on."
"Maybe you ought to write a book about this new species you've got in mind," Oprah says, changing the subject. "If it's halfway decent I'll have you on my show. You'll get rich and famous and win the Nobel Prize for Biology or whatever."
"No you won't." The old guy chuckles.
"Won't what?"
"Have me on your show."
"Why not?"
"Your owners won't let you. There's only so much you can do or say."
"What do you think I can't do or say?"
"Anything that might be even marginally truthful. Your job is to keep people so stupid they buy the junk your sponsors need to sell. You're not gonna bite the hand that feeds you, right? Who's gonna pay you to tell people to consider the lilies of the field? What would that do to the bottom line? People have to stay stupid in order to sell 'em the endless stream of worthless crap they have to buy in order for your owners to keep getting richer all the time. Remember the guy in Plato's cave?"
"Vaguely." Oprah says.
"The guy in Plato's cave went up into the sunshine then came back down and told the people watching shadows on the wall what he saw. They said he was crazy, called him a loon. That's like me trying to talk to you. Try explaining to someone who's chained in one place, facing straight ahead, someone who can't even see the fireplace, let alone the fire in the fireplace, but can only see shadows from the fireplace on a wall, try explaining that above and beyond the fire he or she can't see, there's a real fire, a fire a billion times brighter than the one in the fireplace. What the guy who went up into the sunshine saw was truth and beauty and love and life, the reality of those things, and all he said when he came back down into the cave was, 'Know yourself.' Every holy guy worth his salt climbed up into the same sunshine, saw the same stuff the guy in Plato's cave saw, went back down and said the same things the guy in Plato's cave said and they all knew at the same time and said at the same time that you can say it 'til you're blue in the face but the beauty of it is that it's always been something that can't be bought or sold or earned or learned. It either happens to you or doesn't happen to you, you see or don't see, you know or don't know. The slaves in the cave are gonna call you crazy, sure, but is that gonna stop you from telling them what you just saw with your own eyes?"
"So that's what your new book's gonna be about? Plato's cave? Cool."
"I'm not writing a new book. Books are for saps. You have to say really idiotic stuff if you want anyone to read what you write. People only read what their owners pay people like you to tell them to read so you only tell 'em to read the drivel that keeps mindless slaves from knowing what mindless slaves they are."
"So your pet peeve is that people are stupid?"
"Oh, I've got a million pet peeves. One of 'em is propaganda."
"And what pray tell do you consider to be propaganda?"
"Yeow. You name it. What isn't propaganda?"
"So we should all just throw away whatever money we have, avoid all forms of communication which may be construed as propaganda, gaze into space and let the war between good and evil fight it out in our heads?"
Abraham plays a little air guitar and sings:
"I don't care too much for money,
Money can't buy me love."
"The Beatles made a ton of money, Boychick."
"Jesus didn't make a dime," her son says.
"I'm not him."
"Yes you are," the old guy says.
"Whose Jesus? Yours? Mine? Pat Robertson's? George Bush's? Osama bin Laden's? There's a million notions of Jesus running around."
"Our Jesus." He flexes the muscles beside his eyes. "Everyone's Jesus."
Isaac opens his eyes and says, "Everyone is Jesus."
Nobody makes another sound. Nothing makes another sound. Even the fire quits crackling in the fireplace as Isaac suddenly becomes even more the center of attention than he'd been before. Everyone stares at him, staying still, being quiet, speechless, suspended in shades of disbelief for what seems like a long, long time.
"Can he talk?" Oprah asks, finally.
"No," Giselle says.
"Yep," says Isaac in a terse, breathy, less mature, but distinctly chip-off-the-old-block tone of voice. No one else says another word again as the kid looks slowly, rapturously, around the room; toward the ceiling, toward flames licking the round, random-sized, blackened stones at the back of the fireplace, over at his grandfather and up in wonderment at Oprah gazing down at him.
Oprah's thick red lip-glossed mouth makes a little circle, opens into a bigger circle, then closes into a little circle again as her lips form the word "Wow."
"Are you doing some kind of ventriloquist bullshit?" Giselle scowls over at Abraham's father.
"Hey, I'm as blown-away as anyone," the old guy says.
Giselle stands up and reaches over to take the kid from Oprah.
"No, no, I'm good," Isaac says, warding her off with his left hand and moving nimbly over onto the arm of the prickly maroon chair.
"When did you start talking?" Giselle frowns.
Isaac runs his thumbs under the straps of his overalls, expands his chest and says as if he can't quite understand why everyone's so puzzled, "Now."
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