continued from the Vol. 2 story The Black Dream Cycle
Azalaan spoke his mind in editorials that the student newspaper published because of the controversy that his opinions generated, and the paper enjoyed unprecedented popularity. Azalaan sparked so much controversy that he commonly trended on social media. Cable news outlets featured him frequently on their opinion shows, which meant that he was often on cable news seeing as those channels fill their twenty-four hour news cycle with just a couple hours of news, and then upwards of twenty hours of opinion of the news of the day.
He refused political affiliation with any party, but most labeled him a bomb-throwing, anarchist-libertarian because of the many times that he’d expressed his belief that the experiment of American government was an utter failure in its current state. America only knows how to take money from its citizens to fill the pockets of the academic elite who ascend to government offices through familial and often fraternal affiliations. The majority of the money America collects in taxes, it spends on debt and the military, so the average American can only reap the benefit of America’s perceived prosperity by joining the military.
“That’s reductive!” said the woman in the business coat and matching pants, with her brown hair cut short and styled like a fifties-era celebrity. “The money collected by the government maintains the roads you drove to arrive at this studio. It upgrades the electrical grid and communication lines that make the news possible. Because the US government is so efficient at some things, it is easy to overlook all of the good that it does to provide the framework for civilized society. I don’t want to pretend that politics hasn’t been what its been for the past forty years or so, completely dominated by people looking to make the government work for them personally and not the other way around, and bitter partisanship that makes legislating completely impossible and renders the government incapable of working for anyone. But the government does beneficial things that you’re taking for granted. You don’t just have to be in the military to access the benefits of US society. Actually, we should be treating our soldiers much better than we do, they hardly receive the compensation they deserve for volunteering to preserve our liberties.”
Azalaan was tickled and he said, “The sacrifice of soldiers is honorable indeed and worthy of compensation, but how much of the money allocated to the military goes into the pockets of service men and women? How much of it goes to contractors to build ever-more sophisticated technology to allow us to slaughter innocent civilians without guilt? How much goes to contractors to build schools and government buildings in conquered nations? It seems that the American government uses its military to drum up conflict around the world so that its friends with weapons and construction businesses can fatten their pockets with the money of hardworking taxpayers.”
“Is there waste in the system?” the woman asked. “Yes, of course. We could be doing better for sure. It’s important to point out the follies in the system so that they can be fixed. Not as an impetus to blow it all to hell.”
“You can patch a tire as many times as it’s punctured, but eventually, you’re gonna need a new tire,” Azalaan said with a smirk that he knew would annoy the woman even more so than the metaphor he’d used.
“I have to cut in here,” the young host with makeup as thick as a mask on their face said. “This has been a very lively, informative debate and I wouldn’t expect any less from the two of you. Can’t wait to do it again…”
As they wrapped up, the young host looked into the camera to read the parting message on the prompter to the viewing audience.
After they all signed off, the woman said to Azalaan, “You’re so good at this it’s scary. I can’t wait to do this again, everytime we bicker I get a thousand more followers.”
Azalaan knew that he was building an impressive brand around himself and he only lent it to those who could give him a bigger platform. This woman that he regularly argued with on CNN was also a prominent member of the White House Press Corp, and even though Azalaan didn’t have a job that could grant him White House clearance, he maintained genial relations with this woman who did. She had even asked his question, and mentioned him as the source of it, during a live press conference with the president.
“Are you coming to the bar later?” the woman asked as she gathered her things.
“Of course I’ll be there!” the host said enthusiastically. They looked back and forth between Azalaan and the woman, but neither returned their enthusiasm.
“I meant Leeland,” the woman said.
“I’ll be there,” Azalaan said. “I wonder if I’ll finally get a chance to talk to Charles…”
“I knew you were gonna bring her up and I can say with confidence that she will be there. She’s waiting for confirmation before she can publish a story, and needless to say, she’s very tense and in need of a stiff drink, or two. She’s already at the bar, actually, so whenever you can make it.”
Azalaan was always excited at the prospect of sitting with his older, more accomplished colleagues, and Marlo Charles was a decorated print journalist who wrote the most academic editorials of the day, analyzing everything from art and food, to police brutality. She was often busy with her work and even though his new circle of friends supposedly included the living legend, Azalaan had yet to meet her. She was often busy because of the nature of the news at the time; it seemed that there was always something that required her attention and ate away at her leisure, which was often spent whiling hours away in a bar with friends who also worked in the media and having deep, philosophical discussion about the the state of civilized society.
“She’s excited to finally meet you, too,” the woman continued. “She says you have a Graham quality about you, in his heyday of course. I’ll see you later, I have to stop by my apartment before I head to the bar.”
Kurt Graham. Azalaan thought about the legendary print journalist who was known for his long form stories that exposed corruption in local governments around the US and some international regimes. He published for years until recent allegations of sexual assault from his staff led to his early retirement from major news outlets. There were rumors that he hosted a podcast, but Azalaan hadn’t heard it.
Azalaan left the studio and was disappointed at the small crowd waiting to see him in person and hound him for his autograph. He signed a few, then walked a few blocks to the bar known as The Nellie. When he arrived there, he saw Marlo Charles at a table. She had a beer and there was an empty shot glass on the table as well, but all of her attention was on her phone with the screen illuminating her face in the dim, but lively bar.
“Hello,” Azalaan said politely and when she looked up at him, he waved. He was about to introduce himself, but the woman cut him off.
“Leeland Allen!” she said excitedly. “Sit! I have to apologize for all the get-togethers I’ve missed. I’ve heard so many good things about you, and of course I watch you all the time when you’re on TV. I’m so glad you’re here and we get to talk alone for a little while before everyone else shows up. I heard you on NPR this weekend laughing it up with Scott Simon. Even during this heavy time in US history, he can always find a way to make you chuckle. I will say that I didn’t enjoy that project you were promoting. I saw that documentary and it’s garbage, Leeland. You were the only cogent thing in it, and it was still hard to recognize you. Are vaccines really so bad a thing that the government can’t mandate them? Polio would still be rampant if not for vaccines.”
“People often misunderstand my position, Ms. Charles…”
“Please call me Marlo,” she interjected.
“Marlo, I’m not anti-vaccine, I’m anti-mandate. If I want to risk my children’s lives by not trusting big pharma, then that’s my prerogative…”
“So I take it you are staunchly ‘pro-choice’ in regards to abortion.”
“Of course,” Azalaan said. “If I could get pregnant and I didn’t want to have a baby, no one would be able to force me to have one. I don’t care about the consequences. America is founded on the principal that I have the right to be as dumb as I want to be as long as it doesn’t impinge on the rights of other people, which doesn’t include the unborn.”
“It all lines up,” Marlo said with a nod and then signaled to a passing waiter. When they stopped, she ordered another shot for herself, and a beer and a shot for Azalaan. “You rarely speak with emotion, you know that? You give yourself away when you talk about the military. You often criticize the military and try to carve out some respect or reverence for the soldiers, but you can’t really seem to muster real sympathy for their stories. Because to you, they are one in the same.”
Azalaan looked at her curiously.
“You represent your opinion about what the military is and the negativity that it perpetuates and you are consistent across all of your interviews. It’s the same with all of your opinions, as it should be, I guess, if one is very sure of their idea of reality. But most people, myself included, we can’t help but waffle in our strong opinions that we put out into the world through our work. We buckle to public response, or we learn of flaws in our beliefs, and we recognize that opinion is as malleable as the person who owns it, shaped by experience and maturity. You’ve been in the news for about a year now? That’s almost three years in today’s fast changing news cycle. And you are still the same young man that the public became enamored with, all views and allegiances intact. Are you a journalist, Leeland?”
“I like to think so…” Azalaan stammered. He wasn’t sure that he was following her train of thought, and just then the waiter sat their drinks on the table.
“You’re not a journalist,” Marlo said with a smile. “No, journalists are a rare breed. I don’t mean this to be insulting, please don’t take offense. It’s not the greatest club to belong to. One would assume that the hardcore journalists who travel into dangerous war zones and the like, are thrill seekers more than anything else. But it’s not necessarily true. A journalist can be a thrill-seeker, but the moniker doesn’t fit them all. A journalist, by definition I would argue, has a dedication to the Truth, capital T. By this I mean the idea that there is an objective truth, a real history that must be documented by those with no investment in either side. A journalist puts themselves in danger, not in search of a thrill, but in search of the Truth. Is that a worthy thing to sacrifice one’s life to? Some people don’t even think history exists, and what is the news if not history from the past week or so? I get it, can we really be objective? Even if we travel to some remote country to document a civil war, we can’t help but form attachments, which colors our perception of the conflict, no matter how much we proclaim objectivity. So what is the Truth, what is history, but a collection of the opinions of people privileged enough to take the time to document their view of the present for posterity? Who knows what really happened? You’re not a journalist. You’re too smart to be a journalist. You’re the other type, using the news to get what you really want.”
Azalaan didn’t feel as though Marlo was attacking him. She wasn’t speaking aggressively and she seemed to be enjoying their mostly one-sided conversation. But she seemed to be making a point to distinguish him from a journalist who was interested in the truth. Did that mean she thought he was dishonest?
Before either of them could say anything, two people arrived at the table and sat in chairs that they pulled up next to Marlo.
“It’s the money twins!” she said joyfully.
“Does she know we’re not really related?” the male presenting twin whispered to the female one.
Azalaan knew them and they didn’t look like twins, but they worked for the same financial magazine and wore the same thin metal-rimmed glasses. They smiled and said hello to Azalaan.
“I’m glad you’re here, and there’s the rest of the crew,” Marlo said excitedly as the woman that Azalaan had debated with earlier arrived with another man who he knew was a free-lancer and blogger. “We’re all here! It’s been so long and I definitely don’t have the tolerance that I’m used to. Those shots went right to my head.”
Everyone laughed and exchanged greetings. The waiter came and took drink orders. The group was the loudest in the bar even before they were all served and as comfortable as Marlo had made herself, but by the time they were all a few drinks in, their conversation became much more subdued. The dimness in the bar closed in around their table and made them feel like they were in a private backroom. Even though the bar was full, the commotion of the crowd blended into a medium roar that hung around them, but didn’t overpower Marlo’s voice.
“What a time,” she said when a lull settled over the table after they had discussed recent events of the day. “I am an older woman so I’ve lived through a lot of the history that you all learned about in school, but there is something surreal about the news today. I blame it on the internet, technology makes everything so much more visceral. Things aren’t worse now, pain isn’t more potent, suffering is suffering no matter the clock, but we see it, don’t we? We see it everywhere and all the time so it feels like it’s all around us, and the tragedy becomes embedded more easily into our consciousness. We can’t keep it out.
“It blows my mind to think that this is the only world most of you know. But it produces men like Leeland here. Oh, what a delight you are in person, young man, just as sharp as I suspected. I find your perspective to be quite refreshing honestly. It’s what is required to shake up the old and incorporate the present. We need minds like yours to rearrange the world and show people new possibilities. It goes back to the conversation we were having before. I told Leeland that he was not a journalist and he took the news very politely, though I could tell that he was at least a little insulted. I didn’t mean it to be insulting, you all agree because I developed my definition of a journalist with you all and we’ve discussed it before. There are largely two types of people who go into the news business, Leeland. You’ve got your Ted Koppels who present as dedicated to the capital T Truth, and then you got your Kurt Grahams. They’re the charismatic type who become the envious idols of a generation. The type who could do anything at all, and will do many things throughout their lives, but found a reason to care enough about the news to lend their talents to it. They can make a mark by making people care about something that matters, or by demonizing something that doesn’t deserve it. The Grahams could care less about the capital T Truth. They care about some version of the truth, the subjective one that serves their true goals and aims, but they aren’t dedicated to the pursuit that defines a journalist.”
Azalaan was complemented by the explanation. The female presenting money twin, who was not an actual twin, took a drink from her beer and then interrupted Marlo.
“There’s another type, remember. The nameless worker bees…”
“Ahh, yes,” Marlo said, “the worker bees. The wheel couldn’t turn without the grunts. Not everyone finds lofty purpose in their day jobs, for some it’s just work and I don’t knock that either. But we have a Graham here with us now and one thing that I’ve learned is that leaving that level of charisma unchecked opens up the terrible possibility of corruption. It makes me think of the columnist who I replaced last year.”
“Chad Smith?” the female presenting money twin asked. “He fell completely off the map after he was fired. You know him personally, right?”
Marlo nodded silently.
“Like most of the public who read his column, I hadn’t heard a word from him since the accusations were made public. We would have dinner together every few months, we were very friendly and I enjoyed working with him. I had published some opinion pieces by then and he gave me pointers as a veteran of the game, which I genuinely invited and appreciated. He was never the man to me that he was to younger staff, I guess. I assume because he saw me as a peer. Everyone else, in his opinion anyway, owed their jobs to him because he was the reason the paper enjoyed the reputation that it did; it was his insightful opinion that people paid to read and he apparently demanded a level of reverence from everyone else. I never witnessed his temper firsthand, but I remember going to the office one afternoon and you know the main office of the newsroom where I work, it’s filled with desks on the main floor and there’s offices along each wall, with a staircase up to a balcony and offices on the second floor. It’s always busy, but that afternoon, it was quiet enough to hear a pin drop, and then I heard him screaming at the top of his lungs. I recognized his voice even in his anger, but I still can’t picture him in that rage. I just never saw it. I think the admiration that he earned over his long career went to his head. We were friendly, but I don’t know him well enough to know the details of his personal life, maybe there were other things that made him prone to anger and abuse. But of course it’s not an excuse for bringing it into the workplace and I’m glad that it was finally dealt with. I wasn’t much interested in talking to Chad after I really listened to and read about the things he’d done to my coworkers. None of it was sexual in nature, it was just verbal and in a few instances physical abuse that made the workplace hostile for some. The saddest thing is how long it lasted. For years people took his abuse, or were aware of it and allowed it to happen, because they believed him when he said that people only bought the paper because they were interested in his opinions. It’s not true, of course. My paper is a staple of the community and it’s still around because people are used to seeing it and they support it. There are many local papers like ours, but we’re in New York City, there are just so many people, there’s enough to sustain a newspaper. People have responded positively to my work since I’ve been there.
“I did finally confront Chad. I was in the office late, following the M23 rebellion in the Congo, or what was covered of it on TV, and digging around for stories on the internet. The Congo should be the most prosperous nation in the world with its rich natural resources, but mostly it’s been manipulated and exploited by outsiders. After such a long history of bloodshed, the people of the Congo deserve to live in peace. I was there in 2009 with a colleague who was covering rebel violence. Seeing those people, mothers and their children displaced from their home or exploited by rebel groups, fathers and sons standing strong in the face of sure slaughter. I regretted going there. Being there felt wrong, but only for reasons that I had manufactured. There was definitely a good cause for me to be there, if I’d gone to volunteer or something like that, but I was just there because I could go for relatively cheap and as a black woman, I wanted to spend more time in the countries of Africa. I’ve never felt more American in my life, standing in all of that misery just to watch it. I didn’t enjoy it, but it would make for a good story, and who doesn’t love to tell a good story?
“Anyway, I was in my office late, it had been Chad’s, so when he showed up at the door, I figured he’d gotten nostalgic and showed up to reminisce. He was a mess. He’d lost so much weight and his face was white, he was a walking skeleton and I wondered how he’d gotten inside the building. He could have been a homeless man. He had been friendly with the guards when he worked there and they must have let him up.
“‘You look good there,’ that was all he said before he fell flat on his face. I called an ambulance and I was with his wife in the waiting room when the doctors pronounced him dead. His wife said he didn’t know what he was without his job. All he did was drink and talk to himself. She said losing the job hurt him most because it ended after he had lost so much respect and he knew that people would remember him for the worst mistakes he’d made. It’s sad but, not really. He died rich and still very privileged. He still had plenty of fans and positive attention for his long career, it was his choice to focus on the negative.
“But I don’t think it was the loss of his reputation that killed him. Chad was a man who was used to mattering, and he got confirmation for his influence all the time. When he lost his job, he lost his platform, and in his mind he’d been rendered mute. Men like Chad, like Graham, can’t stomach being quieted. They have important things to say that will make the world so much better if only others will listen and take heed. It’s arrogance, the same arrogance that travels for pleasure to areas of unrest. Everything that people like Chad encounter is fodder to build his reputation. He was an opinion columnist, but he was always traveling to war zones and being photographed, giving detailed accounts of the things he’d seen on cable news. He built an impressive name for himself and people wanted to believe that because this man had the privilege to travel, he was somehow the arbiter of the truth. In his mind, this is the capital T Truth, but of course it is a self-serving truth that is designed to disseminate in the weak-willed for his gain, be it financial or otherwise. He was the ultimate swindler, trading on love and admiration for something much more sinister. I’m being dramatic, but I saw a real, palpable darkness in Chad’s eyes before he fell dead. His body was probably already dead before it hit the floor, but his eyes were like shiny black marbles in the sockets and I knew that I had seen that darkness before. It was a hunger, a desire to consume, to convert and repurpose. Everything could be made interesting through those black eyes that refused the death of their body, until they were confronted with the reality that it was indeed all over because I now occupied his chair. That had been enough to shut those black eyes forever.
“All this talk of Chad, and the presence of my new friend Leeland, has me thinking about Kurt Graham,” Marlo said with a new heaviness in her voice. She seemed more grave than before, though her joy at sitting with her friends and colleagues was still very apparent. Leeland, and everyone else around the table, listened closely to her like she was a television they watched.
“I try not to talk about him too much, some things are best left in the past, but even devils can chance their way into goodness, and good men should be remembered, flaws and all. I’m not an apologist for the man, I know of horrible things he has done to family and strangers alike, but I will never forget my first encounter with him. It seems like so long ago when I think of all the life I have lived since, but I can remember it like it was yesterday.”
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