Amerika

Every election cycle, Jorge Madigan-Sanubane hopped into his custom Ford Econoline and drove with a television crew to interview the different political parties. He had been promised something different this season, so he felt eager apprehension as he opened the door to the first party headquarters.

Situated in one of those great old Anglo-Saxon homes along the bayou in River Oaks, the Incompetence Party central nervous system branched out through the wings of a stately manor house now in the process of being upgraded to Gigabit ethernet and EnergyStar cooling.

“The central point of the Incompetence Party,” said Campaign Manager Roberto Wang-Stuart, “is that people should not be punished for incompetence, and should be able to do whatever they want to do, even if they are useless, without being discriminated against. We create equality by insisting that people do not differentiate between productive and unproductive activities.”

Sweating in the Houston summer which is like South Vietnam with bigger cockroaches, Jorge shook his head at that one. He jumped back in the van and they motored off in a cloud of smoke, ending up at a high-rise condominium in the gallery area where the Momentum Party had its headquarters.

Riding up the elevator to the sixteenth floor, Jorge and his camera crew felt a sense of awe for how this building like a temple to an ancient god rose above the scrum and muss of the green foliage crumpled to the earth below. It was like ascending beyond the conditions of humanity.

“The Momentum Party stands for conservation of energy,” said party boss Jeb H.W. Reagan-Martinez. “We want people to get out of our way so that we can keep doing what is productive or personally profitable. The party is divided between Trads who want productive and Libertarians who aim for profit.”

Shaking his head after that interview, Jorge helped his cameraperson who was vomiting violently on the floor of the elevator. He whipped out his iPhone and saw that their next target was in the north part of the city with the Stoned Accountant Party.

They found themselves in a dusty street where dry clay and car exhaust mingled to form a grey haze, near a freeway surrounded by both suburbs and giant industrial areas. Dead birds dropped from the sky and gunfire echoed from distant ghettos and trailer parks.

“The Stoned Account Workgroup aims to make stuff work,” said Herbert Winkelschleifer. “We believe in the power of observed reality, which has a light side and a dark side. The light side is that we leave people alone who are not causing harm. The dark side is that we remove anything harmful to civilization and believe in the Pareto cutoff.”

He took a huge hit from his squat glass bong. “Where was I? Oh yes, we measure harm in terms of civilization. That is, if you want to saw the tits off your kid, shoot heroin, film your wife getting gang-banged, or sodomize a young wrestler with bright eyes, well, hah, knock yourself out.”

Winkelschleifer blew out the rest of the smoke. “Those things do not harm civilization because they are localized. But using actuarial statistics, we can see what actually creates risk of civilization declining into third world levels, like socialism, diversity, apathy, obesity, perversity, and really, stupidity.”

He gestured at the parking lot next door. “People are on a Bell Curve, or rather, dozens of them. You have a moral curve, an intelligence curve, and a ‘gumption’ curve which is what Nietzsche called aggression, you know, ramming stuff into place so it works instead of flopping your little hands and whining about poor me like most people do.”

The room filled with smoke as he took another bong hit. Jorge began to feel light-headed but wanted to continue the interview. His cameraperson accepted a blunt rolled in one of those old Optimo cigars with clover honey sealing the flap, lungwolfing a thick smoke of homegrown ditch weed and basement LED-fed indica.

“So for any group, 20% of the population does 80% of the good… and a different 20% does 80% of the bad. Mathematically and logically, you want to lose the bad 20% and get more of the good 20%, which raises the level of society as a whole, so that the good 20% of tomorrow is better than the good 20% of today. You dig?”

Jorge was lost in the math. It was his least favorite subject at Jefferson-Lincoln-Chavez High School where he grew up in Porter. “So that bad 20%,” said Winkelschleifer, “just needs to go away, know what I mean? We want to exile them useless to Venezuela or Cuba or something.”

He continued. “But that good 20%, man, we want to keep them, so we should stop taxing them entirely and leave them alone. They will have more kids, and the next generation, the top 20% will be even better and 40% will be as good as the 20% good today… this is, like, Darwinism, man.”

“Now there’s other stuff we have to do too,” said Winkelschleifer, blowing out the remnants of a giant bong hit. “We have to be like robots, machines, math equations… cold logic. Colder than the Arctic, blacker than darkness. Stuff like diversity and Keynesian socialism just don’t work, so we gotta lose those,” he said, giggling.

“But the rest, we should just about letting the good times roll,” he said. “Get rid of the bad people and stupid ideas, go back to WASP America, cut government down so it serves civilization again, and stop this ‘we the people’ nonsense because Crowds are always insane.”

“You know what really bugs people?” said Winkelschleifer. “It’s that someone else knows better. They are smarter, more moral, and have more gumption; statistically, those correlate. They also recognize archetypes and discriminate, which is also statistically right. But that’s how you build civilization.”

“I mean, look out there, man,” said Winkelschleifer. “Everyone knows that this civilization is collapsing into being the new Mexico or Russia. We are failing like Rome and Athens, and look at what a mess Italy and Greece are these days… total third world, dude. Total. We gotta fix that. It’s what leaders should do… fix the real problems instead of the dramatic stuff everyone else is talking about.”

As smoke cascaded around him, Jorge packed up his gear and fled in a state of moral confusion and existential terror.

Tags: morality, politics, pragmatism, realism