The Overton Window

  “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.

  CHAPTER 12

  For an eternal few seconds, Noah held out hope that Danny Bailey would blow right past the interruption, but it just wasn’t that kind of a night. Noah stole a glance upward and found himself the sole focus of attention from the man onstage.

  “Well, well, well.” Bailey moved to the edge of the platform so they were facing each other. “Looks like we’ve got a junior ambassador from the Ivy League among us.”

  Noah kept his eyes fixed squarely on his beer glass, but Bailey wasn’t going to let it rest.

  “Come on up here, Harvard, don’t keep us hanging. If you’ve got so much to say, just dumb it down so all of us hicks can understand it, and then have the guts to say it loud enough so everybody can hear. I doubt if you can tell us much about the Constitution or the Founding Fathers, but maybe you can enlighten us with a little racist, communist wisdom from a real hero … like Che Guevara.”

  Noah looked up at him. “No thanks.”

  “Oh, but I won’t take no for an answer.” Bailey turned to the crowd. “You folks won’t either, will you?”

  Angry applause filled the room along with taunts and chants. It finally became too much to sit and take.

  “Fine,” Noah said. He finished off what remained of his latest beer, stood, and allowed himself to be fairly manhandled up onto the platform and under the lights. Bailey moved aside from the floor mike with a be-my-guest sweep of the arm.

  “I want to start off by saying,” Noah began, adjusting his voice to make the most of the sound system, “that because of my job I’m in a unique position to know for certain that most of what’s been said here tonight is absolutely true.”

  The crowd quieted down considerably upon hearing this, as he’d assumed they would.

  “Let me see if I can confirm some of the speculation from earlier speakers … The Federal Reserve isn’t federal at all: you’re right, it’s basically a privately owned bank, a cartel that loans you your own money at interest, and its creation was the beginning of the end of the free-market system.

  “The United States was built to run on individual freedom, that’s true, but because you’ve let these control freaks have their way with it for almost a hundred years, your country now runs on debt. Today Goldman Sachs is the engine, and in case you haven’t realized it yet, the American people are nothing but the fuel.

  “The Committee of Three Hundred exists. And the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, the Club of Rome—they all exist. And they are globalists; they’re wealthy and powerful beyond anything you can imagine. There are predators among them, absolutely ruthless people, but all of them together really do run things in this world, just like you say they do. There’s nothing secret about those societies, thoug
h. No hidden conspiracies: they do what they do right out in the open.

  “See, the place where I work is where all the secrets get told, because they have to tell us their secrets before we can hide them. But here’s the interesting thing: Do you know why I’m not worried about sharing any of this with you? Because they’re not afraid of the American people anymore, and especially not you people. All they’ve got to do is keep you bickering among yourselves, overwhelmed with conflicting information, or fretting about conspiracies or hypnotized in front of the TV and the computer, or standing around here thinking you’re fighting back, and you’ll never even get close to doing them any harm.

  “There really is a New World Order on the way, but it isn’t new. It’s been coming for a long, long time. You let yourselves get distracted with a thousand conspiracy theories, but there’s only one truth at the heart of them all. George Carlin said it better than I can: Up at the very top, it’s a big club, and you’re not in it. They’ve got all the power, and you’ve got none of it.”

  “Like hell we don’t!” shouted a man in back.

  “Okay, okay, I think I know what you’re trying to say. If you could ever get enough voters together to do anything significant, you might have a shot. But that’s easy enough to deal with. Let me show you how.”

  Noah pointed out a particularly hefty man near the bar.

  “Can everybody read what it says on this guy’s T-shirt? You know, a shirt that was probably sewn in Bangladesh by a ten-year-old girl who worked sixteen hours that day? Turn around so we can see it, big guy; be proud of it. It says, ‘Born in the Jew S A.’

  “If he’s not already an infiltrator or an agent provocateur, then your enemies should hire him immediately. That guy is exactly why I’m not worried about telling you things that should be secrets: With him standing next to you, who’d ever believe a word you say? At every rally you hold, if you’re lucky enough to get the press to cover you at all, he’s the one guy who’ll get his picture on the front page. If you want to know why you can’t get any traction with the other ninety-seven percent of America, it’s because you let yourselves be lumped in with people like that.

  “Name-calling also works like a charm.” He pointed to a different patron with every smear that followed. “There’s a Birther, and a Truther, two Paulites, a John Bircher, a Freeper, a white supremacist, a pothead, three tea-partiers, and that guy there is the jackpot: a Holocaust denier. From there it’s easy to roll you all up together so that no one in their right mind would want to join you. Why would they? According to the network news, you’re all borderline-insane, ignorant, paranoid, uneducated, hate-mongering, tinfoil-hat-wearing, racist conspiracy theorists.

  “That’s how they keep your eyes off the big picture. All the while the gradual overthrow that you’re so passionate about exposing is happening right under your nose. Yet you stand around here preaching to the choir, as if that’s going to do anything at all to stop it.

  “There’s no respect for you in Washington. They laugh at you. You say you want a revolution? That Constitution the lady was holding up a while ago? It gives you the power to revolt at every single election. Do you realize that in a couple of weeks every last seat in the U.S. House of Representatives will be up for grabs? And the presidency? And one-third of the Senate seats?

  “The approval rating for Congress is somewhere around fifteen percent. You could turn the tables and put them all out of a job on that one day. But do you know what’s going to happen instead? I do. The presidency is going to change hands, but the corruption will accelerate. Over ninety percent of those people in Congress—people who are deeper into the pockets of the lobbyists every day they spend in Washington—over ninety percent of them are going to get reelected.”

  The crowd was listening intently; it seemed they weren’t at all sure if this was just another part of the show.

  “That’s all I’ve got,” Noah said. “I’ll be outside waiting for a car if anyone wants to take a swing at me. To tell you the truth, I think a fist-fight might just be the perfect way to end tonight’s festivities.”

  There was a smattering of tentative applause and quite a bit of murmuring from the crowd as he stepped down from the stage, grabbed his bundle of wet clothes, left some cash on his table, and headed for the door. He heard Danny Bailey behind him back at the mike, picking up where he’d left off earlier and doing his best to get the crowd reengaged in his message, whatever the hell it was.

  Noah was nearly to the exit when he felt a hand touch his arm. He stopped and turned to see the woman who’d spoken earlier, Molly’s mother, standing there.

  “That was quite a speech you gave, and on such short notice,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Noah said. “I’ve got a gift. Look, I didn’t mean any disrespect—”

  “You don’t have to apologize to me.” Her face was kind, her eyes intelligent and alight with that same inscrutable glint that had hooked him so hopelessly during his brief time in her daughter’s company. “I think we might have more in common than you realize.”

  Behind him, Bailey was already midway into a spirited, modern paraphrase of a well-worn Patrick Henry speech. By the sound of it, the audience had fully recovered from Noah’s double dose of reality and was working itself into quite a lather again. Maybe it was the late hour, the evening-long buildup of alcohol and anger, or the now-obvious scattering of outsiders around the room who seemed to be acting in concert to fan the flames of the mob mentality—but whatever it was, things were getting ugly.

  Noah looked around for Molly but the audience was too thick to penetrate. Two men had stationed themselves in front of the door, in a stance that implied the way to the street was about to be closed.

  “Have you seen your daughter?”

  “I did a few minutes ago.”

  “I think we need to get out of here,” Noah said, taking the older woman by the arm. “Right now.” There was a glowing fire-exit sign on the wall to the rear of the place, and though there were probably other ways out, that seemed to be the easiest.

  It was slow going. Bailey’s booming speech and the occasional roar of the crowd in response drowned out all of Noah’s other thoughts except one: getting outside before whatever bad thing that was surely about to happen did happen.

  “Let’s stop kidding ourselves,” Bailey said. “We’ve done everything that could be done to avoid the storm that’s coming. Our voices have not been heard! The time for simply hoping for change and praying for peace is gone. If our government won’t answer our appeals and do what’s right, if they’ve forsaken their oath to defend the Constitution, then an appeal to arms and to the grace of God Almighty is all they’ve left us!

  “I ask you: If not now, when? When will we ever be stronger? Next week? Next year? Will we be stronger when they’ve taken our guns away, or when a cop or a paid government thug is standing on every corner enforcing the curfew? No! I say, if war is inevitable then let it come on our terms!”

  The exit door was almost in reach but Noah stopped short; there was still no sign of Molly. He’d let go of her mother as the two of them had worked their way through the wall-to-wall people, and he’d lost track of her as well.

  “There’s no longer any peace to be had!” Bailey shouted from the stage. “Whether you know it or not the war has already begun!”

  To describe the next few seconds as a blur would make it seem as if the ensuing events were jumbled together or indistinct, and they were far from that. They passed in something like slow motion, like those graceful shots of a drop of milk splashing into a cereal bowl or a rifle bullet cutting edge-to-edge through a playing card at twenty thousand frames per second. But the trade-off for all that visual clarity was a complete inability to act; Noah could see everything, but do nothing.

  A slate-gray pistol appeared in a man’s hand nearby—a man whom Molly had pointed out earlier as a newer member of her organization. The weapon was drawn down and level toward the stage. There was a flash, and the s
onic pressure of a firecracker or the popping of a paper bag too near his ear, and then another, over and over as the crowd surged away from the gunman. The rising sounds of panic, a shower of glass and white sparks as a spotlight shattered in its mount above the stage, the back door banging open, the rush of black-suited officers storming in, a sudden stinging odor like a mist of Tabasco and bug spray, a loud commotion at the far end of the room as another squad in riot gear burst in.

  Noah was caught up in the blind retreat of those around him, pushed back toward the center of the room. And there was Molly, maybe twenty feet away, held by her hair and crumpling to her knees, her left arm twisted high behind her by a roughneck the size of a linebacker. Noah heard a stifled cry and a repeating electric sound. He turned to see the big man he’d met earlier, Hollis was his name, stricken and helpless in a seizure on the floor, the barbs of a stun gun buzzing in his chest.

  From behind his tinted visor a nearby man-in-black raised his riot club, ready to cave in the skull of the helpless man at his feet.

  In this strange, slow procession of vivid snapshots, a random thought made its way back to him from earlier in the day. We stay mostly the same and then grow up suddenly, at the turning points. What came next would either go down as one of those dreaded defining moments, or as the final mistake of a bad night that would top any that had ever come before. It didn’t matter which; the die was already cast. Just because he spent his days strip-mining the vast gray zone between right and wrong didn’t mean he couldn’t tell the difference.

  Time resumed its proper pace, and he felt his will unfreeze. As the black truncheon swung down Noah reached up and caught the uniformed man by the wrist, stopping him cold with an unexpectedly steely grip toned over years with his personal trainer at the Madison Square Club. It’s true what they say: you just never know when all those pull-ups are going to come in handy.

  There was no struggle. The other man locked eyes with him, their faces a hand’s width apart. Perhaps the man was in the midst of a defining moment of his own. At first he looked surprised, and then incredulous, and then—despite the impressive array of armaments swinging from his belt and the three additional troopers already rushing to his rescue—he looked afraid.