The Fires of Orc

The right to swing my fist ends

where the other man’s nose begins.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Monday following Markus’s nationwide coming out party, I received a memo with the subject line, Guidelines and limits for referring to opposing candidates. I forwarded it to Lydia and awaited her opinion on its content before expressing my own. The salient points in the memo were:

When referring to an opposing candidate, refer only to actual matters of record. Cite opponents’ positions with direct quotations referencing the original context.

Do not address matters of speculation about opponents’ future plans, unless those plans are an expressed part of an opponent’s position that can be cited consistent with #1 above.

Decline to answer any question or make any statement regarding purely personal matters or any issues that are either a) subjective or b) matters of speculation regarding opponents’ personal lives or beliefs.

When expressing disagreement with or opposition to any position or policy espoused by either opponent, explain the extent of the disagreement but acknowledge any degree of partial agreement. Few ideas are entirely bad.

Disavow and disclaim affiliation or agreement with any political advertisement from any action committee or other interest group other than opponents’ actual campaigns.

Clearly express this campaign’s commitment to honesty, sincerity and positivity and refuse any invitation to engage in indirect negative campaigning.

If asked by the media for any speculation that would violate any of the foregoing, answer that “The Markus campaign will not address matters that distract from the real issues confronting the country.” Be open to discussing any policy or position, but do not answer questions about either opponent that are not based in documented, historical fact.

In time we came to call it the Seven Points Memo. It was a summation of Markus’s broad principles for campaigning cleanly. Leaked to the press (I couldn’t resist), it became a sensation. But that was a few days later. On the morning I received it I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. My instinct told me it was politically naïve. But in its naïve innocence it might have some utility. So I waited while Lydia read it.

“Okay. So what do you want me to tell you?” she asked.

“I guess to start with, do you think he’s serious?”

“I don’t know why you would ask me that,” she said condescendingly. “It’s consistent with everything he has said so far. He wants to run an honest, open, transparent campaign and by doing so, he’s distinguishing himself from his competition.”

“I get that part,” I replied. “But what about when it gets down and dirty? We’re not supposed to actually keep our hands clean for the next year are we?”

“I think the memo speaks for itself,” she said, “and yes. I think we’re supposed to keep our hands clean. Both of our opponents have lengthy public records. Both of those records are littered with compromises and reversals and some outright betrayals. There’s no need to get into the mud when the mere facts are damning enough.”

“Granted,” I said, “but how long do you think we can remain righteous and run against their records before one or another of them points out that we have no record to run on?”

She sighed with exasperation. “Don’t you see though, that’s part of the point. He doesn’t have a public record so he’s running on what he does have.”

“What, his good looks?”

“No,” she scolded, “he has his word, and the best way to get the people to accept it is to keep it. If we can’t be true to our word for a year, they shouldn’t vote for him.”

“Oh for crying out loud,” I said. “You say that like you mean it.”

She objected, “I do mean it and I’m sorry to think you’re so jaded that you can’t see why it will work. The people aren’t fooled by scary prognostications ‘Vote for Smith and you’ll live in a militarized theocracy,’ or ‘Vote for Bradley and your kids will all be gay and poor and enslaved by Muslim terror groups.’ Nobody falls for that sort of thing.”

“They most certainly do,” I said. “Every four years both sides go nasty and melodramatic and every time the nastier, more melodramatic side wins.”

“That’s true,” she conceded, “but only because there’s no other choice. We can safely assume that both Smith and Bradley will get dirty, and when they do and we don’t, we’ll be the side whose word matters.”

“Hang on,” I said. “Suppose there’s a twelve-round fight and it goes the distance with both fighters getting dirty, hitting below the belt the whole way along. When the final bell rings, the judges aren’t going to award the victory to the referee.”

“That’s a silly analogy,” said Lydia. “We’re not a referee. We’re in the fight too. But we don’t have to hit below the belt. We’re better than that.”

“Fine,” I said, “But what do we do when someone hits us below the belt?”

“That’s what a cup is for,” she said.

I laughed, “What do you know about cups.”

“Nothing,” she snickered, “I’m just trying to stick with your chosen metaphor. Why do men do that anyway?”

“Do what?”

“Take every serious issue in life and turn it into either sports or war?”

“I guess because sports and war are both about winning.”

“And is that what you think life is about?”

“I guess not, but it’s damn sure what a presidential campaign is about.”

“I’ll give you that, but neither Smith nor Bradley is going to punch Tom Markus in the balls.”

“They will metaphorically,” I insisted.

“A blow to the metaphorical balls doesn’t actually hurt you people, does it?” she asked.

“You people?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I meant Male Americans.”

“Forget about boxing and nut shots and all that. What are we supposed to do with this memo?”

“Well let me see,” she said. “Up until now, have you been called upon to render an opinion about Smith or Bradley? Has anyone asked you to comment publicly about their personal lives or issues outside their public record and stated position.”

“Well no…”

She cut me off, “Right. In fact, you deliberately stay out of the public eye and the campaign doesn’t even acknowledge the extent of your involvement with strategy, position statements or anything else. You fly completely below the radar. So for now, I suppose I’d say let’s keep doing what we’re doing. We write the message and the message is working. Everything you’ve done so far is working; even the god-awful black-and-green is working. Don’t worry about the dirt. That’s their thing. Our thing is solid and you’re very good at it.”

I puffed up a bit, “You think it’s that simple?”

“I’m pretty sure it is,” she said, “but I know that’s not very dramatic. Maybe Sun Tzu could make is more inspiring.”

“I’m positive he could.”

To this day I disagree with Lydia. I could see her point and I went along with it. But if you ask me, doing the right thing is only worthwhile if someone sees you do it. Of course the great thing about a presidential campaign is that everyone sees you do everything, so the more we ran a clean campaign and the more we were seen to do so, the more doing the right thing became doing the smart thing. We didn’t need to hit people in the nuts. We had more skill than that.

Lydia was right about something else – the edict to play nice didn’t really affect my job one way or another. All I had to do was sell Tom Markus and doing that without slinging mud at the opposition was quite the simplest way to go about business. In fact, I took the memo to an extent Markus might not have foreseen. I unleashed my team of minions on the internet archives of both major party candidates with orders to ferret out their actual records – votes cast, bills endorsed, statements made – and we launched a fact-check page on our own site to address claims made by both sides. We corrected distortions and defended facts. In time, our page became an authoritative information exchange that was quoted in the major media, making us the referee in a heavyweight fight who the judges could conscientiously vote for.

When Smith accused Bradley of being weak on defense, we pointed out that Bradley’s intervention in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was the first direct U.S. military action in sub-Saharan Africa in more than thirty years, an intervention that saved hundreds of thousands of lives and gave that country’s government the first year of stability it had known since the 1990s. We uploaded a statement from Markus:

During this campaign I will express disagreement with President Bradley on many issues. But about one issue I must express not only my agreement, but also my admiration. The decision to commit troops to the Congo was politically risky, but for a nation with half the defense budget of the entire world, there is no more compelling case for the use of might than to stop genocide and bring peace to people stricken with two generations of war, poverty and pestilence. The attacks on President Bradley’s commitment to U.S. military strength are unfounded and unfair. This campaign will not share in accusations that prey upon pubic fears and replace truth with rhetoric. Neither will we question the current president’s commitment to a strong U.S. military and its courageous men and women.

Then when Bradley accused Smith of trying to reduce veterans’ healthcare benefits, we pointed out that the Smith bill actually gave veterans more access to healthcare, not less. And again Markus addressed the issue.

Where the rights of our veterans are concerned, there is no room for gamesmanship or playing fast and free with the facts. Senator Smith’s bill will allow veterans with private health coverage in addition to VA benefits to access the physician of their choice through their own health plan with the VA covering out-of-pocket costs and other expenses normally borne by the patient. The plan will not only give veterans a wider range of healthcare options, it will also reduce demand for costly VA services and treat veterans the same as their peers in the civilian workforce. Senator Smith’s plan is a win-win and I urge President Bradley to sign the bill when it reaches his desk.

And so, through the magnanimity of fact checking, Markus aligned himself with anything good from either opponent’s platform and distanced himself from anything slimy. It wasn’t a tactic that might win over many of the Smith or Bradley base, but we weren’t going to get them anyway. For more independent, sensible voters, we were becoming a viable alternative to the lesser of two evils. Correcting the historical record gave Markus a credibility he hadn’t earned through prior public service. It allowed him to demonstrate his understanding of real issues, real timelines and the real ideological divide that kept the two entrenched camps in Washington spitting across the fence at one another without accomplishing anything.

All that was fine and it worked even better than anticipated. Between his bump following the one-hour telecast, a subsequent boost from the new look and literature, interest sparked by the leaked Seven Points Memo and traffic generated by the fact-check page, we had climbed to a solid twenty percent in national polls, while both Smith and Bradley had slipped to about thirty. That left twenty percent of likely voters to fight over and about them I still was not convinced that clean and upright was the way to go.

Truthfully, I was irked by Lydia’s remarks. Why do you people always do that? she had asked, meaning why do men always treat life like it’s a fight. I suppose that’s a fair question and I suppose we do tend to approach most things from that angle. I suppose women, on the other hand, approach life like it’s a potluck social. Everyone bring what you can and we’ll have a feast, which is fine until the bully from up the block crashes the party and steals all the potato salad. I suppose women would wag their fingers, call him rude and start chopping more potatoes.

Well I’d sooner tear down his house and bring back the potato salad plus whatever else he has in the refrigerator.

They say and eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind, but I say turning the other cheek just gets both sides of your face slapped.

I played by the rules. I followed the Seven Points Memo. I kept Markus above the fray and I relied on our commitment to accuracy and clarity to distinguish us from the competition. But I kept an eye on their belt lines. When the time came, I was willing to punch a guy in the nuts. I kept my minions working away at the weak spots, Theowulf in particular. I let him know in no uncertain terms that the Seven Points did not apply to him. A crusher has to be remorseless.

***

“Old Timer, how many languages do you speak?”

Oh for the love of… “What?”

“Besides English, I mean. How many languages do you know?”

The Landlord doesn’t speak one language properly and he wants to know about other languages?

“I was once fluent in two languages and competent in two others,” I tell him, “but that was long ago. Today I’m fine in English and Spanish. That’s all.”

“But you could learn other languages if you wanted to?”

“No better than you could,” I say.

“I don’t know about that,” he says, scratching his neck stubble. “I don’t learn new things so well.”

“It hardly matters,” I say. “For us, in this time and place, there are two languages and every day the two grow closer and closer together. In fifty years there will be one language, Spanglish, sufficient for our entire hemisphere.”

“I think that’s sad,” he says.

“Why so?” I ask.

“Well, you know, with all the different languages there used to be, there must have been so many different ways to say things, and so many different ways to understand things. It’s just sad to think all that would go away and leave us with just one way to talk about the world. What if our ideas aren’t big enough? What if some other language would let us say what we feel with more power? What if we could have some idea in another language but that language dies? Then the idea could never happen and we would all lose.”

“Perhaps,” I say, “but then not all ideas are good ideas, are they?”

“I’m not sure about that,” says The Landlord. “I think actually maybe there’s no such thing as a bad idea. Sure there are wrong ideas but that doesn’t mean they’re bad. The wrong ideas just help point you to the right ones. You never really know a thing is right until you turn it over a few times and look at it from all angles. Wrong ideas show themselves and they help you see what’s right. So yes, I think all ideas in their own way are good ideas, even if they’re wrong.”

“You could have a point there,” I admit, “but you might be misunderstanding how languages work. There’s no inventory of magic words in any language. Languages don’t limit what you’re able to think, they just set the rules about how you express it. I promise, there is nothing I might ever have said in English that would be any more profound in French, even if it sounded prettier.”

“But that matters,” he says.

“How so?”

“Don’t you see?” he explains. “If it’s more beautiful, then it’s better. How a thought sounds is just as important as anything else.”

I shake my head. “No, I think thoughts are by themselves worthless. What counts is what we do with our thoughts. Actions matter much more than words.”

“Right,” he insists, “and beautiful thoughts inspire more action than ugly ones. That’s why it would be a shame to have just one way to say things. We might never be able to act on the beautiful ideas that died with all those other languages.”

I sit silently, Ulysses unopened on my lap. Could I have learned something on this day of days? Might this miserly inn keeper’s munificent philosophy have stirred some insight? I would scarcely have thought, descending that twisting, tilting peril of a staircase hours ago that my outlook on life could be affected by this foul little ill-favored man.

In time I speak. “I think you might be onto something.”

“Ah, it’s probably nothing,” he shrugs. “I just think about stuff. Mostly it’s a waste of time. I wouldn’t know a good idea if I had one.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” I tell him. “Even a broken clock is right twice a day.”