The Fires of Orc

Without a medium to create its form,

the news of the day does not exist.

Neil Postman

Lydia and I worked twelve-hour days together each day for the next week, through the weekend and into the late night hours. She worked from my office with her tablet at the small table across from my desk. We faced each other and worked in turns on project after project. She drafted, I revised, she proof-read and edited, I performed final checks and more and more text amassed, building an optimized archive of issue materials.

It was Lydia’s job, for the most part, to determine the candidate’s position on issues. She spent hours on the phone, laying out in complex detail the facts on both sides of policy considerations, outlining each party’s platform and whenever possible defining a center position that could appeal across party lines. She had extraordinary patience and repeated herself as often as necessary to include all parties and arrive at consensus, which ordinarily met with Markus’s approval. Occasionally, however, Markus had fixed opinions about which he would not waver.

I overheard her side of one conversation concerning the subject of school vouchers.

“Yes sir, I agree. All things being equal I think voters favor choice in matters affecting their children. But in this instance we’re not talking about choice as much as we’re talking about funding…”

“Yes sir. The thing about choice, though, is that voters who strongly favor school choice are almost entirely committed to the Republicans, and…”

“Well I think we are trying to pull voters from both camps, but about reaching the middle and speaking to the uncommitted, I’m just not sure that…”

“I think the concern though, sir, on the part of undecided voters is that while school choice in and of itself is a fine idea, with funding tied to performance, allowing high-performing children to flee low-performing schools means sentencing those schools to poverty…”

“I do understand sir. Very clearly. I’ll make sure we put it exactly as you just said.”

I marveled at her poise in handling obvious disagreements over basic principle. Lydia was anti-voucher. Markus should have been. But when all was said and done, a pro-voucher position was formulated and added to the formal platform. We coated it in the rhetoric of “individual freedoms” and “the fundamental rights of parents.” I doubt most voters could read through the smoke-screen, thankfully. But obfuscation aside, Markus’s position on the issue would be the worst thing possible for under-performing schools in the country’s poorest districts. Even I objected, but only to Lydia, and she just shrugged.

“It’s what he believes. I don’t agree with him, but you have to admire his standing on principle,” she counseled.

For what it’s worth, I have never admired standing on principle just for the sake of standing. Standing on a wrong principle just makes you immovably wrong, and wrong and immovable is the worst kind of wrong there is. Fortunately, however, there were very few such issues on which either Lydia or I differed with Markus. What few differences there were didn’t amount to much. Almost right down the line, on every major theme that would feature in the campaign, we found ourselves anticipating Markus’s position and concurring with it.

It was a magical environment. It was as if we were scripting a new government and a new country, replete with foreign and domestic policies that abjured the excess and partisanship built up over centuries of cronyism, approaching each real issue with common sense and equity. It was the purest, most hopeful time of my life.

And above it all hovered Lydia. How the light did love her! It bent around her, cradling her, gentle on the edge of her orbit. She moved as if buoyed by space itself, light on small feet, sweeping, dance-like, enthralling.

But about the work, there was one real problem with Markus, one that might make issues like the school-voucher falderal a bit of a mess. Markus was a fifty-year-old bachelor with no children. Over the years he had kept the company of a string of starlets and had graced the covers of gossip rags in their presence. By 2028 America was a licentious realm, but it remained to be seen if its people would elect a middle-aged playboy to lead them. Had it been up to me, we’d have steered carefully clear of family matters entirely. But Markus weighed in on such matters and our position papers included many an opinion I wished he had kept to himself.

Markus favored portable school vouchers and the right to spend them at public or private accredited institutions.

Markus unreservedly supported plural marriage equality.

Markus believed a woman’s right to choose was a right guaranteed by her right to privacy and that privacy did in fact reside in other rights conferred by the constitution.

Markus opposed parental notification requirements for pregnant teens.

Markus believed in a single-payer healthcare system with credits for those who opted into private coverage.

Markus favored a flat tax with no deductions and no exemptions, including no dependent child credits.

Markus promoted a plan requiring two years of mandatory federal service, civilian or military, for all youth upon reaching their eighteenth birthday.

Aside from the voucher issue, I was personally aligned with my candidate’s views, as was Lydia, but I had real concerns about certain of his positions given his unmarried, childless status. I brought it up to Lydia one afternoon.

“Could we talk about the bachelor elephant in the room for a minute?” I asked.

“Fire away,” she quipped, turning in her chair to face me.

I loved how she spun in her chair, the effortlessness, how she twisted in light and color, a kaleidoscopic wonder, prurient in her elegant innocence. I had no doubt my intentions were obvious. I don’t think my words betrayed them but I can’t be sure. It was long ago and I was helplessly smitten.

“I’m just thinking that being a bachelor is a potentially serious problem. Do you not agree?”

“I haven’t thought much about it, but yes, I think it could be a problem. I might not think it’s as serious a problem as you do, but a garden variety problem, sure.”

“And it doesn’t worry you?”

“No,” she said. “But apparently it worries you.”

“You’re damn right it worries me. How are we going to handle it?”

“Handle what?” she quizzed.

“The fact that he’s fifty and hasn’t settled down.”

“Oh my God,” she exclaimed. “I think I might know something you don’t!”

“I find that doubtful,” I said with a half-smile, “but please do enlighten me, if you can.”

“You think Markus is a product, don’t you?”

I shifted, crossing my arms chest high, leaning back pompously in my chair, “Well isn’t he? I think he’s a product and I’m trying to sell him to as many customers as possible.”

“I’ll tell you what I think,” she said. “I think you’re instincts are uncanny and I think you might become the most influential electoral mind in this country, but I think you’re still stuck in the sales business. Tom Markus is a product hypothetically but not actually. He’s not a pill or a video game or a soft drink or a sun screen. He’s who he is. You can make a product be anything you say it is. But with a person, especially a person like Markus, you have to work with what you’ve got. You can’t make him perfect; you can only make him as good as he can be.”

She could certainly hold her own. “Okay,” I said, “but don’t you think we should be prepared? Shouldn’t we work up a statement just in case it comes up?”

“Absolutely not,” she answered with stern, gorgeous countenance. “Have I told you that in 2022 while I was at Grogan I interned on the Maxine Beatty Senate campaign?”

“Didn’t Maxine Beatty lose?” I asked.

“Yes, but that’s not my point.”

“So you’re zero-for-one. Do please go on.”

“Shall I?”

“Yes do.” I noted the irritation in her voice.

“Anyway, the campaign manager in that race told me something I haven’t forgotten. He said, ‘Don’t talk about anything that isn’t already being talked about.’”

“And what kind of advice is that, precisely?”

“If you’ll let me explain, perhaps you can understand,” she said peevishly.

“Please explain,” I relented.

“So far I am the only person you’ve told about your concern. That means two of us know and that’s one too many. Markus’s marital status has not been mentioned by any opponent or any member of his campaign. If you bring it up, you occasion it into existence. You’re proposing to reify a hypothetical and that’s never good. We shouldn’t act concerned about something we’re concerned about. We should ignore it.”

“So we ignore it. And then what? What happens when it comes up?”

“If it comes up,” she emphasized, “then Markus can be righteously indignant about it. You know the rumors about Bradley’s extra-marital carousing. He’s not going anywhere near the subject. And Smith is on his third marriage. If he’s dumb enough to bring it up, we can say Markus is waiting because he takes his vows seriously.”

“Yeah, that’s a good point. But what about the voters? What if they have questions we’re just not hearing about?”

“I think you should give the voters more credit,” she replied. “The major party candidates are picking the low-hanging fruit, died-in-the-wool partisans. We’re going after tough-minded, independent thinkers, the kind of voters who aren’t interested in red herrings and sleight-of-hand non-issues. If we lose this election by one vote and there’s a single voter out there who would have voted for Tom Markus if only he was married, I’ll buy you a steak dinner.”

“Lydia,” I said, “I think you’re the smartest person in this campaign. I appreciate you talking me out of a mistake.”

“That’s my job,” she said. “You should know that. You gave it to me.”

I was smitten before. I was smattered after that exchange. In fifty years since that afternoon I have met no woman so complete, so much a woman, so much herself.

That evening, Markus took to the airwaves. It all began oddly. There was a musical intro with a short video, highlights from the candidate’s early life and a brief account of his impressive career, first under his father’s tutelage and then as the President, Chairman, CEO and majority stock-holder of Quark. There were cut-aways of Markus in the Third World, Markus in the community, Markus in children’s hospitals and everywhere else he could sate his philanthropic thirst. The video ended and the scene shifted to Markus himself, live, at a nondescript podium before a black-and-green backdrop. He spoke.

My fellow Americans, I have purchased this time tonight because I want to be your president and you deserve to know the man who hopes to win your confidence. I can’t come to each of your homes, though I wish I could, and I can’t shake three hundred fifty million hands, though if time permitted I certainly would. What I can do is give you an hour of my time, which is less than you deserve, but more than you have gotten from candidates in the past. We have fifty-five minutes together from this moment during which I want you to hear from me, directly, comprehensively, why I believe my plan is best for America and why I’m seeking your support. I want you to hear directly from me the actual scope and content of my vision for this country. I want you to hear it before it gets distorted and misrepresented by my opponents, as it inevitably will. You deserve to know what I think and what I propose to do and you also deserve to know how I propose to do it.

“So far so good,” I said to Lydia, who was watching with me in the office.

“Indeed,” she said. “Not bad.”

There are those who say I’m an upstart, an outsider, an interloper. They say I haven’t spent enough time in Washington. That might be true, but I’ll tell you something else that’s true: I have spent enough time in the real world to know that Washington doesn’t know everything.

“I bet you wish you’d written that,” she said.

“I’d have written it better,” I joked. Of course I wished I had written it.

I’ve heard the speculators and the detractors who say I’m not ready to be president.

“Oh why would he say that?” I wondered aloud.

Lydia ignored me.

I think what they must mean by that is that I’m not ready to play by their rules, or follow their customs, or play their party games, or overlook what’s wrong in order to maintain the status quo and I confess, if that’s what they mean, then no, I’m not ready to be president. But I’ll tell you what I am ready for, I’m ready to change the rules that need changing, I’m ready to break with their customs when those customs don’t serve the people’s interests, I’m ready to face what’s wrong and challenge the old guard. I’m ready to be the least popular man in Washington if it means I’m doing the work you sent me there to do.

“Okay,” I said. “That was good.”

He went on and spelled out his position on a host of issues. On the Middle East he said:

I believe we must maintain a strong and credible force that can and will defend basic human rights around the world. But I also believe that when you are wronged you should ask what you might have done to give offense. Our policy in the Middle East has been lopsided for decades, tilting in favor of oil interests and campaign donations. The overwhelming majority of Middle Eastern people, Arabs and non-Arabs, Muslims, Christians, Jews and millions of others, are peace-loving citizens of countries struggling to take their rightful place in the world. Antagonizing those people through perpetual interference in their affairs, that’s not a sound policy. Neither is the thinly veiled rhetoric of hatred and division that masks itself as strength in the face of terror. The fundamental pillars of all beliefs and moral codes include charity, decency and fairness. Islam is no exception. The Muslim world is a friend waiting to be made. We do ourselves no favors by making an enemy of that potential friend.

I popped, “Why in the hell would he say that?”

“Because it’s the truth,” Lydia scolded.

“But it’s a campaign, not a political science lecture. Why mention Islam?”

Lydia shrugged in irritation at my interruption.

About Social Security Markus said:

The Social Security system is not broken. The only thing wrong with Social Security is that it can’t defend itself against political opportunists who raid its coffers to pay for their agendas here and now rather than leaving the trust fund as it was intended, to pay for your needs down the road. We can fix what’s wrong with Social Security with the swipe of a pen, by cutting it out of the Federal revenue budget where it never should have been put in the first place. No president and no congress should be authorized to spend your savings.

“Genius,” I exclaimed.

He went on down the list and eventually arrived at the issue of a running mate.

I know it’s unconventional to announce a running mate with thirteen months to go before an election. However, I believe you deserve to know everything about my intentions. I don’t want to ask for your blind trust. I want you to know what you’re signing on for. The vice presidency has proven to be a critical position at various times in this country’s history and I propose to use that office as it should be used by tasking my vice president with a hands-on role, as my Chief Operating Officer, overseeing many of the day-to-day affairs of a policy-and-vision-driven administration in which each team member pulls his or her weight. I’m going to ask a lot of my vice president and tonight I am proud and genuinely excited to introduce to you a woman who enjoys my complete trust and deep admiration, Christine Brown.

“Wow,” I muttered. “Now that’s a coup.”

Christine Brown began her life in government as a low-level staffer with the Department of Housing and Urban Development and moved rapidly through the ranks of that Department, followed by positions with Labor, Justice, and Health and Human Services. At the age of thirty-eight she was appointed Deputy Secretary of State, a post she held through two Secretaries. In 2026, Bradley sent her to Israel as a Special Envoy to mediate talks between the Israeli government and the Palestinian authority. Those talks produced the historic Jerusalem Accord, which finally solidified Palestinian statehood. The infant nation of Palestine was built on an agreement written by Christine Brown. The administration building at the Palestinian University in Gaza featured a portrait of Brown above the inscription, “For love of peace and progress.”

Brown had never belonged to any political party. She had been courted by both but had, until that night, eschewed all invitations to seek elected office. She was a woman whose entire adult life was a matter of public record and completely without blemish. Any candidate would have wanted her and we got her.

I also want to introduce six members of my future cabinet. These men and women are public servants of rare distinction and among the most renowned experts in their respective fields. They are each sacrificing a great deal to come aboard this campaign. They have taken time away from lucrative careers and have committed to spending much of the next year away from family, under the microscope of a closely scrutinized election season that will cost them their privacy and perhaps their patience. But they have committed to joining me as a team, pulling together to make the theory of good governance a living, working reality.

For Secretary of State he put forward Maxine Levitt, a former Democratic Senator from New Hampshire, who had served for eighteen years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, including six years as its Chair. Levitt declined to run for a fourth term three years earlier to be with her husband who was dying of Alzheimer’s disease. Her frank and open discussions about her experience with that loss had been featured in numerous interviews and articles. She was loved on both sides of the Senate aisle, a stateswoman of rare stature.

As his Secretary of Defense, Markus introduced Carlos Miranda, the recently retired Army Chief of Staff and lifelong Republican who referred to tanks and aircraft carriers as LSMTs, short for Large Slow-Moving Targets. Miranda’s doctrine called for “millions of small units; not hundreds of big ones.” He had overseen the operation that reunited the Ukraine without a shot being fired, an embarrassment that eventually sent the Russian president into exile.

Markus introduced his Secretary of the Treasury, Piers Kegel, a Nobel Laureate known for his scathing critique of Friedman-styled neo-cons. He had no lack of criticism for mainstream Democrats who thought the solution to all problems was a new bureaucracy, but he saved his most venomous polemic for supply-siders who, he alleged, “argue in essence that we should tax poverty as an incentive to get rich.”

Markus ran down the list, presenting exceedingly well-qualified prospective appointees to head the Departments of Labor, Education and Energy. There were nine posts still to fill and he promised he would name his nominees as soon as possible.

In closing he spoke to the camera in tight close-up, eyes locked with viewers.

I know that many of you wonder what I must be like in real life. I’m not unaware of the stereotypes and assumptions. I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth…

“Oh fuck!” I hollered. “Please don’t talk about this…”

“Damn it,” she said, “May I please listen to this?”

Actually, I’m a lot like most of you. I love my country. I love the opportunities it provides for so many people who would find those opportunities nowhere else. I love that my country is a symbol of strength throughout the world and that it has been willing, time and time again, to defend the cause of liberty when called upon. I love Americans. I respect our old people and I cherish our children. I celebrate the diversity that is a source of our strength. I respect our traditions and I am inspired by our pioneering spirit and our eagerness to challenge convention. I am in every way a proud American.

But then there is a very big difference between me and the rest of you. Few of you will ever have the lifetime security that comes with great fortune. I wish that weren’t so. I wish that the privileges I have enjoyed in life were available to all of you, and to your children. I wish that they could experience all the things I was so blessed to experience in my own childhood. I cannot, unfortunately, make life as easy for your children as it has been for me.

“And now he’s talking about children?! God damn it Lydia I told you. I fucking told you!”

“Seriously,” she seethed. “Let him finish. You don’t even know where he’s going with this.”

Well there’s one thing I can do. You might already know but if you don’t, you deserve to know – I have no heirs. I am an only child and I have no children of my own. I own stock currently valued at over eighty-five billion dollars and it will be of no use to me in a matter of time. I have lived fifty years and I hope I live another fifty. But even if I do, there is no reason for me to leave the world with more money than I need and more than I deserve.

That’s why earlier today I signed documents to create a living trust that will provide for the transfer of my estate upon my death. I have placed my complete earthly holdings in trust and when I pass those holdings will become the irrevocable property of a foundation with a board of directors appointed from the faculties of fifty public universities, one from each state. The board of directors will control Quark Metrics and will administer the company as guardians of the public trust, for nonprofit purposes. When the company’s current patents expire, they will enter the public domain. Quark will not seek to renew exclusive rights to any of its advances. The future work of the company will be in the public interest and its holdings will be the common property of the people of the United States, employed for the benefit of people around the world.

Like I said, I can’t do everything for your children that I wish I could. I can’t lower every bar that blocks their paths and I can’t right every wrong they will encounter. I know you all work hard every day to help give them a fair start in life. I had a head start. I did not earn it. It came to me by the luck of birth. I can’t share that luck but I can give back the privilege I enjoy by leaving that privilege for the good of others. I’m doing this because I believe you deserve it.

“Oh my,” whispered Lydia.

“Yeah,” I said, “I didn’t see that coming.”

“So what were we saying about his being a bachelor?”

“You have my permission,” I told her, “to tell me anytime henceforth to shut up. But you’re wrong about one thing.”

“And what’s that?

“He is a product. He’s the best product I ever sold.”

We worked through the night, feverishly. The next morning we ordered signs and brochures. We finally had a slogan.

Markus 2028 – You deserve him.