JESUS NATION SEX REBEL, mini-chapter 51

51. LUNCH WITH ESTHER

“I really admire you. Not least for going around with a young man. It seems like you’re mocking the Men of the Gospel, doesn’t it?”

Eve hadn’t even checked out the menu yet and she was already lathering Esther Todd with the loving attendance of a makeup artist slathering ointment on his favorite monster.

“At a certain level of society you’re more free to do what you really want,” replied Esther.

Eve smiled. That was what she wanted for herself. That’s where she could try out her idea of sexuality as a blessing from God instead of a trial. And help Rachel.

“How does the Bureau of Behavior Design and Management work? How do you introduce new policy?”

“Aha. It’s great deciding how to organize a whole society. You wouldn’t believe the discussions we have. We’re like scriptwriters. We write the scenarios. Give society an arc. A narrative for the society. A meta-narrative, into which we fit a series of mini-narratives. The best part is planning the news.”

“Planning the news?”

“The news is not what happens. The news is the story we decide to put on TV.”

“You pick the agenda. Obviously. Indeed.”

“No. We create the news. We don’t report it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Look, what’s the big story today?”

“Jeremiah Luther. He’s everywhere, isn’t he?”

“We script that.”

“What do you mean, you script it?”

“We organize his meetings and marches, structure them, then film them. He follows our script.”

“Are you telling me he’s just an actor? Heavens.”

“Sort of. He believes what he says, otherwise we wouldn’t have cast him, but we write the script of his movement.”

“That’s unbelievable.” It was. Wheels within wheels. Power worked behind things, creating its own obscurity, putting an appealing face on its hidden, naked, brutal charge.
“You won’t believe what we have planned for him. Much more amazing than you can imagine. We are going to keep the country riveted. Reality TV like never before.”

“But then what’s real and what isn’t?”

“Listen. First TV covered the news. Then they learned how to cover it as entertainment. Some people complained, but nobody minded. Now we create it from the bottom up as entertainment. I guess a few unpatriotic souls would complain if they knew, but I don’t think anybody would really mind.”

“You can’t create everything, can you? News is what happens, too.”

“It’s always been what you create. News people have always decided what the news should be. The news doesn’t decide by itself.”

“But when something big happens, then that’s the news focus, isn’t it?”

“Why are some scandals more newsworthy than others? Because the news people decide they’re newsworthy.”

“But aren’t news media the watchdogs of democracy?” Eve didn’t know where the old phrase sprang from. It sounded slightly treasonous.

“Please. They’ve never been.”

“What about Watergate?”

“What about Watergate? It was time to take Nixon down. If they hadn’t found Watergate, they’d have found something else. Remember, Nixon was not part of the natural elite. That’s why he was taken down so viciously. Clinton wasn’t part of the natural elite either, which explains why they got vicious enough to try and impeach him.”

“But there are things that happen objectively that are important. What about a war?”

“Only if your country is involved. There are wars going on now that you know nothing about in places like Africa where thousands of people get killed every day. But if our country has a little war that lasts a week with, say, Grenada, and three people get killed, you’ll hear about it, because the government will want you to hear about it, because governments start wars for political reasons, and they know that wars make them popular.”

“Wars are popular?”

“Leaders would never start wars if it made them unpopular. Bush 43 started the war in Iraq because he knew it would make him popular, and he could use that popularity to get his domestic agenda through.”

“He started it because he thought Saddam Hussein was a threat.”

“He was not that dumb. Saddam Hussein was no threat at all. A silly little country in the Middle East that we could fly over at will and bomb whenever we felt like it. Bush started that war because he wanted to get re-elected. He saw that with Margaret Thatcher’s little war in the Falklands. It made her hugely popular, in a country that wasn’t even as warlike as us. He knew that a president who starts a war would get re-elected. No other reason.”

Good heavens, this sounded like high treason.