“Simple story, right?”
“I like that you represented Wall Street with a trans person. That’s very open-minded, if slightly wishful thinking.”
“Artistic license. The point is that what I’ve just drawn is popular opinion, correct? The general consensus, agreed on by communists, and European socialists, and liberals who are afraid to describe themselves as such, and liberals who take pride in the term, and people who call themselves moderates, and people who call themselves apolitical, and Southern rednecks, and gun-toting libertarians, and God-fearing devotees of the Limbaugh radio hour, and the Gen Z mega-demo that’s coming to voting age as the boomers burn and fade. Anyone who’s not a billionaire knows that Wall Street’s the nemesis of our friend Joe Schmo, or Joe Hill, or Joe the Plumber, or Joe Mama, or whatever you want to call someone with a floating-rate mortgage on a depreciating property, and a job that, if it hasn’t already been made redundant, will be sometime in the next ten years. Even you believe in this reductive narrative.”
“My husband works in finance. I know it’s more complicated.”
“I didn’t say you don’t benefit. I didn’t say you can’t argue talking points about the trickle-down effects of corporate wealth or the way markets tend to self-correct, or Thomas Jefferson’s wet dream of an open-air flea market. What I said is that you believe it. In your hidden heart, you know you are complicit in the machinations of neoliberalism. The disenfranchisement of the middle class. The destruction of the working class. You are a scion of privilege. A basic bitch who buys a Rag & Bone dress at full retail, then tells her friends it was marked down. A person who convinces herself that by donating a small, untaxed portion of her yearly salary to Kickstarter campaigns that fund urban farming initiatives, the ultimate balance of her good deeds and destructive behaviors evens out. And yet still deep down, you know that you’re complicit.”
He wasn’t even out of breath.
I said, “These are things I’ve considered.”
“And even though you think hippies are dirty and hipsters are used and discarded douchebags, and homeless teen runaways are a blight on the glory that is Alphabet City, and even though you find fault in certain aspects of #Occupy, you don’t ultimately disagree that the system needs reimagining. So what do you do? You try not to think about it. You stay out of it. You tell your friends that you’re not interested in politics. That you don’t have a deep enough understanding of the situation to form a truly educated opinion. That, yes, your husband is a banker, but he’s a different kind of banker, the good kind of banker. A banker with a heart of gold and a wife of heart, and a Sunday kinda brunch-bloated love.”
“What’s your point?” I said.
“The point is that you’re not alone. There are a lot of people like you. People who were sickened by the camps at the border, and what happened with the pipeline, and what happened in Charleston, and what happened in Orlando, and what happened in Parkland, and what happened in El Paso. People who hashtag believe women, and hashtag me too, and hashtag it might as well be the heat death of the universe, dude, because time’s indubitably up. People in favor of pan-gender bathrooms, an assault weapons ban, a bigger education budget, less military spending, and more attention to climate change. And yet, they’re torn on the UBI because they like their pumpkin-spiced lives. There are a lot of people like you who are waiting for the right person to come along and tell them there’s nothing wrong with the way that they’re living these lives. Do you know the term psychic foreclosure? That’s what people want. A one-size-fits-all system of belief: no gray areas, no tricky ethical quandaries. License to live as you already are. That’s what we’re here to give. We’re here to tell them that just because they went to Wesleyan and smoke fat blunts of Kush and favor a Chinese sweatshop worker’s right to a fair and speedy lunch break, it doesn’t mean they have to go against their own fiscal interests. It doesn’t mean that socialism is the way forward. It doesn’t mean that the toothless meth smokers in Appalachian trailers deserve a percentage of their hard-earned salaries. It doesn’t mean that people like you should pay a six percent property tax on your refurbished brownstone so every bedsore-ridden inbred in southern Ohio can eat chicken-fried cheesecake while watching amateur wrestling on loop. Forget Joe the Plumber. How about Yelena the Trust Funded Yoga Instructor? That’s our demo.”
“Okay.”
I was trying to picture chicken-fried cheesecake. Lucas picked up the pen. He crossed out Wall Street and replaced it with #Occupy. He said, “Your job is to create that narrative.”
“My job is to create that narrative,” I echoed. It’s a tactic I learned early in my career. Repeating other people’s words makes it seem like you understand, that you’re on their side and submissive. “So you work for a bank?”
“No.”
“But someone with an interest in the Senate killing the bill?”
“This is bigger than a bill. It’s about giving people a sense of comfort. You’ve worked with lifestyle brands. Brands that tell people that if they buy a product they can live like the people in the ads. This is the same. We want people to feel like they can be the people they want to be. That they can find peace.”
“You’re a lobbyist?”
“For America.”
“What a line. You chose me because my husband works in finance. You knew I’d be sympathetic.”
“We chose you because you’re good. Your campaign for McDonald’s in India—Eat, Pray, Loving It!” He removed an ice cube from his drink with his fingers. He chewed the ice cube.
“Then why all the secrecy?” I said. “The motel, the project code name, the fact that we haven’t met any of your colleagues.”
“In a
