165
Tom Clancy’s Power Plays
“Speaking of agendas,” she said, “I’d like to give you the chance to explain some of your own recent statements, which polls indicate the vast majority of white people and African-Americans find incendiary and frankly disturbing. You have in numerous speeches accused the federal government of flooding urban neighborhoods with narcotics and automatic firearms, specifically targeting high-school-age children in-this is a direct quote-‘a covert program to instigate their mass suicide-murder through the evils of violence and addiction.’ You also called for African-Americans to refrain from all transactions with white-owned businesses, withdraw from the democratic election process until a political party open only to black candidates and voters is established, and, I’m quoting you again now, ‘assume the license to make war upon our enemies and achieve a noncapitalist economic system,’ referring to the police as ‘a demonic army of persecution that must be brought to its knees by any means necessary,’ which seems to espouse the very violence that you acknowledge is devastating inner-city black youth. What’s still more controversial, you’re said to have begun echoing the separatist policies of the Black Panther movement in its earliest days, explicitly advocating …”
The partition of several states into an independent black territory, possibly in the South, that was absolutely what he’d been talking about at his campus engagements, though he’d known it to be about as achievable as an exodus of the people to Shangri-la on a giant magic carpet. But every so often, when he was in front of a crowd, something would kind of pop out of his mouth that caught their attention, just shook the room, you know, and when that happened, he’d take off im166
BIO-STRIKE
avising, get them more fired up, reasoning that part of job as an orator and motivator was to keep his Users from falling asleep in their seats, and moreover at it didn’t actually matter if some his declared goals way, way in the outfield, as long as he stuck to his eneral message. In his mind, he was like a kid making list, asking for twenty, fifty, a hundred different ssents for Christmas, figuring he’d be lucky to see en one or two of them … but also figuring it couldn’t ; to ask, because you never knew what might turn up the tree, all gift-wrapped and shiny. That was the fptung in life, you really never did know. If* Still, as Grover had sat in his office with the television from the big-time, number-one-rated network ews magazine rolling away, conscious that his inter- |Wew would be seen in millions of homes across the jfiountry, it had occurred to him that maybe he ought to jy/ease off some of his positions, soften his earlier com- jgjitents, take another deep breath and remember that he jjpfts supposed to be Reverend Nate Grover Lite.
And then, just as he was about to respond, he’d seen out-for-blood look in She Creature’s eyes, seen that was ready to get in his face again no matter what said, and all at once he flashed red hot with anger. Hj&nd he’d thought, What the fuck, give her what she