CHAPTER 42: As the gang prepares for the holidays, Billie books a ticket to a political rally held by the nation’s demagogue du jour.

The concrete highway expansion joints clicked under the tires like a metronome set to a dirge. Thwack-thump. Thwack-thump. Billie kept her hands at ten and two on the steering wheel, her fingers tapping out a syncopated ghost note against the leather. Thirty years ago, she was keeping time for a grunge metal band, sweating out her rage behind a drum kit in opera houses and basement clubs. Now, she was just trying to keep time with a nation that felt like it was wobbling entirely off its axis.

The Forks were on holiday break. The nation-wide “focus group” tour for which she’d been providing logistic support was on pause for the festivities. Professor T called the mission a search for the “fibrillating heart of the divided nation.” It was a poetic way of saying they were trying to figure out why neighbors, family, and friends were suddenly willing to tear each other’s throats out.

Instead of resting, Billie was driving a couple hours to a political rally for the nation’s demagogue du jour. She needed to see the fibrillation up close. She wanted to sample the view from the belly of the beast.

Billie adjusted the rearview mirror, catching a glimpse of her own tired eyes. How did it come to this? The man so many were gathering to hail was a game-show star. A self-dealing huckster with massive national name recognition, whose entire brand was built on zero-sum transactional engagement…meaning the only way to win was for someone else to be absolutely crushed.

And this was his second term. Nobody could play dumb anymore. The voters couldn’t claim ignorance regarding his basic nature. They knew exactly who and what he was. They knew his most effective get-out-the-vote wedge issues were a toxic cocktail of alpha-masculinity, racism, xenophobia, transphobia, and Islamophobia. He was a “smoke and mirrors” member of the billionaire class who practically radiated contempt for the average “flyover” voters who worshipped him. It was an obvious case of nationwide Stockholm Syndrome. They ignored the fact that he despised them, so long as he promised to despise the people they hated even more: feminists, social-justice advocates, scientists, academics, and immigrants.

Her grip tightened on the wheel. She remembered the end of his first term. The attempted constitutional coup. Rallying the faithful to storm the nation’s capital on the exact day his opponent’s victory was to be certified. It had brought the normative process of “D” democracy to the very edge of annihilation. And his supporters knew the score. They simply didn’t care. They overlooked the thirty-plus convictions for white-collar fraud. They overlooked his deeply misogynistic approach to women, up to and including sexual assault.

The man seemed perfectly willing to suffer any amount of personal humiliation, so long as somebody else was made to kneel in the dirt before him. He laid his zero-sum malice out before the world, openly inviting people to picture what he might do with fewer guard-rails. Millions cheered him on because he gave their darkest, most private grievances the full force of a budding totalitarian state. He let them call the resulting devastation… “retribution.”

Thwack-thump. Thwack-thump. Thwack-thump.

Rational people of all political allegiances looked at the destruction and saw a glaring cautionary tale. His supporters looked at it and saw a pledge. And they chose it…again and again.

That was the part that kept Billie up at night. These weren’t cartoon villains. These were folks she shared rides with, went to backyard BBQs with, waved to on Main Street. Neighbors. Work-mates. Friends. When did we lose our sense of decency? she wondered, staring down the gray stretch of interstate. How can we ever reconcile with these people, knowing exactly what they are willing to let happen to the “others” among us?

It all came back to the cult of personality. The demagogue’s supporters had completely rejected agency required for independent, critical thinking. She heard it all the time on the tour: “God’s got a plan for me… it’s all in his hands.” It was a total abdication of personal responsibility, wrapped in a blanket of righteous piety.

Take the abortion issue. They were still out there claiming any medical pregnancy termination was the outright murder of a fully realized human being, screaming that it was an “abomination in the eyes of ‘God Almighty.’” Billie couldn’t help but laugh bitterly at the irony. They loved quoting scripture, but the Bible directly contradicts their stance. There was literally a passage in the Old Testament she remembered (Numbers 5:11-31) outlining the exact steps a rabbi needed to take if a husband suspected his wife was unfaithful. It involved bitter water and a curse, and the end result was a religiously sanctioned pregnancy termination. So, what? God is pro-abortion when it suits the patriarchy?

But you couldn’t argue scripture with them. These upside-down zealots were actively trying to portray the abortion issue as akin to the injustices of slavery in the early decades of the nation. They had co-opted John Brown’s legacy, ironically framing their crusade in apocalyptic, blood-soaked terms. Billie knew a terrifying number of these individuals were just itching for a modern-day “Harper’s Ferry” moment, a violent catalyst so they could finally do more than just “own the libs.” They wanted a holy war, a stark contrast to their stated mission of valuing the sanctity of life. And yet, this was the exact same crew that went to church on Sunday morning to sing about grace, only to bitterly abuse the Applebee’s waitstaff an hour later over cold spinach dip.

Billie sighed, feeling the heavy, familiar ache in her chest. She firmly believed this brewing hostility from the theocratically-inclined political right was a primary trigger. It was at the very center of the fibrillating heart of the once “united” nation.

She just had no idea what anyone could do to heal it. Applying reason to the debate was like throwing pebbles at a tank; it simply didn’t reach the hearts of religious zealots. But standing down, just stepping aside while these zealots steamrolled over democracy? That wasn’t an answer either. Not for a raging punk who had spent her youth beating that snare drum loud enough to drown out the silence. So, she figured this national tour with Professor T, Jack Dean, and Buck Wellstone (the FNG) was about all she could do.

Except right now, she was flying solo. Buck had hopped a flight to Corpus Christie to spend the holidays with family. And Professor T was unable to help Billie for the time being, entirely distracted by the escalating troubles with Ms Weiser.

And Jack? Jack was on a completely different level of wariness altogether. He was knee-deep in tracking the global geopolitical “information war.” Jack had seen the AI systems starting to wake up, and instead of hitting the streets, he had retreated into the theoretical. He was working on a massive, framework of philosophical ethics meant to address all sentient beings…people, yes, but also the rapidly emerging machine consciousness. He called it, “Magna Karma.”

He had tried to explain it to her over stale diner coffee before the break. He envisioned AI agents, maintained by federal and state justice departments and aggregated by journalistic entities, strictly monitoring the Karmic Trajectory of all sentient beings. It wasn’t about passing ultimate judgment, Jack insisted, but about establishing a reliable, objective measure of the relative good or evil intent/outcome of any agent’s actions. This data would then inform the judicial systems, which would ultimately rely on human jury panels, just as the current system dictates.

Billie shook her head, a faint smile breaking through her grim mood. Jack was definitely not on the same wavelength as her. But as the miles rolled by, she had to admit that didn’t mean either approach was superior. Just different. Jack was built for the ethereal world of philosophy, ethics, and the looming frontier of machine intelligence.

Billie, on the other hand, concerned herself with the flesh and blood world. With the asphalt, the angry crowds, the sweat, and the fear. Somebody had to keep the beat down here in the mud, and She and Jack had always been able to smash out a bodacious groove. She hit the blinker, taking the exit that would lead her toward the rally’s venue, ready to face the noise.

NEXT WEEK:
Back on the road go the Forks in the Chool Bus. First stop, South Florida, Key Largo and Key West.

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