“I’m here to represent you,” he’ll say, grin gleaming and eyes beaming at the wide world of hopefuls thronging to him for purpose. Afterwards he’ll mill amongst them, slapping backs and shaking hands, kissing babies and wives and wrinkled-up grannies, flitting from lost soul to lost soul like a shepherd amongst dissolute sheep. He’ll smile and comfort, grieve and console, and promise and promise and promise to do whatever it takes to make them believe in him. And they will, because they need to. Because he’s authentic, and kind, and take-charge, and patriotic, and trustworthy. Because he’s the kind of guy I’d want to grab a beer after work with, you know? Because he cares.
Because who else are they going to follow, when it’s all said and done?
People liked to pretend that they weren’t easy to convince, that they were open-minded and intelligent creatures with maybe a few passionate stances that they refused to retreat from. Whether to send their people to suffer and die, or how equal different shades of skin should be, or when exactly a collection of disparate cells awakened to having a soul (that particular one always filled him with amusement). They’d argue with one another, sure, throw stones and break bottles and put up fences, but at the end of the day they were all citizens of the same great nation. Common decency would prevail, and hardworking, honest heroes would eventually emerge to lead the people into prosperity.
The truth was, people were tired. They were too weak or apathetic or broken to manage things for themselves, and so afraid of taking on responsibility that they’d sell their soul to a man who could do it for them. The trick was to do things piecemeal: to make them sign you in on the dotted line and then take from them bit by bit, compromise by compromise, moral by moral until they’d either surrendered their spirit or dropped dead at your feet. It was an old game, the oldest one there was, one he’d been playing and winning for as long as he could remember. Even since before he’d had words to explain it.
Back in ’62 (this was when he’d worn a different face, of course) there’d been a journalist for one of the major papers who’d sat him down and hurled barbed questions at him, one after the other. Questions about lobbyists and tax breaks and foreign powers, about secrets and scandals and sworn silences, questions that nearly made him burst into laughter. Sure, everyone thought the same thoughts and dreamed the same dreams, and maybe even harbored a few idle resentments now and again, but rarely so openly. It was almost refreshing to have someone so blatantly, bravely challenge the simplistic truth of the way things were. He was impressed despite himself. He’d have offered her a job if he’d been bothered to learn her name.
The rest of the evening was spent drawing up budget reports, in between silent ruminations and picking her bones out of the cracks between his teeth.
He had to admit, it was harder nowadays to get away with that sort of thing. People cared less when they didn’t think they had a voice that mattered, back when monarchs strangled whores in hedge mazes and emperors slit throats for sideways looks. But a deal was a deal, old or new, and the youth of today owed just as much to the system as their great-grandparents before them. It was all so refreshingly routine once you knew which patterns to follow: oils and opiates, wars and provisos, slaves and sex, vagrants and preachers and propagandists, a rainbow of filth-encrusted flags, banners buoyed along by the breeze, global warming—global warming, now that was a new favorite term, the ice caps melting and the seas rising and humanity sinking into a morass of its own making, strangling itself in toxins and carbon dioxide and ash, drowning under the weight of all those collected indiscretions, sins piling atop one another until the whole sorry species went the way of dinosaur dirt.
“I’m here to represent you,” he says, and the crowd erupts in celebration. It’s one of his favorite lies to tell.