So Much for That - Lionel Shriver

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had different jobs. It was Jackson who railed about how his friend was constantly doing favors for people that Shep himself would never demand of others in a million years. But he’d rather the double standard work that way than the other way around.) For that matter, Beryl’s volunteering to take time away from her busy creative schedule to slum with her boring brother meant that she wanted something. Something more than dinner.

      Mesothelioma kept frustration with his sister at bay, likewise whatever sense of mourning he might otherwise have felt about Pemba. He had not been lying to Jackson. He didn’t think about it. He thought about one thing and put all his energies into one thing only. Glynis’s cancer facilitated the same laser-like focus that Zach found in computer games, perfectly replacing the driving single-mindedness previously provided by The Afterlife. Merely relinquishing Pemba with nothing to put in its place would have left him lost, fractured, at sea, and for once in his life maybe angry. As it was, he still hewed to a prime directive. He would do anything to make Glynis more comfortable, or to keep her from going to any trouble. He would do anything to save her.

      With Beryl coming over, he’d stayed up until 3:00 a.m. the night before assembling a pan of lasagna and washing salad greens. He had never cooked very much or been interested in cooking, but now his interest didn’t matter. He looked up recipes. They suited a man who was constitutionally obedient, and he followed them to the letter.

      Because for now there was nothing left to contemplate that served the prime directive – he’d already read a dozen Web pages on how best to prepare Glynis for surgery in two weeks’ time – while eking over the Brooklyn Bridge Shep allowed his mind to slide to Jackson and his goofball book. Even Jackson didn’t believe he’d ever write it. After all, he was one of these guys who were remarkably lucid in conversation, but who seized up at keyboards. It was weird how some people could be so garrulous and articulate when blah-blah-blahing down the street, yet couldn’t write a meaningful sentence to save their lives. Their reasoning went spastic, their vocabularies shrank to “cat” and “go,” and they couldn’t tell a coherent story of a trip to the mailbox. That was Jackson. This afternoon, he’d liked that idea of a title on a pile of blank pages because titles were all he was good at. Still, CHUMPS: How Behind Our Backs a Bunch of Bums and Bamboozlers Turned America into a Country Where We Can’t Do Anything or Earn Anything or Say Anything When It Used to Be a Damned Nice Place to Live – well, at titles he was very good indeed.

      As for his friend’s half-baked theories, Shep had never been sure whether he himself bought into them even slightly. (It was difficult to attach these views to a political party, since Jackson thought not voting was a political party.) They went something like this: Americans were divided between folks who played by the rules and folks who simply played the rules (or ignored them altogether). Jackson spoke of one “half” leeching off the other for ease of reference, but allowed that the proportions were likely far more dire; the fraction of the population that was being soaked by the savvier sorts who knew the ropes may have been closer to a third, or a quarter. Over the years, Jackson had christened these two classes with a series of homespun shorthands whose children’s-book alliteration Shep remembered with affection: Patsies and Parasites. Freeloaders and Fall Guys. Saps and Spongers. Slaves and Skivers. Jackals and Jackasses. Lackeys and Loafers. He’d used Mugs and Mooches for three or four years now; maybe the tags were going to stick.

      According to Jackson, the Mooches comprised first and foremost anyone in government, and anyone who lived off government: contractors, “advisors,” think-tankers, and lobbyists. He reserved special contempt for accountants and lawyers, both of whom slyly implied that they were on your side, when this bloated, parasitic caste of interlocutors effectively constituted a penumbral extension of the State, their extortionate fees amounting to more taxes. Other Mooches: welfare recipients, obviously, though Jackson claimed they were the least of the problem, and as much victims as perps. Marathon runners with sprained thumbs on disability. Bankers, who manufactured nothing of value, and whose money-from-money deployed the suspect science of spontaneous generation. On the opposite end of the spectrum: any mastermind who refused to earn any appreciable income – why bother, only to be robbed of fifty cents on the dollar? (Jackson was indignant at having been raised on anti-communist propaganda. When for half the fucking year, he said, you were working full time for the government, your country was communist.) The recipients of inherited wealth, which covered Pogatchnik. Illegal immigrants, who would remain “undocumented” in perpetuity if they knew what was good for them; synonymous with becoming a card-carrying Mug, citizenship as an aspiration was pathetic.

      Criminals were Mooches, too, of course. Yet while Jackson scorned establishment Mooches, who concealed their rapacity behind a façade of rectitude, or even, gallingly, of self-sacrifice (the expression “public servant” drove him wild), ordinary decent criminals won only his admiration. Drug dealing, Jackson claimed, was an intelligent, well-considered career path for the average young person, enterprising self-employment sans the Schedule C. He esteemed anyone who worked off the books or serviced a black market. He had a soft spot for Mafia movies, and had seen Goodfellas five times. To Jackson, criminals embodied the seminal American spirit.

      As for the Mugs, Jacks cheerfully confessed to his own lifetime membership. They comprised all the remaining schmucks who got with the program, but mostly because they had no guts, and lacked imagination. Mugs exhibited neither resourcefulness nor innovation, ostensibly core traits of the national character. Having never undergone proper adolescent rebellion, Mugs were developmentally retarded, and as grown-ups were still figuratively setting the table and taking out the trash. They may have learned to say “fuck” in front of their fathers, but they could never bring themselves to use the word with the IRS. Even on the five-point scale of moral reasoning (where Jackson had dug that up Shep had no idea, but its exposition had consumed one of their ritual foursome get-togethers last summer), Mugs were stuck at the bottom. For Mugs weren’t motivated by virtue, but by fear. They sweated bullets over their taxes, adding up tattered receipts for $3.49 and $2.67 and getting flustered when the calculator didn’t produce the same result to the penny on a second tally – despite the fact that the recipients of their fervid bookkeeping would blithely drop $349 million through the cracks in the GAO floorboards or fritter $267 billion on a dead-end war in a sandpit, a dizzying shuttle of decimal points that never struck Mugs as unfair or bitterly hilarious. They got their car insurance payments in on time; able to afford only collision, these were the same suckers who’d be T-boned by an uninsured Guatemalan running a solid red light and get stuck with the bill. They didn’t put extensions on their houses without getting a building permit, belying that they really owned their houses to begin with. To the degree that these poor flunkies were not tippy-toeing through their lives abdicating everything they ever worked for out of terror, they were stupid.

      But it wasn’t meant to be this way, Jackson insisted. Sneakily, little by little, the Mooches had hijacked a system that hadn’t started out half bad into a situation that would have mortified the founding fathers, who’d never intended to create a monster. Nor did they design democracy as an evangelical religion or a self-destructive export business, whereby it actually cost you money to sell your product abroad. What Thomas Jefferson’s crowd had in mind was a country that left you alone and let you do whatever you fucking well wanted so long as you didn’t hurt anybody – in short, “a cool place to hang out,” and not “this big drag.”

      For government was now, in Jackson’s view, a for-profit corporation, although a sort of which the average industrial magnate could only dream: a natural monopoly that could charge whatever it wanted, yet with no obligation to hand over a product of any description in return. A business whose millions of customers had no choice but to buy this mythical product, lest they be locked in a small room with bad food. Since all politicians were by definition “on the tit,” none of them had any motivation to constrain the size of this marvelous corporation that didn’t actually have to make anything. Occasional conservative lip service notwithstanding, sure enough, over the decades USA Inc. had done nothing but expand. Jackson predicted that at some point in the near future the last remaining Mugs would get wise and sign on. Once the entire American populace was either working for or living off the government, the country would shudder to a halt. It was happening in Europe, he said, already. With a ratio of all-Mooch to no-Mug, there’d be no one left to squeeze

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