The People's Vindication

THE PEOPLE’S VINDICATION

It’s in events such as these in which Sheila would get to stop and see the ample view of how she’d gotten here; how we all had. After all, Vice President Coe never noticed when he had crossed the line with the rest, letting the very death of democracy fade into the past before anyone could express their pain for it… It’s a good coping method, that of denying, then oversimplifying, and finally letting such tragedy grow old too fast so as not to bother the new order as if it weren’t new at all, but the way things should have always been.

We all had eagerly anticipated the uncommonly bold promises of absolute peace and prosperity one year earlier during the campaign rallies. And we all were too eager to convince ourselves that they had been fulfilled once the time came to savor such satisfaction, only to taste the blandness and prove our loyalty by convincing even ourselves that it was sweetness we weren’t worthy of tasting as of yet.

Yes, the wars in the Middle East found new fires to fuel them through recently acquired weapons and might. The wars in the Far East served as a great portion of that fuel, which in turn fueled themselves to new levels of lethalness and mass destruction about to force us into both of them inevitably. However, in our new order we always knew there would be others to blame; those too weak to execute our sacred president’s plans; those too inept to not over-understand how they had to be executed without needing to hear or read particular words, and those too cynical to follow the path of what was right, and implicitly our sacred leader’s will.  If only they and only they had held up their ends of our project, we would know how perfect our precious leader’s project really was.

These were the truths we were to conclude in order to belong, so these were the truths and nothing but the truths of those strong over the weak. And although a bitter pain in the cores of our souls where we could not reach and soothe shamed our betrayal of the ancestral legacy of those so brave and sacrificed, we could never let that be part of the truth. For the nucleus of the one and only truth we belonged to now was him... So non-verbally pacted ; so indifferent to what anyone felt, for individual feeling had nothing but faint relevance at best. The truth was an ocean that could not revolve around a droplet, but the other way around.   

Since the State of the Union had become a huge dinner instead of just a prolonged speech, a new truth became an abundance we had to see although it no longer actually existed. And a deeply embedded truth was that of the happiest presidential family ever in history, although the longer sleeves and higher necks of our first lady, Doris Trenton, who could never actually be Sheila to the people, revealed to us all such tell-tale signs of a truth that had to stay in the shadows, for that had to be a fake truth with no service at all.

The feast was that of genetic memories only distant generations could dream of. There were eggs from just about every medium-to -large avian species in the western hemisphere, as well as their meats. No beefs of any major farming mammal seemed to have been omitted, and all our first lady could perceive upon looking at it all was her kinship to the creatures who once lived within such masses of flesh. That’s all she was but could never involve as a truth; meat to be enjoyed then made to absorb the pains and hostilities whose only truth only that flesh should know.

Besides, she was the second center of attention; a creature so beautiful, only the ultimate truth could hail as his own. She was to be grateful that no matter how bitter such feasts had become to her, she still got to look great while having them. She was to be grateful that although her body was bruised, and her face wasn’t as bruised as to not be able to act as if it weren’t, she had the best make-up artists to help her show, not who she really was or how she really felt, but who truth itself demanded she be.

So when President Thaddeus Trenton decided this State of the Union’s Dinner picture-perfect moment would be that of yielding the knife, not to head Chef Luca Buccelli, but to his amazing wife always by his side, he knew all he’d get would be an automated human round of applause full of the most predictable clichés of cheers and faint bliss.

The truth beneath was that we all had become trapped in our own endless vicious cycles of replacing actual happiness with settling for showing others that we were. We had locked ourselves into the prisons of hypocrisy so tight and safely, that the fear of letting ourselves out of them had become near deadly, and no will had become a worthy opponent of the truth. And until someone’s will could break that first barrier, the truth would be that we would order ourselves to be happy where we were.

Sheila was perfectly ready to carve the first mark on the immense turkey at the head of the table. She had to be, for there was “ no way in hell she was going to embarrass her president.” She made sure she had the carving technique down to an art the previous night at 1:37 a.m., when her 19-year old step-son, Jake, finally blurted out the words: “I’m sure that will be good enough to please him for tomorrow.” behind such a hypocritical smile and fake disposition to empathize with her that she just wanted to smack his face into a new truth.

So really, besides her newly perfected skill, everything was absolutely the same. There was no public scrutiny that could stress here anymore. There were no more red beams of recording cameras awaiting to pounce on the first foul-up or embarrassment. It was all part of that endless cycle, and right before positioning the knife to do what everyone knew she was going to do, yet for some reason clap and cheer about it, she could finally perceive the pain in far too many of those watching her; even in those behind their cameras so eager to capture something funny or embarrassing that would break such hidden yet deeply embedded pain, so eager to return to times when they were all their true selves, as our culture and history always demanded of them all.       

So when the knife went right into the center of his sternum, and up deeply into his liver and then as far left as she could stretch, the truth was that everyone there with enough awareness of who we truly were had to make extraordinary efforts for their sighs of relief to go unnoticed. The secret service men paused for less than a couple of seconds just to see if it was all some kind of prank, then proceeded to immobilize her arms, and then tackle her on to the floor as gently as possible while making it look rough.

The truth was that we all had to scream and scramble because we truly were incredibly shocked, but something deep inside also released a generation’s worth of tension, which we had to conceal under the layer of shock.

When our dying and agonizing president’s son Jake snapped out of his own shock and opted for pouncing onto his step mother as she was being propped up by two secret service men, a third one blocked and kept him from reaching and harming her, tackling him hard on the floor and actually telling his fellow service men to get the first lady out. Right before they obeyed that command, all those present and watching could see her upper-body bruises we all knew she had under her partially torn dinner dress.

It was then that so many of us became more comfortable with the truth. I, in particular, became comfortable with the fact that we still had to refer to Mrs. Sheila Trenton as the Doris Trenton, our first lady. But I became more comfortable with the truth that we all knew but couldn’t blurt out; the truth that President Trenton, and recently his immediate family, were immune from prosecution of any official acts committed. The truth was that he had no longer been just a president, but something in between a president and a king. And his wife was now the top figure as a queen, and I as a Supreme Court Justice, had no jurisdiction over her official act, much less any other judge.