shells, napalm, high-hoopin’ missiles, and various dainty war widgets, bioweapons, and lawn sprays) with annual profits totaling $20 billion last year, has laid off eleven thousand more people in the Midwest and seventeen thousand in California in its plan to restructure the two locations, primarily to part-time no-benefits positions, and at other levels, “contracting out” (or “outsourcing”), as well as the relocation of a section of the Chester plant to the women’s prison in Pontooki. Minnesota.
Also fourteen thousand to sixteen thousand people will be replaced by computerized voices and robotic hands. All this in order to fulfill a projected $27 billion for next year, and, of course, an even more ample and sexy figure for the year after that and after that MOOOOORRRE in order to continue tantalizing investors, who, like small children with TV remote controls, are so grimly playful.
THE END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH!
Well, the end of some worlds.
Among the thousands laid off by Duotron Lindsey, a man in sales named Doug Russell, silver-haired, broad-shouldered, fine bearing, with a funny, crooked, coaxing, “adorable” Felix-the-Cat smile, and a big kind of arm-wrestle-type handshake, who has given all his life to the company and was never home, never home, was never a father to his daughters, husband to his wife, never could be, just married to the job, as nuns are married to God. This man, Doug Russell, after hearing the news of his layoff, is missing. Missing for a few days. Missing. Nobody knows where he is.
Now on Tuesday, shortly after 9:30 a.m., he has turned up at the Duotron Lindsey regional corporate offices, his hair oddly messy, no suit jacket. Wedding ring gone, tie gone, funny crooked smile gone. No, he isn’t drunk. He is alert. He carries two coffee cans that slosh with liquid.
People are looking at him. Even those who don’t know him sense something. And they see him unhesitatingly, with shuddering depths of resolution none of us will ever understand, pour the watery contents of the coffee cans over his hair and face, chest and back, feet and shins and thighs, and then flick a match, which, with a great orange crackling weirdly soft whomping roar, covers his entire shape with fire and fills the lobby with horrified pandemonium.
Growth! Growth! Growth!
Today another American factory closed. Another dozen family farms withered . . . “Get big or get out!” Another factory restructured, downsized. Another many thousand people temped and temperamental. Another forty factories and six hundred family farms evaporate. Another seventy factories, two thousand local “micro” businesses, and seven thousand family farms lift off into the clouds.
Blank and dumbstruck.
Here we have interviews with welfare mothers. Look close. Here’s one in Boston, sitting on the stoop with a buncha kids. How many kids? Fifteen! That’s a lotta kids. And we just know they’re all her kids, with fifteen different fathers. Hear her talk. Bad English. A really ignorant stupid type. (Not like us.) A real pig. And she’s black. “We” have nothing against black, of course. But . . . you know . . . this one is not a black to be proud of. Not a nice Harvard black or We-Shall-and-Did-Overcome black. This one is a grungy black. Grungy ultimate. Poor. Lazy. Soaking the taxpayer. But sexy. See her hair! Rippling and fixed to attract. Look at the sexy way she smokes. Cigarettes IN FRONT OF THE KIDS! Cigarettes paid for by YOUR tax dollars. And here’s a white one. Gawd! She has twins! And nice clothes! Probably a shiny car hidden off-screen. She is telling us something. What is it? Something about “busted pipes.” She is whining. Thinks the world owes her! But also, she is laughing. Hear that giggle. What’s that she’s saying now? Sweet little-girl voice, eyes all aflutter. “I love men.” Did she say that? Most likely that is what she said.
In the valley of the St. Onge Settlement robust acorns let go . . . thwack!thwack!thwack! upon Quonset hut roofs and orderly stacks of old rusty-edged metal roofing and clonk! on an inverted plastic pail, the iron, the steel, the aluminum, the slate, all in array around the sawmills and furniture-making Quonset hut guarded by helpful oak giants. A rhythm band of the queerest sort is playing a march.
The figure in brown flannel check and green wool crossing the Quad and sandy lot with a basket like Little Red Riding Hood is the Settlement’s chief cook, Bonnie Lucretia Bean Sanborn St. Onge, who we all know well. She has managerial and caustic traits at times, and mythical traits of violence. She has a hale stride.
She passes through the nearest Quonset hut’s wide-open bay as through a sieve, leaving light and rhythmic thwonks! and silent grasses behind.
Up the dim stairs to the attic.
She knows which room, though this is her first time bringing a meal. Ground control to Silverbell Rosenthal! Ground control to Silverbell Rosenthal! some of the other basket deliverers had sadly joked when returning to the kitchens.
Bonnie Loo shifts the basket. Her broad knuckles, used once or twice to pummel other wives here, it has been falsely rumored among newer residents, now punch the pine door, jolly punches, shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits!
She knows there are no windows in the room beyond this door but before the door inches open, she expects lamplight. But there is only dark, from which the sharp immobile-featured white face and white Common Ground Fair 1990 T-shirt of Silverbell Rosenthal§§§§ emerge.
Behind Bonnie Loo the four-watt baby-pink night-light bulb in the wide, tool-cluttered hall broadcasts what it was intended for, a sleepy nighty-night dimness. Bonnie Loo wags the basket. “Brought your dinner.”
Silverbell renamed herself in college. She was Sarah Bowen. That was before she married Aaron, then the Bowen part also went the way of the winds of change. She wasn’t a feminist in how you’d want you and your man to be on separate ships through life’s journey.
So why Sarah to Silverbell?
To erase her given name, her mother’s and father’s gift, wasn’t there something wrenching in her soul even before the storm, the SWAT storm, faceless men in black first shooting her Doberman pinscher in the kitchen, pow!pow!pow!pow!pow!pow! pow!pow!pow! taking nine shots to down the screaming dog. Then a black mirror-shine boot stomped the newborn puppies! It is said this is to provoke you into attacking a police officer.
So maybe she did that . . . raised her hand to the shooter or the stomper . . . it isn’t clear. But they broke her arm and stomped her head. Same boot that solved the squealing puppies problem? Well, today you can see something about the intensity of one of her eyes.
Then it must have been her husband, unprovoked, who raised a hand
