Basket of Deplorables by Tom Rachman

Author:Tom Rachman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2017-07-28T04:00:00+00:00

4

Sad! Wrong! Not Nice!

I WON’T CHANGE. BELIEVE ME. If you think I’m changing, you are wrong.

Before all this, I ran a hugely successful business, leasing aircraft to the best military juntas and the top rebels. I never broke a single law. Never. But anti-freedom bureaucrats had it in for me, and they rolled out the red tape, the US authorities bandying around vicious terms like ‘Foreign Corrupt Practices Act’. It was harassment, pure and simple. Why not catch the bad guys for a change? Not an honest American whose only crime is wealth creation, a guy who’s smart enough to organize his assets around the regulations, which is what you’re supposed to do. The rules are highway dividers: you drive by them; only a moron runs directly into one. But I’ve got no delusions. A price must be paid. That is, paid by somebody else.

Oh, come on! You know I’m only trying to rile you. Forgive me if my humor’s a little rusty. There’s nobody else to talk to around here.

You should understand that, at the time of my death, a grand jury was prying most insensitively into a certain income of mine – an investigation far too dull to bore you with. Fortunately, reports emerged that I had plunged to my very timely demise in a plane crash deep in the Congolese jungle. The case halted, and I resumed – in Hanoi this time, with a name not necessarily corresponding to that assigned at birth, plus an array of well-stocked bank accounts. I’m informed that a touching memorial service took place in my hometown of Kalamazoo, engineered by my younger brother, Glen. The event was standing room only, with musical performance, dance, and plentiful tears, because people love me. A terrific event; really fantastic.

So everything was great – that is, until a pack of weasels started sniffing at old emails of mine posted online because of Leakzilla. These were not nice folks: scummy student lawyers in the nation’s capital, led by a poisonous little Nancy Drew who twigged that, notwithstanding my tragic demise, I continued to dispatch the occasional email. There’s no respect for privacy anymore; it’s disturbing, really.

And what happened next – that was the real crime. My savings were frozen. Because government is the real thief. And banks, too. They talk about ‘your account’, then just cut you off when they please. You get stuck in some customer-service nightmare where everything’s ‘recorded for training purposes’, meaning you can’t use big-boy language without getting banned. Finally, you’re talking with some outsourced dunce who keeps saying: ‘So sorry, sir. That’s what our records indicate.’ Nobody’s accountable these days. Such a shame.

After this unjust turn of events – my money ripped off, my location leaked – I was an innocent man on the run. Luckily, I’m highly resourceful. You won’t find anyone more resourceful. So I contact my old friend Baz Grimaldi; great guy. We met during the good old days in Libya at the Corinthia Hotel – the only place to stay in Tripoli, next time you’re in town.

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