Leonard tossed the stacks of manuscript into a large box and closed the top.
When had he realized that things in the United States of America were going in the wrong direction… not the wrong direction of a thousand intellectual crying-wolf outcries, the fashionable cries of Marx, Marcuse, Gramsci, Alinsky, and others… but really going to hell in a handbasket?
Recently, for reasons he couldn’t trace, he’d been remembering the early days of the Obama administration. Leonard had been married to his last wife, Nubia, then—certainly the least stressful of his four marriages. And although they were living in Colorado at the time, Leonard teaching at CU Boulder and Nubia heading up the African-American Womyn’s Studies Department at DU in Denver, she had insisted on returning to her hometown of Chicago to be there on the night Obama was elected in 2008. Nubia had been so certain that her candidate would win that she’d booked the flight to Chicago for both of them in August, the day after Obama was nominated at the Democratic Convention in Denver. Nubia had been a delegate at that convention.
They’d stayed at her mother’s house. Nubia’s three brothers and two sisters and all their spouses and kids were there to watch the returns and even before Obama reached the magic number of delegates, everyone had walked over to Grant Park for the final announcement and celebration.
Leonard remembered the cheering and the tears on Nubia’s—and his own—cheeks. Leonard had been ten years old when police attacked protesters in the park not too far from where Obama was acknowledging his victory that night, too young to pay much attention to the turbulent 1960s. This night, with the hundreds of thousands of people streaming into Grant Park and the cheering and weeping and hugging of strangers when the huge TV displays showed CNN announcing Obama reaching the critical delegate number, seemed to be both the past and future of Chicago and America.
Things had been dark, but they had all reached the Promised Land together.
That feeling had faded faster for Leonard than it had for Nubia over the next few years, which was one reason the marriage had ended earlier than it might otherwise have.
It was not that Leonard, an intellectual and proud member and even leader of his faculty tribe then in his early, healthy fifties, had suddenly turned into a closet Republican. No, during all of those years of violent change, Leonard had remained a believer—in hope, in change, in the important role the federal government needed to play in everything from enforcing climate-change regulations to taking control of health care and a thousand other facets of American life.
But over that decade and the next, as the recession seemed to be ending and then slid back into something far worse and seemingly never-ending, as the foreign wars ended in defeat and retreat, and as the government and its many entitlement programs bet wrong on the future and went broke—Leonard began to doubt.
Doubt whether those social decisions toward ever-increasing government deficit spending in the midst of Round One of the great global recession had been the wise thing to do.
Doubt whether America’s eventual retreat from the rising success of radical Islam’s influence around the world was the wisest course.
Doubt whether the United States of America should have claimed its new and more humble role in the second decade of the twenty-first century as “just one nation among many.” Despite Professor George Leonard Fox’s deeply entrenched intellectual skepticism about anything even remotely bordering on vulgar patriotism, hadn’t there been something unique about America… other than its oft-alluded-to offenses of racism, sexism, imperialism, and rampant capitalism?
As the second decade of the century ground on and ground so many people around the world down through bankruptcy, failure, and compromise with violent aggressors, Leonard began to wonder—and even express his questions to Nubia—whether there hadn’t truly been something exceptional to the old view and power of the United States after all.
“I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything more from someone born in the fucking nineteen-fifties,” Nubia had said shortly before she’d left him. “You’ll always live in the fucking nineteen-fifties, along with Senator George McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee.”
He hadn’t corrected her on Joseph McCarthy’s first name. Nubia had been twenty-one years younger than Leonard. And beautiful. He missed her to this day.
But he’d thought her accusation unfair. He’d explained to her once that he didn’t have a very clear memory of the Communist witch hunts of the early 1950s since he’d been born in 1958. Leonard couldn’t even tell her about the love-peace-drugs-rock-music ’60s since he’d only been twelve years old when that decade ended.
He confessed that the actual world around his childhood had seemed… what? A more ordered time. A saner time. A safer time. Even a cleaner time, he realized.
But, he argued, as all progressive liberal Democrats and intellectuals argued to themselves about the time he’d married Nubia (he just turning fifty years old and the head of his English Department, his beautiful bride not quite thirty and struggling for power in her department), the nation would have been different for Obama if the right-wingers hadn’t left them with an economy that was crumbling and a foreign policy that was failing everywhere. (Except, when Leonard continued being honest with himself, he didn’t really remember exploding economies or disastrously failing foreign policies during his thirties and forties.)
Sometime around 2011 or 2012, before Nubia left him and he’d left Colorado to come teach at UCLA, Leonard had asked various professors of economics at CU what was going on with the recession that would not end and the continuing financial, real estate, fiscal, and other crises. (Leonard had never had the slightest interest in economics… refused to treat it as a real discipline for study, much less a science. But who else could he turn to at such times?)
Five or six of the top economists on the faculty had tried to explain the convulsions then just beginning in earnest in arcane—but hopeful—terms. Leonard had tried to follow the explanations and succeeded to some extent. But he’d remained unconvinced.
Then, by chance, at a party at a fellow classics professor’s home in the foothills above Boulder, Leonard had found himself having a drink with an ancient retired professor of economics who listened to Leonard’s question, then pulled a small laptop out of his briefcase. (Phones and computers were separate things in those days, as hard as that was to imagine.)
The wrinkled old prof, already three sheets to the wind from the Scotch whiskey he’d been drinking all evening, punched up a chart and showed it to Leonard. Later, he’d e-mailed it to the English lit professor so Leonard still had a hard copy of it around somewhere.
The old chart showed a continued 8 percent debt-growth scenario—starting in 2010—with the debt shown as percentage of GDP and based on different predictions of growth, ranging from -1 percent to a healthy (but never-achieved) +4 percent.
At that never-achieved 4 percent of growth, the national debt would have equaled the Gross Domestic Product—i.e., equaled 1.0 when debt was divided by GDP—by 2015. But of course, the economy hadn’t performed that well, and the actual ratio of debt to GDP had been closer to 1.2.
The old economist’s debt-growth scenario had shown that by 2035, even if the economy had grown 4 percent a year, the debt-to-GDP ratio would be 2.2. In truth, Leonard knew, the ratio was now more than 5.0 to 1.
The chart had ended with a prediction of debt to GDP being as low as 3.2 in 2045—if the country had actually grown that much—and as bad as 18.0 in 2045 at the -1 percent growth rate.
The United States would never reach that dismal 18-times-debt-to-gross-product ratio, Leonard knew. America had gone bankrupt years ago.
“Three other economists and I worked that chart up four years ago,” slurred the drunken old Libertarian. (Or so Leonard now suspected with some alarm.) “That’s just the goddamned debt outgrowing the goddamned GDP, just as it did in Japan, and now the dragon is here and devouring us. Understand?”
“No,” said Leonard. Although part of him did, even then.
“Here,” said the old economist and pulled up another chart.
It showed the risks of growing entitlement spending and had bar graphs demonstrating how mandatory entitlement spending—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and all the hundreds of other federal programs—would exceed total government revenues sometime between 2030 and 2040.
The chart had been wrong, Leonard knew. In reality, mandated entitlement spending had exceeded total government revenues before 2022, about the time the nation was officially declared bankrupt.
“That was based on projected mandatory entitlement before Obama and the Democrats rammed through their stimulus bills and all the rest of their entitlements,” growled the old prof. “Notice that somewhere in the early twenty-thirties, our mandatory spending on entitlement programs will exceed our national GDP. By twenty-fifty, the damned interest on money borrowed to pay for entitlement programs—the old, smaller entitlement programs—will be greater than the GDP.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Leonard remembered saying. “That can’t happen.”
“It can’t?” said the old economist, breathing Scotch fumes into Leonard’s face.
“Certainly not. The president and Congress would never let it come to that.”
The old man across from him was trying to focus his gaze. “I know you. I’ve read about you. You’re hot shit in English lit. Well, tell me, Mr. E-Lit Hot Shit, where’s this country going to get the money to pay for these programs?”
“The economy will come back,” said Leonard.
“That’s what they said three years ago. And every single Wall Street recovery’s been as legless as a quadriplegic Iraq veteran. And the economy—never the same as Wall Street, you understand—is worse. Isn’t it? Isn’t it? Small businesses being taxed and bullied out of existence. Unemployment rising again. Hell, there’s a permanent unemployed class in this country again for the first time since the nineteen-thirties. Inflation returning with a vengeance, making everyone poorer by the day. Shoppers aren’t spending. Buyers aren’t buying. Banks aren’t lending. And China, who still holds most of our paper, coming apart at the seams. Their economy—their miracle eight-percent-growth-a-year economy—turned out to be a bigger sham and bubble than ours. Their ‘eight percent growth’ was a bunch of old Communists determining their economic growth by fiat ahead of time—and paying for it out of government funds—like a retail store operator counting his inventory as profit.”
Leonard hadn’t understood that at all. But he was following the news on what was happening to and in and around China. It was frightening.
“The president has a lot of smart people around him,” Leonard said, standing and getting ready to move away from the retired old fool.
“It’s too fucking late for smart people,” slurred the economist, his gaze going out of focus again. He looked at his empty Scotch glass and scowled as if he’d been robbed. “The smart people are the ones who’ve fucked up this country and the world for our grandkids, Mr. Hot Shit English Lit. Remember that.”
And, for some reason, Leonard had.
WEDNESDAY
Val didn’t come home on Tuesday night nor on Wednesday morning. A little after noon, Leonard called the LAPD to report a missing child.
After forty-five minutes dealing with voice-mail and holding (for some reason the LAPD played some sort of Turkish-sounding music in the background while people waited on hold; it sounded to Leonard like the wailing of crime victims), he finally got through to a police sergeant, waited another ten minutes while his call was transferred to Missing Persons, and then he was prompted for the facts. As soon as Leonard gave his grandson’s age as “sixteen” he heard the interest go out of the policeman on the other end. The final advice was—Wait a week. Call the parents of your grandson’s friends—ask them if the boy is there. If your grandson doesn’t come home by then, call us again.
Leonard had wanted to call the parents of Val’s friends, but the only boy in that group whose name he’d known was William Coyne. There were no Coynes in the ever-dwindling online phone book.
Hadn’t the boy, William, in that one time they’d met where the young Coyne was obviously shining Leonard on, said something almost condescending about his mother working for the Japanese Advisor? Or for the city in some liaison capacity with Omura’s staff?
Leonard had his phone search through all the online city official and Getty Castle directories but there was no Coyne listed anywhere. Wait… hadn’t Val said something last year about his friend Billy the C’s parents getting divorced? It had been part of a contemptuous spiel that Val had launched at Leonard about everyone Val knew being from broken homes. If she was divorced and back to her maiden name, what might it be in the Advisor’s staff directory?
Leonard had no clue. He gave up that avenue of search.
Finally, in early afternoon, Leonard left a note for Val to phone him if he came home before his grandfather returned and spent the afternoon on his bike, searching the downtown as far south as the 10, as far west as the roadblocks at Highland Avenue that kept him out of Beverly Hills, as far east as the reconquista checkpoints along Ramona, and north to Glendale.
Everywhere there were convoys of armored military vehicles—National Guard, Homeland Security, and even some regular Army. The smoke in the south was very thick. Los Angeles radio and local Internet news reported nothing out of the ordinary.
In the end, returning to their still-empty and dark basement apartment around 7 p.m., Leonard was beside himself with anger and concern.
Perhaps it was just the sight and diesel-stink of all the military vehicles he’d seen and madly pedaled out of the way of that day, but Leonard wondered if this increased belligerence and erratic behavior from Val were a result of him turning sixteen and having to face the draft now in less than a year. It was the last real discussion that Leonard and his grandson had really had, that afternoon of the boy’s lonely birthday “party.” Leonard was sure that Nick’s failure to call his son must have hurt Val deeply, but there was no discussion of that. Val’s questions that evening centered on the draft, possible ways to avoid it (there were essentially none for a healthy, white young American male who’d registered, as Val had, when the forms showed up on his phone screen), and about the various wars that American soldiers were fighting for India and Japan.
On that last query, Leonard had been less than helpful—he really had trouble understanding the NSEACPS hegemony, much less its war goals in China and elsewhere, and could only explain that sending the troops to fight for the financially more stable India and Nippon was one of America’s few sources of hard currency.
“Mr. Hartley at school says there was an old Southeast Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere almost a hundred years ago,” Val had said, “and that it had something to do with that big war fought then, but I didn’t quite understand the connection.”
The connection is irony, Leonard had thought, but he’d explained about the militarist Japanese Empire and its fancy name for its short rule over major parts of China, Malaysia, what was then called Indochina, and the Philippines and other islands of the South Pacific. He gave a quick explanation of how the Japanese during their rapid imperial expansion had touted their brutal military occupations as a throwing off of white imperial domination—which it certainly was—but only in exchange for a Japanese version of Hitler’s Master Race form of imperial conquest. “They were very close to adding Australia to their so-called co-prosperity sphere and would have done it if it hadn’t been for the Battle of Midway,” said Leonard but stopped when he saw the birthday boy’s eyes glazing over. Val was a reader, but he didn’t enjoy history the way his grandfather thought he should. As was true of most American high school students in this era of politicized curricular “relevance,” Val had never been made to place… say… the Civil War within a hundred years of its actual dates.
Was Val running away because of the draft? Tens of thousands o
f pre-seventeen-year-old American kids did, Leonard knew.
But he still had almost eleven months. Certainly Val wasn’t so frightened of the draft and of fighting overseas that he’d act so recklessly now.
As if commenting on Leonard’s thoughts, the twenty-four-hour TV news channel he had babbling in the background—there were more than sixty on this basic sat subscription, one catering to almost every political stance imaginable—announced that “United Nations forces” had, after “fierce fighting with local rebels loyal to Chinese warlord L fi Zhngzhèng,” taken the key city of Langzhong. Leonard had no idea where Langzhong was nor did he ask his phone to find out. None of it mattered. He had a sudden flash of a kid born twenty years or so earlier than he’d been, before World War II, which Val thought of only as “that big war fought a hundred years or so ago,” moving pins on giant wall maps as battles raged and American and Allied forces moved closer to Berlin or Tokyo.
The “United Nations forces” always cited in the news reports about fighting in China these days simply meant American forces. India, Japan, and the Group of Five so dominated the expanded Security Council that the UN did their bidding without so much as a threat of a veto. When the fighting dealt with the Balkans, Africa, or the Caribbean, Leonard knew, “UN forces” meant the Russians, who were trying as hard as the Americans to earn some hard currency by hiring out their military.
Leonard sighed and shifted the small phone from one hand to the other. He realized that he was doing the Academic’s Shuffle—shifting his thought from real-world worries and fears, not to mention the need for rapid decision making, to vague historical musings and abstractions. It was almost 10:30 p.m. He would have to call Val’s father in Denver. He had no other choice. The boy might be injured or kidnapped or dead… lying in a ditch somewhere in one of the taped-off and unrepaired earthquake zones near the old freeways. It was precisely the kind of place where flashgangs such as Val’s loved to hang out.