Revolution Nein

Yesterday morning I took my son to the carousel park. We were early enough to interrupt a man working out amongst the playground equipment. He was in his mid-forties, wearing black from head to toe, and when he saw us approaching he frowned and exhaled violently through his nose. He had a strong but poorly defined build. As we timidly approached the swings he dropped to do a series of on one-armed pushups, then sprang up to the overhead bar where he executed a series of vigorous pull-ups, counting off a number somewhere in the 300s. He finished off this his creepy calisthenics by attaching plastic handles (which he’d secured to his leg with a black Velcro strap) to the chains of two swings and performing a routine that vaguely resembled the Olympic rings. The police were setting up a bicycle safety exhibition on the mulch and, as the fitness buff wobbled and groaned in his awkward flights, one of the policemen began to stare him down. The fitness buff finished his routine, re-attached the handles to his leg, and then ran down the street, only looking back when he’d crossed the intersection.

There were three officers. One older and bald, his once-powerful build gone to flab but still impressive in the leather-and-polyester of his uniform. He stalked around the tent, taking pictures with a digital camera. A younger officer unpacked bicycle helmets and the third officer, a tall and genial black man, filled out paperwork. Each of the policemen was accompanied by their preferred mode of transport. The older officer represented the police car, the younger the bicycle, and the black officer the motorcycle. My son was partial to the motorcycle. He asked to sit on the seat and when the big policeman reached down to shake his hand he gazed upward with undisguised awe. He was given a badge-shaped sticker which he patted now and then to make sure it hadn’t fallen off.

I took my son back to the swings while the policemen finished their set-up. The wind was blowing hard from the north but the sun was bright. Trucks and motorcycles ground through the intersection beyond the sleeping carousel. The policemen were talking about AIG. The older one rubbed his tan baldness as he scolded his younger colleagues for their anger over the bonuses.

“We’re shareholders in this company now. The taxpayer,” he said.

The younger policeman squinted.

“Which means we own this damned thing, and we’re letting these senators go crazy up there in Washington. This witch hunt, it’s driving down the value, don’t you get it?”

“You think we should just pay these guys?”

The older policeman took a sip from a soft drink, grimaced, and said, “You tell me. You think we can stand to have more failures in the financial system? Or you think we need to move on already?”

“People just don’t like it,” the younger one said.

“There’s lots of things people don’t like. That don’t mean it ain’t the right thing to do. Just pay ‘em and move on. It’s done now. You know what I’m saying? Let it go. It’s done.”

“There’s going to be a revolution,” the black officer said. “And people like you and me, man, we’re going to have to fight them back.”

The older officer pondered this, shrugged, and said, “I plan on being retired by then.”

I had come to this park a few months ago with my father and he’d told me, as we watched my son go up and down the slides, that things were bad in the heartland of America and that a secret movement was afoot to buy up all the guns available in preparation for a revolution. It would happen in the next five years, he said. Riots in the streets. Domestic terrorism. Lynchings. Currency collapse. Famines. Independent states. When I scoffed at this he only nodded his head and said it was always people like me who were caught unprepared and swept away in the tide. I’d put all of this out of my mind at the time. When you’re trying to raise a two year-old you don’t have much time to contemplate revolution.

But then last week I got an email from my uncle in which a Christian blogger predicted a rash of fires on the Eastern seaboard. God would punish us, the blogger said, by destroying New York, Boston, and DC. Of course, this fellow had been predicting the immolation of the east coast for the last 10 years. If he kept it up he was bound to be right eventually. And, I reminded myself, my father’s aggrieved and dramatic temperament had always been fixated on the overthrow of power. Still, it seemed strange to have heard the same idea from three independent sources. Would it really get that bad? Were we headed for total collapse? It made me tired and slightly sick to think about it. I had a little boy, after all. I wanted him to grow up in a stable and peaceful society.

It was a delightfully crisp morning. The sun sparkled on the backs of the slow-moving cars. My son kicked his little legs and yanked on the creaking chains, his solemn expression racing through thick lattices of shadow. It was a springtime morning and the world was pursuing the joy of rebirth, oblivious to our human problems. It was in this tangible, actual, and immediate world that my son still lived. He had not yet learned to substitute a collective human fiction for the simple reality of life. And standing there, pushing him, I could almost remember what it was like to live that way.