The Golem and the Messiah - 4

Chapter 4: The Things That Find Us

The Great Culture War passed the point of no return in the first half of 2020, when a mere handful of behemoth technomedia corporations invoked two separate but simultaneous pandemics as justification for increasingly overt efforts to censor and cancel dissenting voices at odds with their rigorously expedient definitions of science and social justice. Their power and influence was already fait accompli; they owned or controlled more than ninety percent of all commercial media bandwidth, with combined assets valued in the trillions. Not least among the assets they owned were exhaustive behavioral data profiles on every consumer in the nation -- including every public and government official. With Big Data came not only the power to track, analyze and sell every conceivable whim and desire and peccadillo to anyone willing to pay the price, but the requisite wealth and leverage to extract and extort all but absolute political protection and influence from all levels of government as well.

In the Carrollean effluence of the pandemics -- one viral and airborne, one racial and media-borne -- free speech was denounced as anti-science and silence was condemned as racist violence. Over the next few years federal, state and municipal services -- including the police, the courts, schools and corrections -- were systematically restructured to shift the emphasis of law enforcement from physical crimes and misdemeanors to their thought-based counterparts, an adjustment better attuned to the sensibilities and strengths of the new technomedia masters in any event.

Thus purged of dissenting voices, the major media markets of New York, Los Angeles, Washington DC and the Greater San Francisco Bay Area operated as one-party fiefdoms for the technomedia elite: politically and ideologically pure, bereft of religion or any other moral authority not explicitly self-ordained, unrestrained and utterly immune from the consequences of their own policies — all with little tolerance or regard for anyone beyond the immediate pale of their culturally enlightened and state-enforced agitprop.

By then, Jacobinical diversity departments sat in moral judgement over virtually every major university, government agency and corporation, with a self-inflicted mandate for diversity of everything except thought: already the unofficial yet undisputed law of the land. Academics, agency and corporate employees who ran afoul of the diversity gods were publicly excoriated and summarily cancelled, most with no recourse and little or no due process.

Diversity officers and their minions in all large institutions, public and private, had long since discovered the Orwellian wisdom that thought control was a simple function of outlawing some words and changing the definitions of others. Evermore Byzantine rules for institutional and public speech -- replete with Newspeak style guides for appropriate pronoun usage -- all but guaranteed occasional encounters with noncompliance, voluntary and involuntary alike. Those who failed to conform, or those whose language was deemed a threat to the twin utopian directives of diversity and equity for all, were fired in the finest McCarthyite tradition, pilloried in social media and publicly declared as intolerable affronts to civilized society.

In the woke putsch of the 2020s, citizens once inclined to speak their minds learned not to for fear of social and financial ruin. They retreated instead into an all-but-impenetrable narcotic spectacle delivered 24/7 with digital precision by their technomedia overlords — immeasurably enriched and empowered by endless pandemic mandates issued by masked proxies at all levels of government, academia and private enterprise. Thus unchallenged, diversity replaced competence and equity replaced equality as the new measures of social justice, a rebranded and updated version of the former frontier law once referred to as mob justice.

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The net result was what Jake Kassman called conspiracy by fiat. “It’s what happens,” he told Maria just minutes after they first met, “when the top jobs in government, industry and academia become interchangeable and incestuous components of single ambitious careers.” He paused for a moment to grab two flutes of champagne from a passing waiter, and handed one to her. “Conspiracy by fiat is inevitable,” he continued, “when generations of brilliant students from the same Ivy League business and law schools are all taught to think the same way about the same things by tenured professors who likewise all think the same way about the same things. It’s what happens when those same students graduate with virtually identical ambitions of power and success. Old-fashioned conspiracy by design,” he concluded with a broad smile, “is hardly necessary when conspiracy by fiat not only satisfies the same ends, but offers plausible deniability to everyone and accountability to no one.”

They stood together in a quiet corner of the MOMA Sculpture Garden in the late spring of 2028. The leaves of the birch and elm trees, pale and delicate just two months earlier, were already dark and mature in anticipation of the summer heat. A warm stillness settled on the guests of the fundraiser as they stepped from the air conditioned interior of the museum out into the garden. Maria wore a sleeveless black gown, off the shoulders and tight at the waist, with a soft neckline offset by a simple pearl and diamond necklace. She knew in an instant that here, standing right in front of her in a slate gray tuxedo, was precisely what was missing from her career: a true freethinker, a phenomenon never once encountered in five years of accelerated Ivy League education, and certainly not among her colleagues and clients at the law firm since.

Like every other media attorney in the world, she knew all about Jake Kassman. She knew he owned the world’s largest technomedia holding company. She knew he had dropped out of high school and never attended college. And she knew he was a renowned social recluse who limited his public appearances to select charity events and an occasional foray to Yankee Stadium. But everyone knew these things; everyone knew the legend. No one, however, seemed to know much more. There were no siblings or relatives or estranged former wives or lovers, no close confidants or lieutenants — no one on record who might deviate from the official narrative: professionally scrubbed, edited and polished over the years until all that remained was the veneer of folklore — far easier to manipulate when necessary, and far less necessary to explain in the first place. Not that it mattered much: the few gossip reporters and social media influencers who weren’t already on his payroll preferred the legend to the man anyway.

Maria’s interest in Jake Kassman, however, was far less pedestrian, far less casual — as it was with all things she deemed worthy of her attention. She had studied his interviews and white papers and speeches about media addiction as a default social condition in detail over the years but had never been able to find anyone among her classmates, professors or colleagues willing to discuss them. Not one of them, even among those she respected and admired most, looked or wanted to look beyond the power and wealth, beyond the myth. And not one of them wanted to explore their own complicity in the corporate media-induced demise of 21st-century America.

For Maria, their lack of imagination and professional curiosity was all but insufferable: unthinking and venal and easily manipulated. How unsatisfying and disheartening to know that for them the myth existed as an excuse to banalize and truncate the conversation when for her its real function was to inspire the next question. Myths, she knew, were writ large while the true power behind them was buried in the fine print. And fine print, she knew further, demanded scrutiny and discipline. She smiled at the thought of standing there beside him that evening and struggled to contain her excitement. “So there’s no need to conspire as long as everyone has the same Ivy league education and the same career objectives of power and wealth?” she asked him, half in jest.

“Little or none,” he replied without hesitation. “No need to conspire when the scoundrels on Wall Street and the scoundrels in Congress and the scoundrels in academia are all the same scoundrels at different stages of their careers.”

Maria thought for a moment while she sipped her champagne. “Do you paint everything in such big pictures?” 

 Jake’s eyes lit up and he knew from her question that the evening would end well. “That’s my job,” he told her. “Eight hundred companies, two-hundred thousand employees and a network balance sheet of two trillion dollars.” He stepped closer to her and lowered his voice to draw her in. “Maria, I’ve watched your career from a distance for the past few years. Fate is talking to us. The only thing you need, the only thing you don’t have yet and the only thing that will make you unstoppable is alignment with a vision grand enough to be worthy of your ambition and talent.” He spread his arms out wide. “The only thing I need,” he added, “is a partner courageous, talented and ambitious enough to chase the vision with me, wherever it takes us.”

A silent conspiracy by fiat rose unmolested between them at that very moment, like a golem conjured from the firmament of shared ambition. Maria leaned into him, laughed softly and sealed their destinies. “Tonight,” she said after a brief pause, “the only moving parts you need to manage are mine.”

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Two weeks later, at the age of twenty-eight, Maria assumed her new position as Lead Counsel and Executive Vice President of AllCorp. The work was interesting enough, but not much different from her previous day-to-day work at the law firm. What engaged and fascinated her most, however, was her front-row seat to Jake’s mind, where every thought seemed to coalesce first in the clouds at sixty thousand feet, with no apparent regard for personal advantage or other obvious utility. Days would pass before the same thought drifted back down to earth, inexplicably imbued with purpose and corporeal intent. Time and again, Maria watched the process repeat itself: his thoughts would take wing like ethereal jetliners with no discernible flight plan before landing unannounced days later, exactly where they seemed to belong.

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They sat together that evening at a window table in a quaint East Village bistro on Avenue A, just across from the fall elms, oaks and maples of Tompkins Square Park. Maria relaxed the shawl around her shoulders, smiled and sipped from a glass of chardonnay. “What’s more important to success,” she asked him suddenly, “ambition or talent?”

Jake’s eyes roamed the illuminated shocks of autumn color across the street like a raptor, then returned to settle on hers. “Ambition will take you farther than talent,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “But neither will take you very far without vision.”

“Is vision a prerequisite?” she asked.

His eyes smiled across the table. “Not for success,” he answered. “Only for greatness.”

She had discovered in their first few months together that his words often touched in her long-assumed-but-never-articulated contrarian truths, and they always seemed to spark an instant appetite for more.  “Where do you find the inspiration for your visions?” she asked.

He thought for a moment then shrugged. "I don't know where they come from," he replied, noting a hint of disappointment in her eyes. She sat across from him in a taupe bouclé blazer with matching patent leather pumps, tailored gray pants and a white linen blouse open at her throat. "But I do know that I don’t find them,” he continued. He leaned across the table to take her hand, lifted it to his lips and kissed her fingertips. “They find me."

Later that night, after they made love, Maria struggled to reconcile the raw ambition that had driven her entire adult life with the serenity that settled over her at that moment like a soft blanket of stars. With her head on his chest, her fingers traced his shoulder and she wondered about all the things that had found her so far and all the things that would find her still.

She wondered also if she might already be in over her head with Jake. She had never pondered what might follow her arrival at the corporate summit, and now that she was there at the age of twenty-eight, she felt suddenly lost and without purpose. Looking back, she realized with alarm that the upward trajectory she had followed with such slavish fervor over the previous decade had in fact been her only raison d’être. And now, all at once it seemed, there was no upward trajectory left to follow. “Nothing,” she thought to herself.

Maria Perez was not one to not know, not one to tolerate uncertainty for long, and she found her new predicament patently offensive to her sensibilities. What she didn’t recognize at the time, perhaps because her astonishing success had blinded her to it, was the early onset of chronic emptiness, the same soulless malaise she would recognize years later in Jake, and even then only after she had been forced to see it in herself. Still, she refused to relent that night; all she needed, or so she decided in the moment, was a new goal with a new trajectory.

Sleep took her soon after. Never one to dream small, she witnessed nothing less than a cosmic event that night: the birth of a new star. She watched in awe as an interstellar cloud, impossibly vast in shimmering magentas and maroons, wrapped itself around her like a placental shroud. Perhaps more significant than what she saw in her dream, however, was what she didn’t see before she fell asleep. What she didn’t see that night before her celestial journey began was the tear in Jake’s eye as he held her close. It came at the very moment he confirmed in his heart that the woman in bed beside him held the key to unlocking his own dream. It came suddenly like a silent prophet and stole his sleep.

At dawn the next morning he called her into his penthouse office high atop the AllCorp building in downtown New York City. He was standing at the window when she arrived, looking out over all of Manhattan to the north. In the distance he could see the slender green and brown rectangle of Central Park. The East River and the Hudson River edged the island on either side and shimmered in the early morning light like silver ribbons. Formerly the Canyon of Heroes, the Canyon of Martyrs yawned directly below him, shaking off the night, while the courthouse buildings just north of City Hall Park seemed Lilliputian and still sleepy in the dawn. It all stretched out below him like a giant playground.

His office occupied the entire penthouse level, with immense Persian rugs at all angles over polished concrete floors and thirty-foot floor-to-ceiling windows in all directions. Thousands of LED lights embedded flush into the coal-black ceiling illuminated a starry path from the private elevator bank on the south wall to a commanding desk of polished tiger eye maple set in the middle of the floor and stained a deep yellow ocher with a matching leather executive chair. Living walls of illuminated black coral snake plants concealed separate conference and lounge areas in each corner of the office while several robotic bar cabinets of charcoal oak and gold leaf floated untethered on hidden wheels, waiting in silent vigil for distant voice commands to summon their services. 

Maria emerged from the elevator, walked in silence across the office and joined him at the northern windows. They stood together and gazed down on the city in silence for a few moments before he turned to her and took her hands in his. “How would you like to be the most powerful woman in the city?” he asked her.

She looked up at him quizzically, noting for the first time the deep fatigue in his eyes, and said,  “I thought I already was.”

He laughed gently. “No,” he smiled. “How would you like to own it?”

It was a perverse proposal of sorts, but it was perfect in its way and she didn’t want to ruin it with words. So with her new trajectory in place, she raised his hands to her breasts instead and offered him her lips.