Eddy's Current (4 page)

“In other words, all of this and more mean that victory is at hand. I implore you to take our message forward. We must seize our victory, the victory we deserve, the victory that is set before us… that is ours for the taking. Onward, all Christian soldiers!

“Stop the give–aways. Stop those who claim to help with a social program in one hand and a controlling law in the other. Stop the bureaucratic mess. Stop the socialism. Stop the interference in our business matters and the compromise to our pure Christian faith. Get out of our way! We’ve boarded the train, we’ve left the station, and we’re moving fast. Our train’s passengers are not the descendants of monkeys. We’re the sons and daughters of proud and independent people, and we’re one hundred percent human, zero percent animal, and one thousand percent dedicated to God Almighty.

“Either jump aboard or jump out of the way. But make your decision. Be decisive. We’ve had enough, and we’re making changes! God will be with us.

“Thank you for listening, and may God bless you all in His holy name and in the holy name of His precious Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.

“Good night.”

The last words of Peterson’s speech were met with immediate and thunderous applause. Just as it seemed that the ovation should end, it strengthened and became louder. Like an approaching train with its horn blaring, the noise from the applause intensified. When it seemed as if it couldn’t get any more intense, it grew even louder still. The room was euphoric; Peterson’s adherents and admirers were delirious. The noise was deafening.

And the train was just leaving the station. It hadn’t even begun to really get going. At some point the sound of an approaching train’s horn reaches its apex and then, as the train passes, the sound level decreases. Tonight’s train would not pass for a while, not for a very long while.

Peterson had somehow convinced his followers that they had suffered for decades under oppression. Just as Martin Luther King, Jr.’s followers of the 1960's civil rights movement felt that their time had finally come, so too did the many outcast conservatives of Peterson’s generation feel that vindication and justice had finally arrived for them. Their long dark night ended with the bright hope of this day’s total victory. What a speech!

If I hadn’t been there myself to experience it, I would not have believed that a person could be capable of delivering such powerful and persuasive words in a speech. The crowd was spellbound for the entire fifty–eight and a half minutes.

ACC planning sessions followed the speech. Delirious ACC members filed off into small groups to review various plans for ACC indoctrination, expansion, policy and even theology. Yes, the ACC is developing its own theology. God bless them. I am troubled more by the efficiency of these people than I am by their desire to develop their own theology, though. It’s odd. Events such as this are expected to be well organized, but this was different. They were like robots. Everything about the coronation week was perfect. They missed nothing, left out no detail. Each small group was under the leadership of a charismatic speaker who had in front of him a syllabus and detailed action plan. Each small group leader had the name of an ACC contact in each attender’s particular city who will continue the indoctrination and other support for the attender. The ecstacy from this week was carried back to each attender’s home city and was tapped into there by the local ACC contacts in order to increase each attender’s commitment to, and involvement with, the ACC.

I returned to my hotel room at around nine o’clock, removed my netbook from its case and proceeded to produce my report. It was difficult to write the report—difficult to capture the essence of Peterson’s motives and actions. My conflicted feelings began within five minutes of my arrival at the first event of the ceremonies on Sunday, 3 January. I am one of Peterson’s harshest critics, and even I was excited and encouraged by his speech. It was mesmerizing. My adrenalin was still high and my blood pressure still elevated well after the speech. Conflict was racing through my mind as I typed.

USFIA MISSION REPORT

SECURITY LEVEL: Restricted

DATE: 7 January 2021

TO: Sydney Albert

FROM: River Warwick

RE: Tyler Lee Peterson’s Election as President of ACC

[Specifically the events of 3–6 January 2021]

Mr. Albert:

On the night of 6 January 2021, Tyler Lee Peterson delivered a speech to the American Conservative Consortium…

As I typed my report, I caught myself drawing conclusions and giving answers rather than offering observations and asking questions. Peterson had that effect on people. More than once I began a sentence, then deleted it. I wrote entire paragraphs, was at first completely satisfied with them, then canceled them. I wrote out fairly firm judgments, then backed off. I started and stopped, began and deleted, again and again; judged then retracted.

Was Peterson a capable, influential and dangerous leader who could gather widespread support? Or was he an incompetent, smalltime punk who delivered empty words to a desperate throng? Maybe he was neither dangerous nor harmless. Maybe he was simply right about what he believed and deserved only to be left alone to speak the truth as he believed it to be. After all, things are bad in the U.S. right now, and in the entire world. Maybe we need someone to point out to us just how bad things really are.

My third draft of the report — my best of the first three and the only one of the three I actually completed — seemed schizoid. I deleted the entire thing and started a fourth draft. It was around three o’clock in the morning before my report was finally done—my seventh draft. It was fairly straight forward, details included. It certainly seemed that nothing major was left out of it. Still, it lacked a hook or a powerful indictment of Peterson. You just couldn’t get Peterson that way. No one could. He was power hungry and dangerous? Destined to receive that power, and few could stop the train he was driving? Maybe.

I e–mailed the report off to Albert, brushed my teeth, bathed, and went to bed. Probably a wasted workweek, I thought, as I began to doze, thinking about the possibility that I had unnecessarily allowed myself to get worked up over the rhetoric of a smalltime loudmouth who was skilled at telling his new buddies what they wanted to hear. But then again, maybe I was right after all. Maybe he was dangerous. Although, as impressive as his speech was, it was, after all, more a rallying of the conservative core than an actual call for revolution or evil action against the United States. Either that or there was more and I was just too tired to figure it all out.

It was difficult for me to sleep. My day began at 7:00 o’clock in the morning with intensive surveillance of Peterson. At two in the afternoon I attended the funeral of my boss, Bob Mitchell. Bob was the first USFIA agent to be killed in the line of duty. He was a good friend. His funeral service was gut–wrenching. The official report was that Bob died on assignment in Italy. That was the official line and I was required to go along with the official line. I shot from Bob’s funeral back here to the convention center to keep an eye on Peterson.

It was four fifteen or so before exhaustion fought off my depression and my conflicted feelings about Peterson. I remained in a deep sleep for several hours.

POTENTIAL

SEPTEMBER 1982, CRIMPTON, IDAHO

Beginning early each morning, an hour or so after sunrise, large trucks filled with harvested crops rumble continuously into the inspection and weigh stations. At the inspection station, the inspector climbs up the side of each truck, reaches into the contents — most of the time either potatoes or wheat, but not always — inspects the quality of the crops, completes a form attesting to the level of quality, hands it to the driver and motions him on, even though such direction is not necessary. The driver then drives over to the waiting line of trucks at the weigh station.

The driver waits his turn, drives his truck onto the scales, stops to be weighed, seldom makes small talk with the attendant or with anyone else, receives his paperwork, then drives the one–half mile or so to the deposit bin to unload the crops. He then drives back out to the weigh station, onto the scales, his truck is weighed again, more paperwork, then out and back to the farm to pick up more crops, then back to the inspection and weigh stations. The process is monotonous and absolutely necessary.

People don’t talk during the process because the trucks and other mechanical devices do the talking, the noise is deafening, and the system works at peak efficiency only in the absence of verbal communication. Rookie drivers learn to follow the system without asking for details or even basic information. They have to absorb the feel and flow of it all because no one is going to explain anything to them—maybe a hand gesture here and there, providing a hint of a general direction needed, but nothing more.

To survive in Crimpton, Idaho, workers work hard, stay completely within the established way of doing things, and keep quiet. Slacking reduces productivity, noncompliance reduces efficiency, and talking is prima facie evidence of both. It serves no other constructive purpose.

Each year farmers in Crimpton have to grow millions of pounds of potatoes, and nearly as much wheat, get their harvests to market, and get their money in the bank to provide the funds needed for the next year’s crop cycle. Profit is only a theoretical concept to be studied by college students in business schools. Break even, at best, is the reality in Crimpton.

Each step in the process demands grueling, back–breaking work—tilling, planting, watering, fertilizing, spraying for bugs and disease, harvesting, transporting, processing, packaging, distributing. The workers are proud and productive, but the expectation of facing more back–breaking work as a reward for the previous day’s back–breaking work is discouraging and demeaning.

Field workers harvest tirelessly. Their hands bleed, their legs and backs ache, and their bodies shrink slightly each day. The work ages them as much in one hour as the average person ages in two.

Truck drivers’ backs are beaten every minute of every workday, from an hour after sunrise to an hour after sunset, by the up and down pounding of the crop transport trucks bouncing along the rough country roads. Truckers work twelve–hour days, to be sure, but others in the process point out that they’re also off four months. Truckers counter that their four–month vacations are spent trucking in other parts of the country. They have no days off, they say—none at all.

The only part of the process that doesn’t pound the worker physically is the bookkeeping. The bookkeeping takes its toll on the psyche. The entire person is affected. Souls are crushed regularly under the pressures.

Though accusations of wealth accumulated on the backs of this one or that are rampant, it seems that no one gets rich. The farmers, they say, gain wealth at the expense of the field workers and truckers. The field workers’ and truckers’ unions have gotten too powerful, say others, and the cost to the farmers could break them and, in fact, sends many of them to the brink of financial ruin. The farmers claim near bankruptcy. Bankers say that the money lent to run the farms could not be recovered in the case of bankruptcy because the farmland isn’t worth much.

Each person in the process works like a dog, or risks his financial well being, or both, and each is near broke as a reward. All players in the game claim no gain. The rules favor no one in particular. They’re unfair to all.

Alejandro Perez and his wife, Felicia, were proud, hard working farm workers. They came to the U.S. from Mexico in March 1979 to find work in the fields of America’s farms and in her chicken processing plants. He was fifteen at the time; she was eleven. They were far too young to venture to a new country on their own to work, yet they were old enough to realize that life as orphans in Mexico would be worse. They scraped together enough money shining tourists’ shoes in Nogales to pay human smugglers to get them to the U.S., lied about their ages, paid another accomplice to pose as their father, and began to live the American dream as it is defined by millions of Mexican immigrants.

From the time they arrived, Alejandro acted as Felicia’s protector and provider—first in the role of big brother, then as father, then as husband. The latter was real, the first two he acted out of necessity because Felicia had no other options. Alejandro and Felicia were as close as a husband and wife could be. Neither could imagine life without the other. Their new country was their only love outside of the love they felt for each other.

Alejandro and Felicia would do as millions of Mexican immigrants did: They would follow a seasonal work schedule throughout America. Theirs was: November to March, Florida, to harvest vegetables, citrus and sugar; April and May, the Georgia chicken coops and processing plants; June to October, Idaho, for work in the potato and wheat fields. They would work from sunrise to sunset, seven days a week.

Alejandro and Felicia wanted only to save enough money to settle in one area, and live a simple and peaceful life. They saved as much as they could during the years of nonstop work. They fell in love with Idaho, and chose a dilapidated duplex apartment in Crimpton to settle in, at least for the time being. They would have a baby, Felicia would stay home, and Alejandro would continue in the fields, but only in Idaho and Florida, or so they believed at the time. He would have time off, four weeks each year. They would apply for citizenship, and life would be good for them. Those were their plans.