Monroe Anderson

Obama Luck--a Three-Minute Fiction

 

    I've been planning to try my hand at NPR's Three-Minute Fiction since it first started. Each time, before I knew it, the deadline had come and gone. It almost got away from me this year. But on the day of the deadline, I sat down and in a little less than three hours of writing and rewriting produced this short story. I named it "Obama Luck."

 

Obama Luck

 

            Slipping off to sneak a smoke was the first of The Man’s secret habits. Only I knew about the second. 

            I learned of this compulsion on Day Two after I was summoned into the Double O.

            “Where can we go in this place if we want a little privacy?” The Man asked.

            I knew what he meant. I was one of the first agents assigned to Renegade’s detail, shortly after he became a candidate and the death threats started flooding in. I was one of the few agents who hadn’t kicked the habit so we’d sidle off, away from the prying press, to some secluded place.

“Flynt, I’ve got a top secret mission for you,” The Man said on Day Two.

            “Yes, Mr. President,” I answered, perplexed. Secret Service never gets any secret missions. The Langley spooks keep them all for themselves.”

“Whenever the Powerball tops 200 mil, I want you to buy 7 quick picks.”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“I want you to buy 7 Powerball quick picks whenever the lottery hits 200 million or more.  Privileged. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Good. Now where can a couple of guys go for solace and a smoke?”

“I’ll scout around the Castle, sir.”

“Thanks. I’m still trying to find the privy.”

Last November, when I handed him his quick picks, The Man looked me straight in the eye. “Michelle doesn’t know I’m doing this.”           

I shrugged; surprised he’d share that with me.  Our relationship wasn’t close, really. I hadn’t told him that my wife had left me or that my house was underwater.

“If she knew, I’d never hear this end of it.”

I nodded.

“She’s funny that way. She believes there’s only so much luck to go around.  After I won the Senate seat she insisted I kick the lottery.”

“Sir?”

“She said I’d spent my share of luck. I shouldn’t tempt fate.”

“Yes sir.”

“In a superstitious sort of way, I went along, just in case she was right. That was until Roberts swore me in.”

“Sir?”

“The more I learned about what I’d inherited, the more I knew I wasn’t that lucky.”

So that was why I’d been running those errands for The Man for the past three years. No matter where we were, if we were in country, whenever the Power Ball went big, I’d drop by a different Seven Eleven, liquor or grocery store and make the pick up.

He smashed out the butt, and then sighed heavily.

“Flynt, I’ve got a major, major dilemma.”

“How major, sir?”

“Two-hundred and fifty major.”

“Sir?”

“That Powerball winner…the one who hasn’t stepped forward in the past three months to claim the winnings.

            I nodded. The ticket was purchased at the convenience store I’d bought his seven from. At first I thought it was coincidence but as time passed by, I’d begun to wonder.

“I’m the winner.”

“Wow!”

“Do you see my dilemma?”

“I see a lucky man.”

“If I come forward, Republicans will have a field day. I’ll be as rich as Romney. I’ll lose the votes of half the Americans who dreamed of winning with that ticket.”

“If you lose, Mr. Obama, you’ve got a quarter bil to fall back on. If you win, you can claim your $250,000,000 and happily…”

I was about to say, “retire,” but kept it to myself.

Obama nodded and I grinned before lighting his cigarette. I knew it would be our last smoke.  My luck had changed. I was about to cash in on my pension and a big paycheck. I had a secret to share.

Enquiring minds would want to know.

 

I admit this piece of fiction is whimical. I think of it as a bit of O'Henry meets Hemingway. The 9th Round winner, who was announced on NPR yesterday, was Marc Sheehan. His story, The Dauphin, was just as creeative but touched on a heart-breaking challenge for many Americans. I faced this heart break with my mother for years before she died five years ago.

 

 

Sikh Slayings: White Anxiety Gone Extreme

Here's my Root commentary on the Sikh tragedy. No more commentary here. It speaks for itself.

 

Sikh Slayings: White Anxiety Gone Extreme

America's browning drives a backlash that found its most virulent strain in Wade Michael Page.

By: Monroe Anderson | Posted: August 10, 2012 at 12:26 AM

 

(The Root) -- When Wade Michael Page walked into a Wisconsin temple last wesek, murdering six Sikh worshippers and critically wounding three others, it was an incident waiting to happen.

As the neo-Nazi loser marched through the temple randomly shooting one Sikh after the next, perhaps the "14 words" motto of white supremacists was running through his warped mind: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."

To the insecure and frightened haters in our nation, the end of white dominance in America is increasingly inevitable. Besides being red, white and blue, the good old US of A is steadily becoming brown, black and yellow -- a majority-minority nation.

During a 12-month period that ended July 2011, for the first time in America's modern history, more minority babies were born than white babies. Casually referred to by white supremacists as members of "the mud races," Hispanic, black and Asian newborns made up 50.4 percent of the nation's births during that period. Just 22 years ago, minority births accounted for a much lower figure -- 37 percent.

"White supremacist groups have been having a meltdown since the Census Bureau predicted that non-Hispanic whites would lose the majority by 2050," said Mark Potok, spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitored Wade Michael Page in particular for the past 12 years, and hate groups in general for much longer than that. "The demographic change in this country is the single-most-important driver in the growth of hate groups and extremist groups over the last few years," he told ABC News.

Last year Potok's organization reported that hate groups in America had exploded to more than 1,000 from 602 at the beginning of the millennium.

Domestic terrorist Page, a 40-year-old U.S. Army reject, who died from a self-inflicted wound during the Oak Creek massacre, could take credit for some of that growth. For more than a decade, Page had been playing hate music. He played with white-power heavy-metal bands affiliated with Hammerskins Nation, and he led a couple of bands of his own, Definite Hate and End Apathy. His music appealed to other young white losers, creating new haters every day. It also raised money to help bankroll other hate groups like the National Alliance, the violent hate group that inspired Timothy McVeigh to blow up a Oklahoma City federal building in 1995.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, which also monitors America's white supremacy groups, the names of these racists bands reveal what's on their minds and in their hearts, names like Grinded Nig, Jew Slaughter and Aggravated Assault. "In keeping with its attempts to reach out to young people, one label, named Resistance Records, even markets a white supremacist video game, 'Ethnic Cleansing,' " the ADL reports on its website. "The game is a first-person-shooter in which the player takes on the role of a white warrior in a future 'Race War,' who must kill all nonwhites to ensure 'the survival of your kind.' "

Although these virulent, malicious white supremacists, who wear their hate on their tattoo sleeves and everywhere else, are more or less a limited group of bigots, they may merely be the underbelly of a larger phenomenon.

When the Tea Party and other conservatives cry, "We want our country back," it doesn't take much imagination to translate what that means as the nation's demographics and culture continue their colorful shift.

Mainstream conservatives have been spewing coded, dog-whistle racist messages since Ronald Reagan's "Welfare Queen" speech in 1976 and the Willie Horton ad employed in the George H.W. Bush 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis. More recently, the billionaire Koch brothers and their right-wing organization, Americans for Prosperity, were accused of buying a North Carolina school board in an effort to resegregate the Wake County school system.

So I wasn't exactly shocked when conservatives attacked Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano when she issued a report in April 2009 warning that right-wing extremists threaten American security. The nine-page report, titled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," documented the smoldering hate among the nation's extreme right-wing groups, warning that some individuals might commit violent acts. "If such violence were to occur," the report said, "it likely would be isolated, small-scale, and directed at specific immigration-related targets."

Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin posted a blog with this headline: "Confirmed: The Obama DHS Hit Job on Conservatives Is Real."

Another conservative website, Alex Jones' Prison Planet, is headlined, "Homeland Security Report Lists 'Liberty Lovers' as Terrorists."

And then-top Republican of the House Intelligence committee, former Michigan Rep. Pete Hoekstra, charged "unsubstantiated conclusions and political bias," worthy of a House investigation.

I would like to attribute all this hate to good old-fashioned American exceptionalism, but I would be wrong.

A year ago, Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik went on a shooting and bombing spree that left 77 people dead, many of them teenagers, almost all of them Muslims. Like his brethren in the U.S., he hated Muslims, he hated people who didn't look like him and he hated cultural diversity.

I fear this is just the beginning. Not only are some white Americans threatened by the encroaching "mud races," but there is a quickening recognition around the planet that the world is yellow, brown and black.

Less than a quarter of the world's population is white. By 2060, fears conservative Pat Buchanan, that percentage may dip into the single digits.

Cyber columnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed-page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show. He was also the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him on Twitter.

ObamaCare The Game could battle the evil Echo Chamber

While attending the National Association of Black Journalists convention last week in New Orleans, I came up with an idea as to how the Obama Administration could help us understand the historic health care law. I wrote a column about it for The Root website.

'Obamacare,' the Video Game?

This writer says that the repacking of the president's accomplishments would keep his message in play.

By: Monroe Anderson | Posted: June 29, 2012 at 12:48 AM

 

(The Root) -- The Saturday before the 2010 November midterm elections, President Obama's campaign strategist David Axelrod was a call-in guest on a radio show I was co-hosting. Team Obama was already bracing for a shellacking, since for months one Republican after the next had lip-synched right-wing talking points, accusing the POTUS of having accomplished zip.

I knew the Republicans were playing fast and loose with the truth. I knew that, like it or not, in his first two years in office, Barack Obama had scratched more off his to-do list than any other U.S. president since Lyndon Baines Johnson.

So I asked Axelrod why so many voters were so clueless as to how President Obama had spent the first two years of his first term. I dare not try to reconstruct the entire answer from the president's then senior adviser, but I will repeat two words that jumped out at me: "Information gridlock."

That's right. Axelrod's defense for a failure to communicate was that Obama's accomplishments came at such a breakneck pace that the White House press office didn't have the time to make sure that everyone following could keep up with the score. Maybe. Maybe not. But it would seem that the one achievement that is the most momentous since LBJ pushed Medicare and Medicaid through Congress in 1965 might have gotten a little special treatment: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.

It hasn't helped that from its conception through passage until now, the right-wing echo chamber has been in superdrive, dogging and demonizing the president's health care law. But I've got an app for that: Obamacare the Game.

Rather than trying to run down all the complicated bennies and perks hidden in the 2,600-page law, a computer game would have players racing through level after level, virtually discovering the rewards or penalties for either being or not being enrolled in the health plan.

It wouldn't matter whether it was a strategy, simulation or role-playing game, as long as it was available for a free download on the Obama-campaign website for every system from iPad to Xbox to desktop -- Facebook, too. The gamification of the president's historic accomplishment could quickly and easily be a mind changer, slaying the stream of poison that the right keeps spewing. With the flick of a click, Americans would be able to go from unenlightened and turned off to informed and engaged.

How to beat the right-wing smear-and-fear machine came to me while I was in "The Gamification of News" session at the National Association of Black Journalists' convention last week. Although the panel was focused on a cutting-edge tactic for engaging readers and viewers in complex news stories, my mind quickly leaped from there to politics.

Since then I have interviewed two of the gamification panelists, Manuel "Mani" Saint-Victor and Scott Anderson, to see what they thought. They both agreed that it could be done and suggested how to do it.

"Have people walk through the process of being a different person with a different illness -- [the] Sim [City] approach," said Saint-Victor, who is a former psychiatry resident physician at Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital and a founder of Marveloper Media. "Let them walk through and let them see it with the Obamacare version and without the Obamacare version, not telling them which is and which isn't."

Scott Anderson, who is my firstborn as well as the co-founder and lead programmer at Enemy Airship and one of Game Developer Magazine's top 50 game developers for 2009, had a similar idea. He thinks the game should be "how to survive without health insurance." In his version of Obamacare the Game, "You have all these setbacks, and you have all these crazy things people will have to do to survive," Scott said. "It might not be fun, but it'll be effective. People will say, 'Oh, wow'; if these things happened to me, I'd be screwed."

Although gamification hasn't come to politics in a big way yet, it is already being played out in advertising through reward cards and loyalty systems, Saint-Victor said. Of course, almost everybody is familiar with the SimCity games, and there's even a game called Cut Throat Capitalism, which explores the economics of Somali pirates and why they do what they do. "You basically pick what ships they go after and how you'll treat the hostages," Anderson said.

The Supreme Court may have upheld the individual mandate on Thursday, but hold up on the high fives. Just how badly the Obama administration and campaign need to get beyond the information gridlock is patently obvious.

A majority of Americans -- 54 percent -- still believe that Obamacare should be repealed. Republicans have spent three times more money bad-mouthing the president's health law than Democrats have spent explaining it. Right now there are 3 million small-business people who qualify for a health care tax credit.

A mere 170,000 have applied.

Cyber columnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed-page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show. He was also the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him on Twitter.

A mother of a father's day

    There is no comparison between Mother's Day and Father's Day--it's all in the cards and flowers and candy and jewelry and, ahhhh, neckties.

    The moms get it. The dads get less.

    More than $11 billion was spent this Mother's Day cards and gifts. Come June 21, a less beefy $8 billion will be spent on us fathers across America.

    Although I must admit that I'm a bit jealous, as a man I understand. As a general rule, we aren't on the job like mothers are. We're either out of the house, earning a living or--in too many cases in modern America--just out of the house period.

      But, there's something else that may be in play as well. Men aren't supposed to be as sentimental as women. If a spouse or a child misses a birthday or Father's Day, a man is expected to shake it off and stay in the game. Miss those special occasions with a mother and there will be guilt to pay. Who carried you for nine months? Who went through the excruciating pain of childbirth? Who wiped away your tears and kissed away your fears?

    And if you were to show up on the nightly news after ax murdering the girl next door, who would be on the TV announcing with complete conviction that she knew her child could never have done such a heinous crime?

     Besides all that, tradition also favors mom. Way back in 1914, Congress designated the second Sunday in May as Mother's Day. It wasn't until 1966 that President Lyndon Johnson designated the third Sunday in June as Father's Day and it was six years later before when President Richard Nixon signed it into law.

    All that to say is that I get it when Joyce Owens my wife and the mother of my two sons, gets the holiday card and call that passed me by. It may even be partially my fault. When I noticed that both of us were being taken for granted by both our sons, I started quietly pulling them aside to remind them to be sure to call their mother, who they know and I know, did a great job and deserves to be appreciated for it. I secretly remind them to buy her cards. I'd quietly quiz them about their intentions on giving her gifts.

    After my prompting them through a few special occasions, they've come to realize that father knows best and the cards and calls now come to their mother almost without fail.

    So I was pleased when Scott Anderson, our older son, called his mother this morning for Mother's Day. After they'd talked for about half an hour, I got on the telephone to find out how his new job as a game developer at Kaos Studios in NYC was going and how he liked his new overpriced Manhattan mini-apartment.

    We chatted for about 15 minutes with Joyce frequently interrupting my conversation with him to offer a few more motherly pearls of wisdom and love. Just when I was about to hang up, Scott said he had one more thing he'd like to tell us. 

    Six weeks ago, Scott and his friend, Steve Swink, presented at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco the early stages of the computer game, Shadow Physics, they've been working on in their spare time for the past year or so. After the presentation, Scott was interviewed about the dynamics of the game.

    That interview, which was posted three weeks ago on YouTube, already has more than 101,000 views. That's not to play a game but to see Scott talk about his unfinished game. There are also more than 300 comments about the game or--to be more specific--the video of the game.

    Here's one comment I particularly like: "this is really an all around amazing idea for a game...i would definitely pick this up if it became available. the whole concept is so abstract yet understandable and explores a whole new dimension of thinking and ability to adapt because nothing like this has ever been done before. amazing idea. 5 stars. this is going in my favs."

    No, the comment is not from Scott's mother but from someone whose nickname is touRR30.

    But Mother's Day or not, it was me with the swollen chest. Afterall it was me who brought the first PC into the house 23 years ago, when Scott was only three. It was me who bought him computer games and gave the preschooler unrestrained access to my $2000 machine. It was me who sent him off to computer camp at Stanford University when he was 13. It was me who enrolled him in a math camp at the Illinois Institute of Technology the summer his 14th birthday. It was me who arranged, when he was in the 9th grade, for a year-long apprenticeship with Ali at CompuServ Plus where he learned to build his own computer from scratch. And it was me who took him to the Chicago Internet Street Fair just as he was beginning his senior year in high school, which led an internship at cyberPIXIE where he first learned how to program for wireless devices.

    I may have been MIA  for the lion's share of the diaper changing, but I made my personal parental contributions and I'm seeing them pay off. So, while I may or may not get a call from Scott on Father's Day, all things being equal, this was a very good Mother's Day for me.

    And should Shadow Physics get picked up by some big game distributor and should he become another one of those twenty-something Internet multi-millionaires, I won't be too disappointed if he fails to call me on Father's Day because he's too busy designing his next big hit--a new shiny red Porche in dear old dad's garage will do just fine.

    (Here's the YouTube video of Shadow Physics.)