If I were a better writer than I am, I would be able to smoothly work the following thought processes into the story and it would be totally understandable and believable.
But I have limits in my writing ability and the M-W-F format makes it difficult to stitch together a coherent gestalt of how Shannon thinks and where she is going.
BUT: As a blogger I can toss in 'splainer pieces like this one.
Why don't vice cops arrest the drug dealers on the corner?
Primarily because their replacements are stacked five-deep behind them and the stree-corner will be vacant for about 27 minutes before the guy you whisked down to the station is replaced.
The vice cop will invest at least two hours of his life and $1200 in administrative costs to put a 27 minute air-bubble in the drug pipeline and the two-bit drug dealer gets a hot meal out of the deal to-boot.
The vice cop might drag him down to the station to squeeze him for information. Or if the cop is forced to do it by the dealer committing some other crime in front of him.
If Ce'Diff got whacked, she would be replaced in a couple of days by a clone that was at least as vile and as repulsive.
Convergent evolution
The idea of "convergent evolution" is that the species that exist in nearly identical habitats will look very similar even if they habitats are 8000 miles apart and the genetic base of those species were totally different.
Every "High desert" has the equivalent of kangaroo-mice, pack-rats, rattlesnakes and red-tailed hawks. It does not matter if it is in Nevada, Australia, or Iran. Life-forms evolve and bend to most optimally harvest moisture and calories while avoiding potentially lethal environmental challenges. Consequently, the habitat ends up being inhabited by remarkably similar looking "chess pieces".
A thoughtful person might step back a few paces and ask "Was there an ecological niche for Ce'Diff in the business world in 1990?" and for the most part the answer is a resounding "NO!".
The reason is that the system that makes Ce'Diff inevitable is wasteful of human time and capital. Businesses that tolerated Ce'Diff in 1985 would last about as long as a company that was trying to peddle NASA priced toilet seats across from a Menards outlet.
In the core of Shannon's heart, she is a banker. She knows at a cellular level that there MUST be some vast, hidden subsidies that keep the Ce'Diff system in place. Find the engine that moves those subsidies and throw a handful of grit into the gearbox and she will do a thousand times more damage to the system than throwing battery acid into Ce'Diff's face.
That is the careful deep thinking surgical method.
ReplyDeleteThere is also the Curtis LeMay method,(kill enough of them and they will get tired of fighting) which tends to rear it's head up when times get tribal. I do not use the word lightly or with reference to race- all people have their tribes. - our society is bound together by rules based in the idea of individual responsibility. Going tribal, ala Hatfield and McCoy, tosses the idea of individual responsibility out the door, and replaces it with group (or clan) responsibility. That ends up a wide and frightening war of attrition.
Example- no drug dealer is arrested. They get shot, then the next one gets shot, then everyone they are seen with gets shot, then their barber gets shot, and the person who sold them a beer. In short, this is the exact tactic Mark Bowden talked about in "Killing Pablo". They simply whittled his support structure down to a nub, till all that was left was Escobar and one bodyguard running around like rats in a cage.
Another example is the antifa slogan- ACAB- They designated a tribe-no longer the one bad cop who beat up someone for no reason, it's now all cops.
The unfortunate corollary to all this is everyone will be assigned a tribe , whether or not they wish to belong to it.
Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, a co-worker offered that "we should give the dealers bigger guns and marksmanship training and everyone else bullet proof vests, then go on vacation for a month."
DeleteIt was presumed that the end result would be a lot of very new faces on corners and pockmarked storefronts, with no other changes.
Still......
I look forward to a master class in sand in the gearbox.
ReplyDeletePeople like Ce'Diff (like most faceless troublemaking bureaucrats) seldom feel discomfort for their actions.
Well said, and yes, on the money...
ReplyDeleteJoe, I'm not going to get hung up on a typo or a missing leter or two. I'm here for the mental gymnastics of trying to put myself in the characters shoes and see if I can guess what happens next.
ReplyDeleteThat's where the fun is. Keep cranking them out, if I don't get it the first time around I will read it again.
HTR
Interesting thought exercise. Thanks for the cud (to chew on)!
ReplyDeleteMan, you got my noodle cooking...
ReplyDelete"The reason is that the system that makes Ce'Diff inevitable is wasteful of human time and capital."
I can recall in ~early 2000s sitting in on a round table hiring discussion, there were 2 positions open and we had to pick at least 1 woman out of the applicant pool.
HAD to.
I think I am starting to see where this started. It gets the gears turning, but I'm not seeing through the fog yet where to throw the sand. I'm thinking of that cartoon meme going around these days where the hiring manager and applicant share an exchange and the applicants retort is "careful now..."
We were told we had to hire at least 1 female (by the black female HR manager I might add...) Fortunately the trade is populated by talented people of both genders, we found a qualified applicant, who also possessed a vagina, at birth, but I remember distinctly talking about it with my boss (who was also male), and he just shook his head - not worth the fight with HR was his answer (though I was free to persue if I wanted to stir the pot).
Yeah, thats how we got here. 18 bajillion times people said not worth the fight and just let it slide, instead of standing up for principles. Its misogynistic to demand a gendered outcome for hiring, no matter what gender, but nobody fought it. I could wax on about how principled people fight for reasons, even when it goes against them, but thats not what we are anymore.
Oh, a transgression?
But its in my favor?
Nothing to see here...
We are not a principled people. Women should be standing up for men defending hiring practices, but they're not. Any black person that supports hiring quotas is inherently racist, but, they don't tell you to pick the most qualified candidate, do they? No, in fact if a black man DOES point to this fact they get cancelled (looking at you Bill Cosby, before the roofies).
As a people, we suck.
I'm left wondering if this is a new thing, or we were always like this and its just our turn to take the blinders off? Human nature has NOT changed in thousands of years. There was plenty of pre-marital sex last century, but we pretend promiscuity is a modern scourge? My Mom was born 7 months after gramma and grampa got married in Germany in 1946. Ummmm.....
Heller doesn't fully appreciate yet how lucky he is. ERJ, your ability to play 3-D chess is most impressive. Like the Seven Cows saga, this story is a master class.
ReplyDeleteSome observations on the comments above:
I recoil at the misuse of the word "gender" in place of the correct word, "sex". I was taught that "gender" is only a linguistic term applied to nouns in certain languages. A person's sex is male or female. We don't say our farm animals are male or female "gender". Why should it be different with humans?
The difference between 1946 and today is that gramma and grampa got married and made a family. Today grampa scoots for some other booty and gramma is supported by the government, which means your Dad probably went to prison or became a homosexual and you were never born.
The Curtis Lemay method is great if you are willing to go to open kinetic warfare. That is the second-worst case scenario. (The worst case is the commies win.) Like the Emperor's New Clothes, if the enemies can be made ridiculous in the eyes of the public, they lose their power. My problem with the so-called "meme war" is that our side's memes are mostly shared among friends and because of the compartmentalization of media, are not even seen by the wider public. Preaching to the choir does not make converts. I hope to change that a little next week, when I testify at the State House against a number of anti-2A bills. I plan to have a sheaf of appropriate memes to enter as evidence and will base my oral testimony on a few, and to distribute copies widely through the audience under the title, "What Do the Democrats Have to Say about This?"
Okay. I wasn't the only one flailing around in deep water. Thank you for the aside.
ReplyDeleteAs to the commenter's German grandparents... Was your mom full term or a little early? Man, in 45 - 46, who know if you were gonna live another day in Germany? War, then privation? He and she made a family, and it appears to have took. He was an honorable man in my book. You have a great heritage.
Opa was "on a U-boat in the North Atlantic." and that was all that was ever said... Oma had a great story about fleeing Berlin...
DeleteKnew an officer in the army, apparently it was a thing to be dating rank, in part b/c they were the only ones with reliable information about the war at the time. LOL it was even implied they were amorous, apparently Oma was a slut in her day! Anyways the Russians are closing in, tanks literally blocks away, she goes looking for and runs into her buddy who can't believe she's still there. "Grab your sister and whatever clothes you can and leave RIGHT NOW! Just start walking West, raise your arms when you see the Americans." And thats what happened!
After the war they met and got married and lived in West Germany not far from a US Air base where my Dad was stationed in the 60's as a photo interpreter/radio intercept... he came home with a bride like many GIs, and the rest is history!
Oh, and no know issues with Moms birth. Learned on Dads death bed it was a quickie wedding!
DeleteAND, when Opa died we learned he had a fling/love child with another woman up in Meinze because she hired a lawyer to lay stake to part of the estate! Oma knew the whole time and argued they had already paid her off and she shouldn't get anything.
ReplyDeleteUmmm, what'd you just say Grandma???? Lol! Man, the shit you learn when people die.
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