The Whacko's 1st Interview

**BURLINGTON, VERMONT**

 **[Winter has come later this season, as it has every year since the end**
**of the war. Snow blankets the house and surrounding farmland and frosts**
**the trees that shade the dirt track by the river. Everything about this**
**scene is peaceful, except for the man with me. He insists on calling**
**himself “the Whacko,” because “everyone else calls me that, why**
**shouldn’t you?” His stride is fast and purposeful, the cane given to him**
**by his doctor (and wife) serves only to stab at the air.]**

 To be honest, I wasn’t surprised to be nominated for vice president.
Everyone knew a coalition party was inevitable. I’d been a rising star,
at least until I “self-destructed.” That’s what they said about me,
right? All the cowards and hypocrites who’d rather die than see a real
man express his passion. So what if I wasn’t the world’s best
politician? I said what I felt, and I wasn’t afraid to say it loud and
clear. That’s one of the main reasons I was the logical choice for
copilot. We made a great team; he was the light, I was the heat.
Different parties, different personalities, and, let’s not kid
ourselves, different skin colors as well. I knew I wasn’t the first
choice. I know who my party secretly wanted. But America wasn’t ready to
 go that far, as stupid, ignorant, and infuriatingly Neolithic as it
sounds. They’d rather have a screaming radical for a VP than another one
 of “those people.” So I wasn’t surprised at my nomination. I was
surprised at everything else.

 **You mean the elections?**

 Elections? Honolulu was still a madhouse; soldiers, congressmen,
refugees, all bumping into one another trying to find something to eat
or a place to sleep or just to find out what the hell was going on. And
that was paradise next to the mainland. The Rocky Line was just being
established; everything west of it was a war zone. Why go through all
the trouble of elections when you could have Congress simply vote for
extended emergency powers? The attorney general had tried it when he was
 mayor of New York, almost got away with it, too. I explained to the
president that we didn’t have the energy or resources to do anything but
 fight for our very existence.

 **What did he say?**

 Well, let’s just say he convinced me otherwise.

 **Can you elaborate?**

 I could, but I don’t want to mangle his words. The old neurons aren’t firing like they used to.

 **Please try.**

 You’ll fact-check with his library?

 **I promise.**

 Well…we were in his temporary office, the “presidential suite” of a
hotel. He’d just been sworn in on Air Force Two. His old boss was
sedated in the suite next to us. From the window you could see the chaos
 on the streets, the ships at sea lining up to dock, the planes coming
in every thirty seconds and ground crew pushing them off the runway once
 they landed to make room for new ones. I was pointing to them, shouting
 and gesturing with the passion I’m most famous for. “We need a stable
government, fast!” I kept saying. “Elections are great in principle but
this is no time for high ideals.”

 The president was cool, a lot cooler than me. Maybe it was all that
military training…he said to me, “This is the only time for high ideals
because those ideals are all that we have. We aren’t just fighting for
our physical survival, but for the survival of our civilization. We
don’t have the luxury of old-world pillars. We don’t have a common
heritage, we don’t have a millennia of history. All we have are the
dreams and promises that bind us together. All we have…[struggling to
remember]…all we have is what we want to be.” You see what he was
saying. Our country only exists because people believed in it, and if it
 wasn’t strong enough to protect us from this crisis, then what future
could it ever hope to have? He knew that America wanted a Caesar, but to
 be one would mean the end of America. They say great times make great
men. I don’t buy it. I saw a lot of weakness, a lot of filth. People who
 should have risen to the challenge and either couldn’t or wouldn’t.
Greed, fear, stupidity, and hate. I saw it before the war, I see it
today. My boss was a great man. We were damn lucky to have him.

 The business of elections really set the tone for his entire
administration. So many of his proposals looked crazy at first glance,
but once you peeled back the first layer, you realized that underneath
there existed a core of irrefutable logic. Take the new punishment laws,
 those really set me off. Putting people in stocks? Whipping them in
town squares!?! What was this, Old Salem, the Taliban’s Afghanistan? It
sounded barbaric, un-American, until you really thought about the
options. What were you going to do with thieves and looters, put them in
 prison? Who would that help? Who could afford to divert able-bodied
citizens to feed, clothe, and guard other able-bodied citizens? More
importantly, why remove the punished from society when they could serve
as such a valuable deterrent? Yes, there was the fear of pain—the lash,
the cane—but all of that paled when compared to public humiliation.
People were terrified of having their crimes exposed. At a time when
everyone was pulling together, helping each other out, working to
protect and take care of one another, the worst thing you could do to
someone was to march them up into the public square with a giant poster
reading “I Stole My Neighbor’s Firewood.” Shame’s a powerful weapon, but
 it depended on everyone else doing the right thing. No one is above the
 law, and seeing a senator given fifteen lashes for his involvement in
war profiteering did more to curb crime than a cop on every street
corner. Yes, there were the work gangs, but those were the recidivists,
those who’d been given chances time and time again. I remember the
attorney general suggesting that we dump as many of them into the
infested zones as possible, rid ourselves of the drain and potential
hazard of their continued presence. Both the president and I opposed
this proposition; my objections were ethical, his were practical. We
were still talking about American soil, infested yes, but, hopefully one
 day to be liberated. “The last thing we needed,” he said “was to come
up against one of these ex-cons as The New Grand Warlord of Duluth.” I
thought he was joking, but later, as I saw the exact thing happen in
other countries, as some exiled criminals rose to command their own
isolated, and in some cases, powerful fiefdoms, I realized we’d dodged
one hell of a speeding bullet. The work gangs were always an issue for
us, politically, socially, even economically, but what other choice did
we have for those who just refused to play nice with others?

 **You did use the death penalty.**

 Only in extreme cases: sedition, sabotage, attempted political
secession. Zombies weren’t the only enemies, at least not in the
beginning.

 **The Fundies?**

 We had our share of religious fundamentalists, what country didn’t?
Many of them believed that we were, in some way, interfering with God’s
will.

 **[He chuckles.]**

 I’m sorry, I’ve gotta learn to be more sensitive, but for cryin’ out
loud, you really think the supreme creator of the infinite multiverse is
 going to have his plans unraveled by a few Arizona National Guardsmen?

 **[He waves the thought away.]**

 They got a lot more press than they should have, all because that
nut-bird tried to kill the president. In reality, they were much more a
danger to themselves, all those mass suicides, the “mercy” child
killings in Medford…terrible business, same with the “Greenies,” the
leftie version of the Fundies. They believed that since the living dead
only consumed animals, but not plants, it was the will of the “Divine
Goddess” to favor flora over fauna. They made a little trouble, dumping
herbicide in a town’s water supply, booby-trapping trees so loggers
couldn’t use them for war production. That kind of ecoterrorism eats up
headlines but didn’t really threaten our national security. The Rebs, on
 the other hand: armed, organized political secessionists. That was
easily our most tangible danger. It was also the only time I ever saw
the president worried. He wouldn’t let on, not with that dignified,
diplomatic veneer. In public, he treated it as just another “issue,”
like food rationing or road repair. He’d say in private…“They must be
eliminated swiftly, decisively, and by any means necessary.” Of course,
he was only talking about those within the western safe zone. These
diehard renegades either had some beef with the government’s wartime
policy or had already planned to secede years before and were just using
 the crisis as their excuse. These were the “enemies of our country,”
the domestic ones anyone swearing to defend our country mentions in his
or her oath. We didn’t have to think twice about an appropriate response
 to them. But the secessionists east of the Rockies, in some of the
besieged, isolated zones…that’s when it got “complicated.”

 **Why is that?**

 Because, as the saying went, “We didn’t leave America. America left
us.” There’s a lot of truth to that. We deserted those people. Yes, we
left some Special Forces volunteers, tried to supply them by sea and
air, but from a purely moral standing, these people were truly
abandoned. I couldn’t blame them for wanting to go their own way, nobody
 could. That’s why when we began to reclaim lost territory, we allowed
every secessionist enclave a chance for peaceful reintegration.

 **But there was violence.**

 I still have nightmares, places like Bolivar, and the Black Hills. I
never see the actual images, not the violence, or the aftermath. I
always see my boss, this towering, powerful, vital man getting sicker
and weaker each time. He’d survived so much, shouldered such a crushing
burden. You know, he never tried to find out what had happened to his
relatives in Jamaica? Never even asked. He was so fiercely focused on
the fate of our nation, so determined to preserve the dream that created
 it. I don’t know if great times make great men, but I know they can
kill them.