This post is part of the May 2013 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s prompt is “Dialogue Only” with a secondary prompt of “Wrong Place, Right Time.”

“So tell me, Cummings, how’s it feel to be in the pocket of the system, doing its dirty work? You know, I’m actually glad you turned up tonight. As Œ says, the true measure of any movement is in the enemies it makes. In you, we’ve got someone who stands for a thoroughly corrupt and rotten plutocracy, making our ideals stand out in stronger relief, and someone who’s so wretchedly incompetent that victory is less a question of why than of when.”

“You trying to goad me into a fight, Strasser? I think you’ve got me beaten there with those Christmas hams you call fists. It’s just like your so-called ‘movement’—violence and intimidation and thuggery dressed up with a few ten-dollar words.”

“You’re one to talk about ten-dollar words,” he grinned. “That’s all you write for the Guardian after all. Bankrupt ideas and lazy support for oppression and inequity wrapped up in some vocabulary words with a light glaze of sarcasm.”

“You’d rather I was breaking and entering? Hacking and stealing? Framing and lying?”

“At least then I’d know you were serious about what you believed in.”

“I don’t believe in anything! It’s all just rhetoric people use as an excuse to do what they please. Ideology and politics—of any kind—are poison, and just because you drank that particular kool-aid that doesn’t make it any less toxic!”

“Ooh, got you a little riled up there, have I? Easy, tiger. You know as well as I do that saying you don’t have any politics is just a chickenshit way of saying you don’t have the balls to fess up to the politics you’ve had all along. If you don’t believe in anything, why were you out with that camera and your little brute squad trying to catch the Nothing doing whatever you think we were doing?”

“Because you’ve been making a fool of me pretty much constantly ever since you sprayed that first bit of terrible graffiti on campus.”

“As if you need help to make a fool of yourself. Did it ever occur to you that we were screwing with you not out of any grudge but because you’re an easy target? You’re a representative of everything that campus culture has degenerated into, Eric Cummings: a lazy self-centered slacker who stands by a system built on repression and misery because it’s easy.”

“I don’t think tracking you and your cronies is something a slacker would do. I’ve got a nice big stack of unfinished video games at home and an even bigger stack of books I could finish writing. Hell, if I had a big stack of nails to pound through my forehead it would be more pleasant that being within a 50-yard radius of you and yours.”

“That’s the typical reactionary mindset. You’re trying to swat away the forces of change so you can go back to your little cocoon of brain-rotting, mind-numbing opiates and keep implicitly condoning and colluding with the abuses of the edifice that makes it possible. But the thing you and Mayfield and those stooges in your cell don’t want to face is that the Nothing is lightning in a bottle. Once it’s out, there’s no putting it back.”

Check out this month’s other bloggers, all of whom have posted or will post their own responses:
Ralph Pines
pushingfordream
articshark
pyrosama
Sudo_One
Nissie
Angyl78
Lady Cat
U2Girl
MsLaylaCakes
SuzanneSeese
LanaK

  • Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!