Summer of ’16

By Richard Segal

Summer of 16

The summer of 16 opened with storms of biblical proportions, and this was an ominous backdrop to the June 23 referendum. However, move aside Denmark, something was rotten in a lot of places. As events transpired, Brexit proved a sideshow to a wacky season that included coups that couldnt shoot straight, no-you-dont presidential and parliamentary elections in which the real contest may have been between the virtual and the actual vote, and giving new life and meaning to the term turducken. A populist was inaugurated in East Asia, and an impeachment cycle was completed in Brazil, neither newsworthy enough to pass the cut for this story. Apols Brazil, but you got a whole book last time. Brexit was a sideshow, but it was my sideshow, and it wasnt the only sludge I had to deal with during the summer of 16.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Oct 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524664770

Richard Segal

Richard Segal, an American citizen, resides in London, England, and works as an economic and financial consultant. He has written widely about matters relating to global public policy over the years. His most recent novel was The Man Who Knew the Answer.

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© 2016 Richard Segal. All rights reserved.

Summer of ‘16, for whom the bill, by Richard Segal, is a work of fiction. Any references to real people, living or dead, and actual events, organizations or locations, are intended purely to provide context or reference points. All remaining characters, places, names, incidents, dialogue and opinions are wholly fictional and their resemblance, if any, to real life counterparts is entirely coincidental. No inferences or assumptions about any personal opinions should be drawn from the material enclosed herein, and no such representations should be made.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 10/21/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5246-6476-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-6477-0 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

The Real Beavis

Witchiepoo

Freedom or Security?

Shockwave has Crashed

The Polemicists are Back

Agents 68

SlamDown

Sanford & Son

Canadian Number?

Throwback

Forty Two

May Jane’s Last Dance

No Batter, No Batter …

… and He Could Not Sah-Wing!

Chez Quebec

Peas in a Pod

Gotta Get a Guru

A Turnkey Coup, or, Calling all Muhtars

Who Says Democracy is Overrated

The Jewish Patient

This only happens to other people

They Lied to our Face

But Back to the Real World

I’m Afraid You Lose Five Points

The Birth of Peter

Negotiation

I Hear You Knocking

I Now Pronounce You Director of Strategy

Stacking up with the Actor

Tank

Todd

The Actor, Part 3

There will Always be a Germany

Renat’s Return

The Last Set of Doors Will Open

Paydirt

Requiem and Renewal

Previously by Richard Segal

The Russian Economy

Crash, Burn, Hurricane

Trilogy Year

Hitting the Tenspot

Nectar of the Lavender

Cookbook for a New Europe

The Great Art Deco Chase

Three Days in July

Return of the Drama Prince

The Victory Walk

Richard’s Eleven

The Day the Muses Died

Uneasy Riding

Surfing the Urban Wave

Polo in the Snow

Birch

Parrot and the Rooster

To the students

The games of the 30th Olympiad in 2012 are awarded to … Lon-don.

With this single sentence, the entire fabric of a bilateral relationship was overturned. Paris had been odds on to snare victory, but London managed to sneak past the post. It may never be revealed whether true chicanery was involved, although the arrogance of French politicians is rumored to have swung the tide. If you’re President of the French Fifth Republic and in the mood to bait the quality of Finnish cuisine, better to leave your superiority complex at home until after the balloting, at which point hopefully you’ll have more pertinent topics on your mind. In Finland, they eat bear, so perhaps not a swift move in the first place.

Nonetheless, the English cut a deal to give Germany free rein to host the 2006 World Cup, and then promptly prevaricated, so who suggests the Olympics are all about fair play. Legacy value is another selling point to local residents reluctant to tolerate the inconvenience for a month, but the evidence is mixed. London has a stadium in a once derelict area that was utilized once or twice before being handed to a privately owned FC, but as far as urban regeneration goes, it doesn’t stack up to say, the pop ups that have sprung up under any random railway arch. To British politicians and journalists, saying is doing. By contrast, the mayors of Paris set aside a tract of land in the expected certainly of winning the contest, but rather than moping and leaving the rectangle empty when they returned tail beneath their legs, transformed it into a family friendly park, bringing the edge of the peripheral 17th closer to the center, with chain restaurants yes, but not of the mass mass market variety. Perhaps this is more than poetic justice, that Paris lost, and as events were supposed to pan out, because its municipal planning is sound, at least when it comes to family friendly parks.

By contrast, for all the promise of the legacy sites from the 2012 quadrennial, we’re left with a new shopping mall, a promenade in the east of nowhere and memories of trains not working after major stadium events, of ‘horse garden parades’ transformed into makeshift arenas, and vague concepts such as anniversary games and spoof sketches written for the Queen. Despite a few hiccups, those meets were a success, and most have forgotten the almost weren’ts that caused many panics and helped Mitt Romney to lose an election. He poured on the scorn shortly beforehand - some of you guys aren’t gonna make it - he warned to the ABC Network, stating what seemed to be the obvious, when he ought to have smirked and recalled the old TV hero saying that ‘it will be alright on the night.’ Smirks sell. However, if Athens at its inept worse could pull off an Olympics with only 112 years of practice, then so could London with only seven.

Where London doesn’t shine is municipal planning, but rather accidental planning, the spontaneous flash mob shop that succeeds in spite of the authorities. I think of the unintentionally sunken ship, and subsequently the coral and fish attracted to it. I think of my idea of a ‘disused’ army barracks that might attract a unique combination of hippies and ‘heads, initially, and like compost, it thrives and eventually becomes a cultural attraction, from transient to permanent. Quietly, the concept of pop-ups and crowd funding has become the acceptable face of mainstream, acceptable to me, too, and this is a trend the futurists did not foresee. However, London’s spontaneous developments are only possible because foreigners play a large role. London is a major beneficiary of the clear outs that have periodically occurred in Eastern and Western Europe, the big secret being that without these clusters that have quietly assimilated, it would be back to the glory days of the 1970s. The actual leaders, alongside the elite, are descendants of Indians, Germans, Czechs and so on, and the future leaders are French, Italian and Spanish. The creativity is internationally oriented, the lethargy and inertia is inward facing, and the tail wagging the dog is the twain that shall never meet.

What the one man two gov’nors have not learned is that whereas open jars of honey smell fine, they attract flies, which they should place where people aren’t. Nevertheless, the flies have a right to vote and vote they will, whether or not this is based on actual information or xenothropic hearsay. Yah, yah, let’s beat up the immigrant! Then let’s kick a man while he’s down!

Kick ‘em when they’re stiff, kick ‘em all around, just as in Egypt after a narrow victory in the first democratic election, when the victor interpreted his win as a mandate to remake the entire country in his image, and nearly half the country opposed him and his aspiration, some vigorously. However, after a year and a half of ineffective mayhem and public frustration, new generals level-headedly took him out of the picture and life went back to its chaotic normal.

This English Spring, though, it doesn’t reflect democracy, but rather divide and flail. A narrow victory when the question is loaded and no one can win gives no segment the moral entitlement to initiate a reign of terror. I was tempted to suggest the world has learned nothing from the 1920s and 1930s, but rather we have no right to say never again. It is old and trite to cite Chou En-Lai to the effect that it is too soon to draw definitive conclusions from the French Revolution, but we haven’t.

Rightly or wrongly, the French have been functional at forced assimilation, whether this be the Huguenots or the Celts, or in certain instances the Bretons. The English royals permitted the Scots and the Welsh to retain and regain their identity, whereas in France national identities were stamped out. The flies should realise much of the country’s character derives from the immigrants and other foreigners, exactly as it has since Roman times, and by fighting this trend, the indigenous population can only make its life worse.

THE REAL BEAVIS

While the tabloid proprietor was working behind the scenes, waiting for it to be his fifteen minutes again, the mainstream media trotted out stories from decades earlier, in which the sneakster raked a colleague for having once worked for a rival, behind his colleague’s back of course. ‘If he worked for them, he must be a wannabe.’ Of course, though, the word wasn’t rival and the word wasn’t wannabe. The problem with the mainstream media, or MSM, is that it’s either following and therefore lagging the trends, or pandering to its readership to generate new customers, and both are a path to lowest common denominator.

Meanwhile, the US endured yellow journalism a long time ago and our forebears quickly learned the lesson. Sorry, not sorry? No, just no. In the US, I have been told by the son of a journalistic family that once the profession was sanitized, it became respected in response and those in the industry behave accordingly in the present. By contrast, British journalism never grew up. In the 20th Century, it celebrated the man who mapped the DNA, in the 21st, it celebrates the man who pioneered fast food maps.

It is no surprise that American newspapers win awards for their coverage and their exposés, whereas British counterparts are famed for inside pages in color, bad puns on the front pages, business merger rumours that are rarely true, and stings of the gullible. This isn’t the mark of them all, but it is the rule of thumb. As a result, the news section stoops low, such that intelligent individuals are also sucked into them, because it gets the scoops and reports the gossip, it is good at eavesdropping and hacking phones without security features. I could sink my teeth into Evelyn Waugh if he wrote the column on the inside back cover of the weekend glossy, but wherefore art thou, his rightful descendants?

How can they be aware of this stuff if they are not tipped off, because the info they print is too personal, they can not be mind readers. Not even the police could have this access, these forces which have also been turned, which were so busy selling tip offs to, first the tabloids and subsequently anyone who would pay for the data and after that anyone who would take it at all - a heads up on a dawn raid of an innocent civilian - because everyone was getting off on it. Did no one question whether this was just a bit greedy, just a bit infantile, just a bit out of control, like the contrived cliff-hangers in Mean Girls? The worst part is that the public lapped it up, couldn’t get enough of the sport known as gauping, oh lookie someone has tripped on a stick and fallen in the mud and scraped his knee, let’s stare at him in his misery, he can’t move, let’s edge closer until we’re two inches away from his face before he turns around and slugs us, utilising his final ounce of energy before he expires. You can slug the gaupers one by one if you would like to try, but they are hydra like, three will emerge in their place.

When the tabloids were rumbled, the MSM brayed for bloody murder, such was its thirst for revenge that the gutter press recoiled in shame, and the MSM piled it on, front page after front page, leader column after leader column, j’accuse after j’accuse. They traditionally sit on the fence so often they grow leg chilblain, but on this topic they were verging on caustic. No more life’s little absurdities for a variation. The national consciousness took note and the guileful little offender responded, or did he? With notice of about ten days, he announced the closure of his offending Sunday paper, the News of the Boos, which prodded the nation into a brief period of mourning. A true Princess Diana moment, before she was rebranded as Di. How tragic that a scandal sheet which has survived crisis after crisis be forced to shut after 150 inglorious years, we must ourselves bear some of the guilt. Some 186 honest and hardworking journalists have lost their jobs because of the search for the truth they strived for each and every week.

How will we fill the time between courses during Sunday roast? How will we learn the intimate conversations of celebrity power couples in the future? However, it was all a ruse, the little leprechaun had one up his sleeve all along, his ruse needn’t be that cunning when the readership is LCD. He merely reopened the Not the News under another name and this time not too clever, following a further suitable ten days of mourning. He would be free to quietly offend at will in the future, absolved of all past crimes.

The watchdogs should have locked his ID cards and thrown away the key, and shut his aberrant media outlets, except one. A proper punishment would compel him to continue publishing the Not the News each and every Sunday, regardless of the cost or circulation, and let’s see how it fares without the tip offs. Instead, the nation let him go free. When the witchlette dies, we’ll organize a parade to dance around his grave.

The post referendum charade lasted a similar ten days. The sinister cast enjoyed its minutes of fame and disappeared. However, it is necessary to discuss and debate the weenie cast of characters, even if the outcome was obvious in retrospect, both for the sake of posterity and because I can’t let them get away with it, murder, and the remainder of their behavior. The wits who write for the MSM declared this baker’s week the post fact world, during which saying was also doing, but they share guilt for the depleted national condition, because for too long they were cheerleaders for the right-on and the trivial. They may have been painfully funny at times, but they were preaching to the converted and they didn’t have a track record of normalcy during normal times.

The MSM was a voice of reason when the tabloids were spinning out of balance and nothing was praised so much as stupidity (one man’s rank inexperience was another’s fresh face), but when hyper-crisis reverts to a constant drip feed of the doldrums, their value added will return to zero. Yes, their put downs were thought provoking - ‘I labelled him crap because he’s too mediocre to be shit’ or ‘such a miserable lot they’d vote against Christmas’ - amusing once but self-indulgent after that. To them, I’m a foul weather friend, although in all fairness and honesty, I’m not the one paid by the column inch to mock and carp. Should they awaken in a cold sweat asking themselves if they were just that little bit garrulous the day before, or did their subject truly deserve to be perforated? When the sun comes out, what are they going to write about? Not sure, because I’ll be making hay.

WITCHIEPOO

The leadership and therefore succession battle became a contest between one safe pair of hands and four also rans, who were eliminated or dropped out one by one. The bookies’ favorite opted against declaring his candidacy minutes before the filing deadline, having had the woolly cardy pulled out from under him two hours beforehand. He was stabbed in the back by a presumed close ally, who chose to toss his own Cheshire hat into the ring having assured the great public for months that he would be a terrible party leader, yet somehow managed to secure 18 votes in the primary round. When announcing his run for the gold, he admitted that his conscience was bothering him, he couldn’t accept a de facto partnership with the front runner, who in his view was not prime minster material, but rather a pathological blair of the showboating and stonewalling breed. This erstwhile supporter of the front runner and presumed chancellor to be (akin to the ‘colonel’ who would have become central bank governor had a July coup succeeded, according to ‘blueprints’ reviewed by the DP), seconded his wife to write an email which was accidentally leaked, and her catchphrase ‘do your stubborn best’ became famous for eleven minutes. He was renowned for his ultra-polite and profound stand-up impersonation - Aren’tcha just tired of experts runnin around and being all expert like - before praising those experts self righteously.

The would-be’s held forth their saga to be a modern version of Game of Thrones, but it was more like Desperate Housewives, and there is no mistaking who was Bree or the sly murderous pharmacist next door. His failure was a blessing in disguise for her (I mean his) wife, who could have her husband back and she could return to her highly paid job of critiquing celebrity eye liner.

The family man candidate garnered even fewer spotlights, which meant that only a selection of his Christian Right slogans could find their way into the public domain. The lord our Jesus declared that a marriage should be the union of two children, a house and a dog, shortened for the sake of the allotted time. Well and someone leaked a handful of his social media messages, which lacked style points but were mild in comparison with genuine pretenders to the throne. He should have been bucking for the role of high school gym teacher with a crush on the assistant principal’s niece in a straight to video movie rather than leader of the band, or if he was going to copy paste some lyrics, he should have been born Labour and opted for Mrs Brown you’ve got a lovely daughter.

And then there was the Led Balloon, who gathered a scary amount of momentum and seemed to be the choice of the party members, even though she was civilly derided by most of the conservative MPs. The parliamentarians who stood behind her were only slightly less innocuous than the voice box that remained at the end of the first Joker movie, and I suspect they fell into the saying is believing trap, they had to be seen supporting one of their own or clearly also said whatever came into their heads. They could have been hucksters for a household cleaning product they had never heard of before and were merely reading from a TelePrompTer. This is a rilly good dishwashing liquid, she’ll make a rilly good prime minister at the most critical juncture of the past 60 years.

Her proudest supporter, a former party leader who came, saw and faded in no time, because he was the embodiment of the quintessential party member, cried foul any time she was criticised, in other words whenever she was caught out, even though he was rumoured to be a few brick-heads short of a full load himself. If ‘embellish’ never becomes word of the week again that is OK by me. Her decision to join the party, aka enter the race was predicated