RENTON, Wash. — Cartoons depicting corrupt behavior of the Renton City Police Department have sparked a criminal investigation and scandal among locals. However, Chief of Police Kevin Milosevich has called off all official investigations, opting instead for guidance from McCarthy-era Secret Police.
Snitches close to Milosevich indicate the Chief altered his strategy because of a surge in public sympathy for the anonymous cartoonist, known only as Mr. FiddleSticks.
Milosevich’s close friend and spiritual adviser Lorraine McWorth told sources the Police Chief was desperately attempting to underplay the negative image of wildly corrupt law enforcement while simultaneously embracing its proven effectiveness.
“He’s taking a Gestapo-like approach to the investigation, now. Threatening phone calls, letter-bombs and kidnappings are sure to get his point across where traditional methods were failing. When he gets his guy, no one will ever know. Mr. Fiddlesticks will just disappear.”
On a brisk October morning in Brookline, a graduate student announced that he was an expert at something, to the total indifference of his friends, peers and vague associates.
The student was reported to Chronicle.SU by a local informant and subsequently identified by spiteful classmates as first year Benjamin Berkey. Berkey, an enthusiast of the dark witch house music scene, tacitly agreed to make a phone statement to me by making dozens of unsolicited calls to the office of The Soviet Chronicle.
“I’ve read many thick tomes so, like Prodicus, I’ve become adept at choosing words. Often I finish sentences for other people in more exact ways than they ever could have expressed themselves. So, I’ve decided to go on a mission for total exactitude in language. Any time anyone strays from the Oxford Dictionary definition of a word, I will correct them in public in an elitist fashion. This will have innumerable social benefits.”
Berkey then invited me to watch him do his work across town to his sparsely furnished Allston apartment. I spent the next eight hours watching him gruel over a footnote, intermittently taking breaks to masturbate and troll the Internet with obscure semantic and grammatical criticisms.
“Work is hard, but I spend every second of every day knowing that I’m making a difference and growing intellectually. I’ve got a bright future and will surely finish my program with a good job. Not many people can say that these days.”
He then agreed to show me his favorite local coffee shop, where he ordered us espressos only to reject them several times due to “the quality of the crema.”
The barista eventually gave up and told us to fuck ourselves. We took a seat in the back of the checker-floored bar, next to a group of bicycle messengers playing bones.
One of the messengers from the group next to us.
As we sat down, one of the dudes among them, a pierced courier wearing a Brooklyn cycling cap, put the finishing touches on a lengthy monologue.
“…and that just begs the question, ‘Is McInnes libertard or not?'”
“Excuse me, sir,” interjected Berkey, “but I believe that you’ve made a mistake. The expression ‘begs the question’ does not in fact designate something that raises questions, but instead refers to an instance of circular reasoning. Be warned.”
The messenger looked over at him and his septum piercing flicked a little spark of a glint in the light. A pug-faced drunken crusty messenger appeared from among the group.
“Why you gotta be a bitch, man? Nobody asked you, faggot. Nobody spoke to you.”
The altercation deeply shocked Berkey, who became horribly insulted. He began to shake and then suddenly walked out of the coffee bar and refused to answer subsequent calls to his cellphone.
I never heard from him again.
RIP, Benjamin Berkey
Update: Several weeks after our encounter, The Boston Globe reported that Berkey had disappeared without a trace. Even more strangely, authorities declined to open an investigation into his disappearance. His family’s attempts to sue the Boston Police Department were bizarrely dismissed in a similar fashion. And in a final twist, my dumbfounded reading of the report to The Chronicle office occasioned a smile in our editor, Kilgore Trout.
“Yeah, the sergeant at Boston PD actually clued me in weeks ago. Benjamin Berkey was administratively arrested as part of a law enforcement operation targeting known gang members and associates.”
While I don’t agree with his decision to name people specifically (note: I don’t care who he actually named), I find it difficult to disagree with this man on all but one issue. The notion that politically-minded Americans willing to give campaign contributions to honest politicians will somehow outweigh the collective corporate dollar is, like Paul Jay suggested, Utopian. It’s just so far from realistic that we could give enough money to enough candidates to turn the tides against the forces that be (and cheat to exist).
It was so funny (creepy) to me when campaign people came by my house seeking campaign contributions on behalf of Obama, after it was already so clear that he had the best media team in the Presidential history. How is that? Lotsa fucken money, folks. More than all of us put together could ever have come up with in order to stop him.
And it’s a well-known fact of politics, as well as the main reason people hate and distrust Washington, that corporations have a lot of money they’re willing to spend on people they know will protect their interests – and there are sleazy assholes willing to betray their countrymen by accepting it (and still can somehow sleep at night). Well, it’s nice to see someone stating it so poignantly and my only hope is this kind of articulation becomes mainstream. How that will happen without “big media” – or without big media hijacking the movement is beyond the scope of my imagination.
Please, Gods of Reason. Rescue us all from this sea of shit, and get me off the boat of feces. Or, stand up and think for yourselves, America. But don’t look to me; for even as a man of peace, I see no peaceful resolution.
