Minister Faust by From (html) (best ereader for pdf txt) 📗

F*O*O*Jsters was a death-knell indictment of his credibility, and of his bid for the directorship of the F*O*O*J’s operations.

Polls shunted him down from 75 to bottom out at 15 percent of decided voters. The Flying Squirrel had glided up to 50 percent. Even Spoiler Man at 18 percent had pulled ahead of Kareem.

In the five days since the story had plopped into the fan, the media had subjected Kareem’s life and career—his every article, utterance, deed, failure, and foible—to a public colonoscopy. The only division in the electorate seemed to be over which of Kareem’s “betrayals” was worse—violating his own vow of chastity to prosecute a “racially hypocritical” relationship with a white woman, or his racially paranoid denunciation of Hawk King.

(Shockingly, the media-ravenous Syndi Tycho had completely vanished from journalistic sonar screens; not even X-ray paparazzi had been able to snap a shot of her emerging from a trendy bathhouse or a four-star Kabbalah temple. Her publicist had issued only a single statement in the face of the Billi Biceps autobiography and Kareem scandal: “Ms. Tycho wishes to express her profound sadness at the lack of happiness being experienced by her colleagues at this time.”)

In the previous day’s edition of The Langston-Douglas Crisis, two of Kareem’s former comrades from the League of Angry Blackmen had accused him of being a “super sellout”; on the AANT program Oh No She Didn’t, Ms. Thang of the Supa Soul Sistas had demanded “the return of X-Man’s race card.” And Civil Rights–era icon the Spook had called Kareem “a militant negro threat to democracy as great as that of a Kyklos the Imperial Grand Dragon.”

Amid editorials describing Kareem as a “black supremacist” and “race-fixated head case,” Sentinel-Spectator accusations that he belonged to “a black hate group called the L*A*B, an ‘Ebonics’ acronym translating out to ‘Lots of Antiwhite Blacks,’ ” and a shocking editorial cartoon depicting Kareem as a bell-bottomed pimp wearing a KKK hood while soliciting Power Grrrl on the streets of Langston-Douglas, came the calls for Kareem to drop out of the election, recuse himself from investigating Hawk King’s death, and even resign from the F*O*O*J itself. The turkeys of Racialized Narcissistic Projection Neurosis had come home to roost, and were laying their eggs all over Kareem’s face.

Flashbulbs erupted like mortar fire when Kareem stepped awkwardly onto the stage at precisely four P.M. X-Man took his place at the table arranged with microphones from two dozen news outlets and was shortly joined by other members of the so-called X-Slate in the impending election: Gagarina Girl, candidate for Director of Personnel, and Dynamiss, candidate for Director of Finances, as well as their allies, the current Director of External Affairs, Shockra, and Director of Investigation, the Spectacle.

Flashes illuminated the emptiness of the final seat behind the nameplate for the X-Slate’s candidate for Director of Research & Development, the Periodic Man.

Kareem’s neck rocked side-to-side in the by-then loose collar of his ubiquitous white shirt, while his skullified eyes stared straight ahead, a poker face for facing the Grim Reaper. He looked as if he’d hardly slept or eaten in days.

Having escaped the labyrinth of Langston-Douglas to fly within tanning distance of the sun inside the F*O*O*J’s leadership nucleus, Kareem had allowed the wax of his racial hyper-rage to melt and scatter the crow’s feathers of his afro-paranoia, leaving him to plummet into the seat—and fate—he’d taken at that very moment.

“Time to watch this muthafucka squirm,” giggled André, grinning and literally rubbing his hands together.

I tried to catch André’s gaze, hoping to glimpse some of whatever could motivate such an intense psychemotional response toward the X-Man. But he was as fixed on the proceedings as a Roman senator in the Colosseum about to watch a Christian become cat food.

Kareem’s sole opportunity to salvage his career and psychemotional wellness from the Minotaur of his own delusions, and to flee the maze of his own misjudgment, was to accept full responsibility for his grievous errors and beg the public for forgiveness. Only by throwing himself on his sword, battle-ax, dagger, and pocket-knife could he excise the cancer that was consuming his very soul.

Meet the Press, Beat the Repression

Complaining that he’d been “quoted out of context” and citing his need as a young hero “to shock a deaf, dumb, and blind public into consciousness,” Kareem gave an opening statement that fell desperately short of the apology for which the press had clearly come looking.

His defensiveness intensifying during the “media analysis” section of his rant, he threw back into the reporters’ faces his by-then infamous quotation “I’ve been proudly hating all my life, hating the nation of millions holding us back. We opposing jive turkeys.”

“What I actually wrote,” he said, reading, “was, quote, In the 1960s at least we knew we were fighting the Man. We should’ve called him the Punk. But then in the 1970s, we lost sight and got obsessed with opposing ‘jive turkeys.’ By the 1980s, we’d whittled down our objective to battling sucker MCs. And by the nineties, the best we could do was oppose ‘playa haters.’ Well, I have been proudly hating all my life, hating the fools, suckers, and liars with expensive amplifiers who are blinding, deafening, and dumbing us down, and so I’ve been emphatically opposing the nation of millions holding us back, which sometimes—guess what?—is us. We spent too much damn time getting down. Now it’s time to get up. End quote.

“So listen, press. If you people’re going to attack me for what I wrote, at least have the intellectual integrity and the professionalism to quote me in full and attack me for what I actually said—”

Reporter #1: “Kareem, if you’re saying you don’t really hate and want to destroy all white people, why did you say you did? If you didn’t mean it, why did you say it?”

Reporter #2: “Is it true you own a spear inscribed with the words ‘I’m Gon Git You, Whitey’?”

Reporter #3: “Why, after Professor Hnossi Icegaard’s declaration of the Götterdämmerung, did you say that, quote, The