ORVILLE BAUMGARDNER AND THE WHISPERING WIND

“Dear members of the Libertarian National Convention, dear patrons of freedom for all, thank you for inviting me to speak here today in our nation’s capitol. Were I not a GOP castoff, a man without harbor or home, I suspect the honor of speaking to you is something you would not condone. In truth, I am merely a mariner adrift in a shattered boat, and the sea that I cleave is so barren that I hear no clarion call. I cannot even take heart in Bob Zimmerman’s claim that closure resides in the wind. The wind that assails my splintered craft offers no closure at all. Instead, it brings revelations so dark that they further chill my soul.

“And yet, you good folks have invited me to speak in this splendid assembly hall. So, although I’m unable to plant a seed that might lend us a common cause, at least, I can unearth the fallow soil whose fruits I now must bear.

“I was born in Castleberg, Indiana, sixty-two years ago, and I spent my childhood collecting stamps and gathering butterflies. No childhood excesses for me—I was utterly content to sit in the back of my classrooms and peek at Playboy mags. I attended Butler University, where I in no way distinguished myself, but my gentleman’s Cs were sufficient to earn me a bachelor’s degree in economics. After graduating, I challenged the Democrat incumbent in House District 54, and to my amazement, I won the seat with seventy percent of the vote. I do not attribute this to the power of my ideas, but because I had the good sense to express no ideas at all. Ideas are invariably half-baked, at their time of implementation, so I spent my time reading great books instead of proposed legislation. I daresay I have read over two hundred books, including all of Shakespeare’s plays, and I believe my talents would have been better served had I been a thespian. But instead, I chose to upstage my cronies and call them what they are: disciples of distraction and darlings of disarray.

“I wish I could say that a burning bush prompted my rebellion—that I cast off the yoke of servility because of divine inspiration. But, sadly, my turnabout was born from the merest of jealousies—from the fact that I, the most artful of bounders, was not handed my fair share of the plunder my fibs and embellishments enabled our party to steal. It was I who concocted the rumor that the dreaded COVID vaccine was injecting socialist dogma into unsuspecting brains. It was I who claimed that kiddie soccer was coached by pedophiles—perverts whose calling was not to teach soccer and nurture good sportsmanship but to march our dear boys to drag shows and turn them into queens. I even improved on the rumor that school shootings are staged events—I did this by assuring my constituents that the deep state wanted their guns so that government surgeons could storm their homes and make women out of men. So ingenious were my fables, so infectious my deceits, that I blush to confess that my docile supporters swallowed every word. How sad it is now to look back on myself as no more than a pickpocket’s shill, a raconteur whose gift for diversion and uninhibited tongue enabled the robber class to get away with its sleight of hand.

“I see that one of you has put up a hand. Lovely lady, please say your piece, and may I say that the pumps you are wearing complement your thighs? Did I become a prodigal son? you ask. Did I raise my heathen brow because I wished to hold up my head instead of wallowing at a trough? I repeat, gentle lady, that I became a pariah because I am a spiteful man—because I was paid a mere pittance for being the Charles Dickens of shams. Although my lies spurred millions to pervert the American dream, the corporate gluttons I profited did not seat me at their feast. Instead, I was paid just a few thousand dollars—a sum that hardly compared with the fortune Mitt Romney, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio shared. Those three are too woefully shopworn to fetch such a price for their souls, yet they were invited to dine with tycoons while I supped from a bowl of gruel.

“And so, being loathe to settle for such an insulting fee, I chose to take a pauper’s revenge on those who had overstepped of me. ‘Flatterers!’ I hollered. ‘Suckerfish! Eaters of broken meats! Shirkers of duty, soldiers of shams, corporate-indentured cheats! Since you do nothing but suck on the tit of Babylon’s Great Whore, an infamy has befallen you which I will no longer endure!’ And when they called me a miscreant, unworthy of their ranks, I cried, ‘I am truly a turncoat, but I’m no longer a traitor to truth!’

“How coldly those cannibals gazed at me with their narrow Cyclops eyes. How quickly they cast me from their cult and called me the Father of Lies. Had I achieved a murder or two they might have looked away, but I had committed the ultimate crime: the sin of disloyalty.

“Ah, I see that you have a question, good sir. Have I joined the Democrats now? Sir, my heart has become so wary, my hearing so acute, I can find no further relief in the sham of politics. Instead, I am pledged to towering seas and I listen to only the wind, a front that lends no pretense to the hollowness it brings. No, the wind replies in a voice so dry, so utterly alone, that it conjures up only the images of shipwrecks and ancient bones.

“So, what have I asked the wind? you may wonder. I have asked it if God is content to be cited as having blessed both sides of our country’s argument. I had hoped the continual presence in which He has been cast is proof that, at the very least, He has not abandoned us. God has not forgotten you, the wind replied to me. And that is because He cannot dismiss what he never chose to see. Your collective conceits are so petty, your arguments so small, that God has had no incentive to notice you at all.

“At that moment, I wept for the folly in which I had played my part, and I asked the wind if I was now fit, like Jonathan Livingston Seagull, to rise above the squalor and soar like a seraphim. The wind whispered that I was too paltry a man to ever be reborn and that if I hovered above the fray I would not remain airborne for long. Resign yourself to the breakers, it said. They will crush you less than the fall that you will invariably suffer if you claim an angel’s soul.

“If not an angel’s ascent,” I cried, “how about a patriots’ decree? What if I pledged my services to those who have sworn an oath to selflessly battle the ogres that threaten to overrun our shores?’ To this the wind responded, And who might these bogeymen be? Is it they who threaten our land, or are they phantoms conceived by fraudsters who claim enemies where there are none?

“These words made me fully realize that I had sailed too far—that I would forever be tempest-tossed and would never return to shore. I was laden with useless wisdom, I was sated to my core, and yet I had the temerity to ask the wind something more. ‘And what will become of humanity?’ The wind replied with a laugh. Humanity, as you call it, will have no greater stage. It will exhaust itself on lunacy and unexamined rage. It will rant against the elements with desperate conceits and after it has expended itself it will vanish without a trace.

“And there you have it, my friends. I can give you no comfortable lies. Instead, I am haunting a derelict craft on a sea too enraged to survive. I am Coleridge’s’ Ancient Mariner, yet our fortunes do not compare for I have not been offered even a murmur of a prayer. But I wish you the greatest of fortune and I laud your confidence, and I thank you for giving me a moment to bathe in your innocence.

“Ah, I see my hour is up—a dictate in more ways than one. I must take my leave with a dutiful heart for the wind is calling me home. I must summon the pluck of Odysseus and embrace my watery doom, but if you have any more questions, I will be in the back of the room.”

James Hanna is a retired probation officer and a former fiction editor. His work has been published in multiple journals and he is a prior contributor to Adelaide Magazine. James is the author of seven books all of which have won awards. Global Book Awards recently gave him a gold medal for contemporary fiction.