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Internal Affairs Chapter One
By The Host
Internal Affairs
by
Matt
Boudreau
Part One
‘That city in which the destined rulers are least eager to rule, will inevitably be governed in the best and least facetious manner, and a contrary result will ensue if the rulers are of a contrary disposition.’
-PLATO
The Plan
I think it was around the end of my freshman year that I decided to run for office. Not real office, of course. I was no politician – I still wanted to be a movie director back then, back before I realized that film students are pretentious fucks (okay, maybe I had already guessed that part), and also back before I realized that I’m a talentless hack. When it comes to making movies, anyway.
But I’ve got other talents, and I was just discovering some of them. I could talk, I knew that much; what’s more, I could debate, and I even fancied myself a writer. I couldn’t dance, and I couldn’t remember song lyrics – I still can’t do those things – but I had great ambitions, and great expectations, and maybe just maybe half enough energy to do something about them.
But this was the first conscious recognition of anything like political ambition since I was in junior high school. I had been elected to our student council two years running – seventh and eighth grade – and I was then elected vice-president both years. The flames of my ambition were stoked by the two presidents I dealt with, both post-pubescent girls exceedingly beautiful in my eyes; when I was in seventh grade the prez used to hug me and call me her ‘teddy bear’. Hey, I was short and scrawny; she was really hot. I didn’t miss a single meeting.
Last I heard she’s in a band.
Look at me: already I digress, and how. Oh, well. All right, here’s what you have to know: when I wasn’t re-elected in the ninth grade I was indignant, to say the least; despite later being called in as a ‘special advisor’ to the council (nobody else was close to being competent enough to run the thing), I abandoned all political aspirations then and there. A budding career might have been lost forever were it not for the conversation I had one night in Derek Peckard’s tiny dormitory room at Regiopolis College, half a decade later.
‘I wanna run this place,’ Peckard said. His face was plastered with its usual mischievous half-grin. It was funny how easily he could be trusted; his was not an honest face. His manner, even, gave him away. He carried secrets and lies around with him like a night watchman carried his twirling baton; so what if he lost ‘em for a minute, he could always stoop down and pick ‘em back up.
Then again, maybe I’m reading too much into things. Or maybe I’m too trusting, I don’t know. I’ll just tell you things as they happened, about me and about everybody else, and I’ll let you come to your own conclusions.
So, anyway, he said that night that he wanted to run the place, meaning the university. I had just prevailed upon him to join the school’s struggling debate team. In fact, I’d been bugging him about it for months. I’d been a good high school debater but now I was a small fish in a big pond and I needed someone I could relate to, or maybe someone I could feel superior to. Regardless, Peckard – the archconservative himself – had enough lively debates with me to make making it formal a mere formality. Still, I’ll be honest, I never thought he’d take to it the way he did. At the first meeting he met Mike Shantz, a debater who’d just run unsuccessfully for the presidency of our student government, and I think it was with this in mind that he was speaking.
No wonder. Mike was an easy guy to look up to. He oozed charisma and schmoozed charisma and probably sweat charisma, too; all of his orifices were designed to excrete charm and his body cavities were stuffed with it. His presence was almost blinding. Of course, meeting the guy you immediately knew he only wanted to be your friend because he wanted your vote, but his magic was that he made you not care. He made it a pleasure to be manipulated. It was like he let you in on the deal, he shook your hand and talked you up with a wink and a grin. ‘You know I just want you to vote for me, and I know you will, but we’ll still pretend to be legitimate friends because, hey, that’s how things are done.’ That was the joke, that was the game. And if you played along well enough you’d probably be rewarded
He’d be a great leader one day.
Derek saw that, and it intrigued him. Why it intrigued him, I don’t know. Not to this day. In hindsight it’s hard to believe that Peckard ever seriously considered being involved in student government, let alone running for the presidency. It was too much bullshit, and Peckard thrived on calling bullshit. He was destined for a high-paying job in finance, willingly trading his life for a fat bank account and cherry-picked convertible and, perhaps more than anything, routine task-oriented work without, well, political bullshit. In the meantime he’d perpetually sit on the sidelines too amused to be really critical and either way too smart to care.
Yet at the time he seemed completely sincere. He started by saying just what I’ve quoted above, and it was only in hindsight half-facetious – casting out a line and seeing if I’d bite.
I did.
We spent the entire evening planning things out: I would run for an executive position in the debating union in a few weeks and lose but take it seriously enough to be appointed early in my sophomore year to an honorary position as consolation prize; Peckard would meantime insinuate himself more fully into the union. In a year I’d make the jump to our student government, getting a volunteer position that would place me well for a full-time job. Derek would run for union executive and get it. In our junior year I’d aim for a cushy position in model congress and Derek would aim for presidency of the American Parliamentary Debating Association. We would unquestionably get them both. Then we could launch our political campaign or, if necessary, enter a year-long holding pattern while I got a full-time student government job. Either way, by the time we were seniors we’d be executive or executive-elect.
Next step, the world.
Perhaps it’s needless to say that things didn’t work out quite as planned, but clearly that hasn’t stopped me from saying it. Lots of stuff happened over the next couple of years, as stuff is wont to do, and I’m sure bits and pieces will crop up from time to time in the following chapters. What’s important to know right now is that, initially at least, things seemed to be going pretty much as the doctor ordered. I ran for debating exec and lost and was solemn but gracious and was indeed appointed to an honorary position four months later. A year after that I was on the union executive proper along with Peckard, and I was minority leader in model congress, and I had a nice volunteer job in our student government. Derek and I didn’t talk about The Plan after it was conceived, not even once. We stuck to battles, not wars; tactics, not strategy. The question was always, how do we climb the next rung in the ladder, and never, what’s there gonna be on top?
I guess I was getting a little nervous when I finally asked Peckard if he wanted to run or to wait a year. I guess my fears were justified. He said that he had no intention of getting himself involved in student politics. He was far too jaded. Me? I don’t know if I’d been an idealist at all to that point. I had no compelling reason to gain power other than being able to say that I had gained power, to others and more importantly to myself. Maybe I already knew then that I’d be a politician someday and saw this as a dry run. And, as will become apparent soon enough, I figured it’d be a great way to get laid. So to that point I don’t think I had ever really cared about the issues, and so I don’t think I had the capacity to be jaded. It didn’t matter that the system didn’t work as long as I could at least work it to my advantage.
Does that make me a bad person? In the real world, maybe, but at Regiopolis it’s all relative.
I didn’t give up. The Plan was too deeply ingrained. Peckard would watch from the sidelines and, when it came down to it, he’d probably pitch in – after all, he was just about my best friend. I couldn’t count on that, though. And it wouldn’t come down to it if there was no it to come down to: I needed a new running mate (two, actually), and I needed a new Plan.
And that’s when I met Jamie Williamson.
Please comment!
3/2/2005 3:47:27 PM
(Updated: 3/2/2005 4:01:31 PM)
(Updated: 3/2/2005 4:03:38 PM)
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