Steven here initially, to thank you in advance for reading. If you find this interesting, please upvote. Comments welcome. Still not sure how to format in here, so it may look funky like the first one did. Speaking of which, to begin at the beginning, the first installment is here: https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@stevenyates/a-writer-introduces-himself-the-first-novel-of-the-trump-era.
Our speaker has thus been introduced and has stepped up to the lectern. Continuing without further ado (picture me reading this if it helps, although I am NOT "W.T. Stone"!)
I decided not to fool around with the paragraphing, to minimize formatting problems. Nothing to do except see what happens.
CHAPTER TWO: "THIS IS HOW THE REAL WORLD WORKS ..." (Excerpt One)
“Hi, everyone” Stone said in that gravely voice. “Good evening, Corinth State University.” He squinted and put his hands over his eyes. “No protesters? I thought this was a university campus.”
“Corinth State’s not Berkeley,” Cal said with a smile. “Pretty much the opposite, in fact. Most of the time, anyway.”
“Right,” said the speaker, “and I’m not Ben Shapiro or Milo Yanni-what’s-his-face. I suppose we’ll all live longer.” He went on, “Thanks for the invite to exercise my free speech rights anyway, Mr. Currie. This lecture—” he indicated the slide “—is indeed called Reality 101, and for most campus audiences, as things usually turn out, that’s exactly what it is: an introductory course in reality. Places like Berkeley could use a little of that, but they’ve not invited me. Those are the breaks, yes? Okay, I’m a pretty informal guy overall, so let’s start by getting a sense of who’s here. Who wants this introductory course in Reality 101? Anyone care to introduce himself? Or herself" He was looking at our row. “Cal, I know you now. Well, a little, anyway.” His eyes abruptly moved to me. “How about you?”
My heart skipped a beat. I recovered quickly. “I’m Stephen Cole,” I said.
“Tell us about yourself.”
“I’m from here,” I said, “Corinth, Oklahoma. Born and raised here. Graduated from South Corinth High School, worked a while, then came to school here. Majored in economics. Worked some more, both in the City, then back here for the town paper, now doing graduate work in economics, looking at writing my thesis soon.”
“Oh? What will you be enlightening the world on?”
I took a breath. “International trade policy, with special attention — I hope — to its effects on communities like this one.”
His nod was neutral. “Good topic,” he said. His eyes moved and landed on Stefani. “You?”
“Me?” she gasped.
“You,” Stone repeated. “You’re a Native American, yes?”
She gathered herself and said, “Yes. I’m Stefani Waters, and I’m an undergraduate. A senior. I’m Yacapone, which obviously means I was born and raised here, too.”
“Yacapone?” He shook his head. “I am not familiar.”
“We’re the indigenous culture that was here before white people showed up.”
“I see. What’re you studying? Economics, too?”
“No. American and Indigenous Cultural Studies.”
“Oh.” He scratched his chin. “That’s a university major?”
“It is here.”
“What do you plan to do with it?”
“I don’t know yet,” she said.
“We’re millennials,” I chimed in. “At least I guess we are.”
“What year were you born in?” he asked.
“Nineteen eighty-five,” I said.
“Nineteen ninety-two,” she said.
“You’re millennials.” Something in his tone made me uneasy. As if we weren’t to be seen as serious. His eyes had moved to a woman with blonde hair clipped very short in an aisle seat on the other side, about ten rows back — clearly too old to be a traditional undergraduate. She was not wearing makeup. “You?”
“Jill Hampton,” she said, “and I’m working on a physics degree.”
“Physics,” Stone echoed. “What brings you to an economics lecture?”
“I want to study alternative energy generation,” she explained, traces of defensiveness in her voice. “I’m interested in sustainability, in applying whatever I learn to finding clean sources of energy before we do irreversible damage to the planet. Also finding means of more equitable distribution of energy in the world.”
“Ambitious,” Stone said. “Your time hasn’t come yet, but if you hang in there, it will. Anyone else? Someone in the back.”
A hand had gone up. Stone signaled the man: a scraggly fellow in a blue denim jacket, one of the “townies” as we students called them.
“Randall Wright,” he said, “and I’m not a student. I manage one of the restaurants downtown. I’m wondering if you’re going to talk about Donald Trump.”
Stone nodded. “Plenty, when the time comes.”
Jill Hampton’s eyes rolled and she gave a sigh. Not a Trump fan, obviously.
“You’re aware, this is Trump country,” Randall continued, a smile playing about his lips. “Just about everybody except some of the lefties on the faculty and some of the students at this university voted for Donald Trump. I think better than 90 percent of the county voted for Donald Trump.”
“I wasn’t aware of that,” said Stone, “but thanks for the warning.”
“I wasn’t one of ‘em, though,” Randall followed up. “I think voting is pointless. Maybe you’ve heard adages like, ‘Don’t vote, it only encourages them,’ and ‘If voting changed anything it’d be illegal.’”
Stone chuckled. “So we have a cynic in our midst.”
“Or a realist,” Randall said with a smile.
“Interesting you would call it that,” said Stone.
“Reality,” said someone all the way to the back and to my right whose name I did not know. “I’m one of the folks here who voted for Trump, and I’m proud of it. She lost. Get over it.”
Jill Hampton turned to see who had said that, and if looks could kill, the fellow would have been barbecued where he sat.
“Don’t anybody worry, I’m not here to defend Hillary Clinton,” said Stone.
“Good to know,” the man followed up, “but we’ll see, since those were the two choices last year. Hillary or The Donald.”
“Or Jill Stein,” said Jill Hampton, naming the Green Party candidate who if I recalled right received over a million votes, most of them from my generation.
Stone shook his head. “Realistically, she had no chance. For better or for worse, I won’t be getting into that tonight.” He paused and took a breath. “That’ll do. I have some sense of who you are. You’re all invited to the reception later, and I’ll have your names connected with your faces.” He cracked his knuckles. “Time for some Reality 101. I know it’s conventional to begin a talk like this with some kind of joke or quip or something bullshitty like that, to relax you or relax me or whatever. But since this is a no-bullshit talk, and since it’ll be clear before we’re done here what the joke is, or who it’s on—” he spread his hands wide “—I say we just get on with it. How many of you young people, especially you economics majors, see yourselves as part of, or at least fellow traveling with, the Austrian School of Economics? Ludwig von Mises, and those guys. Friedrich A. Hayek, as different as he was from Mises. I’d heard their school of thought is represented here at Corinth State? May I see a show of hands?”
About a third of the hands in the audience went up. Jill Hampton’s noticeably did not. Her lips were pursed tightly. Nor did Randall Wright’s. He was sitting with his arms folded. I glanced at Stefani again. Ours hadn’t gone up. There were things about the school I liked, but overall—
“Two of our economics profs are Austrians.” Cal’s voice. “Or say they are. One is here,” he turned and looked to the back.
“We are. If you’ll allow one more introduction, the name’s David Barron.” A heavyset man with a thin black beard salted with touches of gray and a broad, disarming smile half-stood and waved. He’d gotten his doctorate at George Mason, and been at UNLV before that. An Austrian ‘praxeologist’ through and through, without doubts or hesitations. Economics was an a priori science based on deduction from axioms like that of human action, and he presented it as such.
“The other Austrian?” asked Stone. “I was told there are two of you.”
“Don Fleming couldn’t make it,” said Barron. “Some family thing.”
“Gotcha,” Stone nodded. “How many Libertarians — cap L, lower case l, ‘thick’ or ‘thin,’ ‘bleeding heart’ or not?”
Roughly the same hands went up.
“Your man Gary Johnson didn’t do too well last year, did he?”
I heard a few chortles.
“Not that he was really a Libertarian, him or his VP Weld, but never mind that now. Just out of curiosity, how many of you voted for The Donald. That’ll admit it, that is, this being a university campus.”
A different but overlapping set of hands went up, this time including mine. I’d voted for him because he seemed interested in hearing people like us, out here in small towns in the middle of nowhere whose major employers had gone belly-up. I’d voted for him because he seemed to represent a change in direction. Hillary Clinton had displayed no such interest, and no such thing. She came across as a continuance of everything that was deindustrializing the country, making us more dependent on Washington’s bureaucracies, making us enemies overseas, and in general running us into the ground. None of these things I’d much talked about, much less made a scene about, not even with Stefani who hadn’t voted that I knew of. For when asked what I thought Trump would do in office, or could do, I had to admit I hadn’t a clue. The man was brash and unpredictable, and some of the things he’d said during the campaign seemed over the top. I doubted we would ever see a wall on the Mexican border, for example. But maybe some unpredictability, some black-swannishness — I thought briefly of Nassim Taleb — was what the country needed.
To my late father, Donald Trump would have seemed a breath of fresh air! James Tyler Cole Jr. would have worshipped the ground the man walked on! He would have been walking on air the morning of November 9 last year when the headlines appeared: Americans Elect Donald J. Trump 45th President of the United States!
Too late for that.
Stone was nodding. “Trump wasn’t a Libertarian, either, you know!”
Laughs, including from me. One thing Trump had not been accused of was being a Libertarian!
“As I said, we’ll talk about The Donald in due course. Any Randroi— I, uhhh, mean, disciples of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism?” His voice had filled with sarcasm.
Oooo boy!
One hand shot up: that of lanky, bespectacled Bernie Sanders. That really was his name. He’d taken his share of ribbing, and it showed. He’d been in my macro class last spring, gritting his teeth, hating every minute of it. Double-majoring, he was: philosophy and economics. More philosophy than economics. He’d had run-ins with a couple of professors over there, just like over here. Over here, even the two Austrians considered him a nut. I wondered if he would finish either degree.
“Interesting,” said Stone. “Your name?”
“I’d rather not,” returned Bernie. Surprise, surprise.
Stone shrugged. “Suit yourself. You like Ayn Rand?”
“Greatest philosopher of the past 500 years!”
“If you say so. Any fans of ‘anarcho-capitalism’? I think that covers all the buzz phrases, or at least the ones I use during these talks?”
Again a few hands went up, the familiar crew who saw the state as the source of all that was evil in the world.
“Anyone not have a clue what any of this crap means?”
There were a few laughs as some hands actually went up near the back and all the way to the left, opposite where we were, including that of my Wells Fargo banker.
“Townies and business school button-down types,” said Cal. “The MBAs. They’ll be the ones who get the jobs in the City.” More laughs.
Stone squinted and spoke to them, “You’re just as well off, trust me.”
They hooted and clapped in approval.
Stone smiled and seemed to gather his thoughts as the applause ended. He took another sip of water. Then he said, his smile faded and replaced by a look of cold severity: “Just as well you all aren’t fans, because most of what you’ll find in their books, whether it’s Miss Rand, Mises, Rothbard, or the anarcho-whatevers, is little more than intellectual masturbation.”
There were audible gasps. The auditorium fell silent. The fun was over. Even the business school types in the back were frowning. Some who had raised their hands to self-identify as Austrians including David Barron were staring in shock. Bernie looked like his head was about to explode. Even Jill Hampton’s eyes had widened, with what emotion I could not tell.
Stone clicked to the next slide. The screen above him now said:
REALITY 101 is not Austrian economics.
Nor is it Libertarianism.
Nor is it “Anarcho-Capitalism.”
Nor is it Trumpism.
“Sorry, I forgot the trigger warning,” he deadpanned.
[To be continued....]