Peace in Our Time
A Story about Playing Games
The Peace, Democracy, Justice, Equality, and Freedom Act passed both houses of Congress on July 26th, 2023, and was signed by the president later that day. As its title suggested, the new law ushered in justice and equality in every corner of the country, and it ensured peace and freedom and democracy in every nation on the globe.
The day’s work finished, Senator Buechner went back to the tiny apartment on Capitol Hill he kept during the work week (Tuesday to Thursday), where he collected his golden retriever, Fido. Fido flew with the senator to and from Montana every week, and didn’t seem to mind all the air miles.
With his master in tow, Fido led the familiar way down to the National Mall, where tour groups gawked at the Capitol and sweating runners dashed by, stripped as close to nakedness as they could legally be. The senator was old enough to remember when even most men wore shirts in the summer.
Surprisingly for Washington D.C. in the summer, it was a mild day. The high was in the seventies – downright cold for this time of year. That was why the Mall was so crowded. Nobody wanted to miss the only comfortable day in July. Which was why, at 3 o’clock on a Wednesday, thousands of working-age people gathered between the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial to sunbath and throw frisbees.
“Nobody works anymore, ever since COVID,” remarked a man whose official workdays numbered one hundred out of three hundred and sixty-five. Fido bared his teeth in a grin. He hadn’t worked a day in his life.
Since Fido had been cooped up all day, he was tugging at the leash like he was on speed, but his master wasn’t ready to take him off leash. First, they had to transit the wide sidewalks, which were strewn with the infernal scooters that plagued every city in America. Senator Buechner viewed the proliferation of these menaces – and especially the eager willingness of self-respecting members of the general public to ride them – as somewhere between a sign of the end of times and a herald of the impending collapse of American civilization. The Senator contented himself with the thought that he and his colleagues had put off that impending collapse for another day, due to their diligent efforts that morning.
Finally, when Fido had dragged him until they were parallel with the American History Museum, Senator Buechner let him off leash. The dog proceeded to run around the Washington Monument and back, which took several minutes and involved crossing streets in front of cars. Buechner sat down in the grass to wait.
When Fido came back, he had his tongue out, indicating at least mild exertion. The senator got back to his feet. He pulled a tennis ball out of his pocket. The dog tore off again. He’d seen the tennis ball and he knew what this meant. Naturally, he ran until he was just outside of his master’s range. The senior senator from the state of Montana threw the tennis ball. It landed well in front of Fido, who performed a snatch and grab operation – which involved racing at the ball at top speed to minimize the time a foreign dog might have to come in and intercept the it, snatching the ball up in his teeth, executing a highly-coordinated series of twists and turns to ensure foreign dogs weren’t on his trail, and taking a Great Circle Route to arrive back at his master. He spit the ball out on the ground and raced away before the senator could pick the tennis ball back up.
If they were home in Montana, the senator could have asked his children to pick the ball up. His seventeen-year-old son was too cool to throw tennis balls for dogs, but his twelve-year-old daughter was still young enough to enjoy it. Maybe one of these days he’d bring the family to D.C. for the summer.
As he tossed the ball and watched his dog retrieve it, Senator Buechner felt a warm sense of deserved accomplishment. After all, he had helped usher in peace, justice, freedom, democracy, and equality that morning. That seemed like a pretty good day’s work. It would certainly help his reelection campaign. A PAC for his likely opponent was already running ads claiming that the “misnamed Peace, Democracy, Justice, Equality, and Freedom Act” would actually herald a new era of total war, fascism, tyranny, and slavery. He wasn’t worried. Voters wouldn’t be fooled by such misinformation. Meanwhile, he was working on a bill that he would cosponsor, titled, “The Fairness, Opportunity, Prosperity, and Integrity Act,” which was designed to ensure fairness, opportunity, and prosperity for all, while eliminating corruption in politics. This time, however, he was in closed-door talks with members of the opposing party, who had already agreed to filibuster the bill on the grounds that it would destroy economic growth and shackle American productivity. In public, he would excoriate them in the harshest terms as the opponents of the American middle class, while they would castigate him as an enemy of American business. Meanwhile, he would share a toast with them behind closed doors and congratulate themselves on a brilliant strategy that would get everyone reelected. The bill would die before the election and wouldn’t be taken up by the next Congress.
But not to worry. Should they win control of the Senate, as was likely, his opponents had promised to introduce a bill entitled, “Strengthening American Community and Civic Virtue,” which he would filibuster as being a backdoor for totalitarian theocracy.
Lost in thought, the senator tossed the ball back and forth with Fido while watching crowds of tourists go by. Young lovers walked down the sidewalk, arms around each other – and old lovers, too. He watched a couple in their late eighties or nineties walk by, hand-in-hand. A pack of lobbyists dressed in dark suits walked behind them, and a gang of teenagers after that. The teenagers were all staring at their phones, not talking to one another. The senator wondered idly whether there weren’t, a sweatshop anywhere in D.C. that might offer these young scoundrels gainful employment. Back in his day, teenagers hadn’t had wristwatches, let alone smartphones.
He watched parents walk by with small children, and he watched a group of interns on their way to softball practice. And something dawned on the senator. Most of these people had no idea that he’d help usher in a new era of peace and justice and democracy and freedom and equality that morning. They didn’t even know that Congress had been working on a bill to do just that. Some of them probably would have wondered why.
They had no idea who he was (except for the lobbyists, that is). Normally, in a member of a demographic notoriously hungry for public approval, that revelation would have come as a nightmare. But the senator smiled. He could have laughed. He could have cried, happily watching those parents with their young children in tow. He saw smiles on the faces of all the people who passed by, smiles that had nothing to do with him. In the case of the teenagers, the smiles might have been caused by some inane video by some influencer, but they were smiles nonetheless.
The senator’s shoulders dropped. He hadn’t even realized he had them raised. He continued tossing the ball and watching Fido, who never tired of this, tear off to retrieve it.
“It didn’t matter,” he said to himself. “None of it mattered. It still doesn’t matter.”
He felt as though some great weight had been lifted from his back. All the hard work of fine-tuning, turning levers, flipping knobs, pressing dials, twisting buttons, didn’t really need to be done. Somehow, things turned out just fine – whether he did anything about them or not. The people he saw were happy, happy because it was a beautiful day and they were with their friends and family in a beautiful place. They didn’t care what he’d done that morning. It couldn’t make them any happier.
Maybe he’d go home early tomorrow. There was a flight out first thing in the morning. Sure, he’d miss the investigatory hearing on artificial intelligence, but he didn’t think he was missing anything. He knew where he was on artificial intelligence anyway – if his staffers said it was good, he was for it. If they said it was bad, he was against it. He didn’t really need to know what it did. Besides, none of the tech bros testifying tomorrow knew what it did either.
After an hour, the senator’s arm grew tired. He stopped throwing the ball. Fido gave him a frown, but let his master put the leash back on. He forgot his disappointment minutes later when he discovered a flock of pigeons on the sidewalk and nearly wrenched his master’s shoulder out of its socket.
Absentmindedly, he pulled out his phone. He hadn’t checked it in a while. There were several missed calls. One of them was from his whip. He returned that one.
“Where have you been?” asked Senator Ricardo. “The president’s about to give a press conference.”
“About what?”
“About the bill we just passed.”
“What does he know about it?”
There was a pause. “Does he have to know anything about it?”
“If he’s going to give a speech to the American people about it? No. If he’s going to waste my time? Yes.”
“So, I can count on you to be there? It’s in fifteen minutes.”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“I mean, why does it matter if I’m there or not?”
“Matter? It’s a historic bill. It’s going to permanently end war, injustice, illiberalism, and inequality.”
“Yeah, besides that. I knew that already.”
“Besides that? Well, I guess nothing.”
“Good reason for me not to be there.”
“Don’t you want to win reelection next year?”
“Matt,” said Senator Buechner, “I think I’ll do just fine in the election.”
He hung up the phone, then went home to cook dinner and call his wife and kids.