She leaned into her laptop, her face edging closer and closer until it was almost flush with the screen. Her eyes started to glaze over. The dopamine jolt of arcane data keeping her engaged. The machine whirred with tweets, emails, direct messages, a quick news article or two, overwhelming her senses to the point that her body was ready to give in. It sought to merge itself with the machine, to think with one mind, finally be one whole instead of an extension of her thought process or disparate entities entirely reliant on each other. That is until her phone let out a chirp, like it always does, like clockwork really. It always holds the power to break her concentration. That’s why she sits it just to side of her laptop. So the light of flashing notifications can penetrate her field of vision. The truth is she likes to be disturbed. The practiced rapid-eye movement from screen to screen has replaced deep sleep in her life. This is the dream, live in the flesh, practiced whenever she wants.
Mary Smith is a political operative of some renown for a variety of reasons. First and foremost she’s extremely good at what she does. Her services are always in demand and she commands an exorbitant hourly rate in return. She also doesn’t care who she serves. Political parties and platforms and ideologies stopped mattering to her at least a decade ago. She doesn’t even remember which party she used to support because she’s never voted in her life. Politics is a job. Sure, the frenzy of fighting appeals to her base animal instinct and it drives her to succeed, but she only cares about those minor details if it’s the difference between winning and losing. And winning is everything. Actually it’s the only thing. She doesn’t even like the term political operative. It sounds too banal, though it is the term she uses to talk about work to her parents. She protects them from the cold reality of her work. It’s odd to think about, and she almost never does, but they are the only people she has ever thought of as loved and loving. The thought strikes her now, as she looks up from her phone, then she immediately dismisses it, busying herself with something, anything to lost the thought. Love is a weakness, a life crutch to elicit sympathy. No, she’s no political operative, that’s a term for hacks sucking off the teet of the latest flash in the pan candidate with a massive war chest and zero prospects. She’s a mercenary. That’s what it says on her business card: Mary Smith, Mercenary.
When the news networks all cut over to coverage of President Zelensky’s speech she thought it the perfect time to take a quick bathroom break. She put her phone down and gave her television sets a moment of undivided attention when something in that speech caught her eye. She reached for the remote and raised the volume. She doesn’t speak Ukranian of course. She wanted to feel the reaction, the captive audience and hot take analysis. What she saw was a spark. A person perfectly attuned to the needs of the moment: eyes connecting with the world, emotional rhetoric reaching out across the void for help, pleas to a shared humanity, resilient leadership in the face overwhelming circumstances. It was the summation of everything she always tried to instill in her clients and couldn’t image as being real. She’s never seen it executed so perfectly if she’s honest with herself, no matter how good she knows she is. She’s sculpted walking and talking political Adonises out of hunks of raw play-doh, but this was next level. This felt like authenticity personified, not a performative dance for self-preservation nor a fleeting moment of revelry in adulation. She wondered how it all felt so real. She shrugged and left for the bathroom. When President Zelensky was done he was showered with a warm round of jaded applause.
Diplomats and politicians from across the globe huddled with their staff, favorite operative, whatever, while Mary’s office switchboard lit up with prospective clients looking for the elusive glow of authenticity. Mary returned from the bathroom and calmly took her seat. She was feeling confident, having worked out in the last five minutes exactly how she would apply everything she learned from that speech. But first she needed to find out who was advising Zelensky. When you live in a world where you invent leadership every day out of whole cloth and feed it to constituents as palliative nuggets you quickly forget that people can still be real. Who knew?
GLAZ 