“Songshan is full of bigmouths and crack: dispatches from the Progressive National Convention”
A work of real and literary journalism by the inimitable voice of the hopped-up masses, Mssr. Franck S. Le Corre.
Click here for a refresher on the Progressive primary.
Thursday
9:29 pm: It’s nighttime. I’m at a panier in Meilinis: a truck stop restaurant, from the French for lunch-box, panier-repas. There must be a dozen thousand of these paniers all spread out across the highways of our big beautiful country, doling out ladles of fish soup or French onion soup with a hunk of bread, a warm congee, and barbecued pork, usually from the owner’s cooker in a little shed out back. It’s fucking delicious, and for 3 marks 50 extra they’ll give you a little glass beaker of rice wine to wash down the grease. It’s so goddam delicious I’m surprised it isn’t outlawed already.
Someone at the PNC will be saying that, some little gray killjoy in a sweater vest who wants to stamp out all things big and beautiful in favor of a chain diner that sells wheaty hotcakes with fake syrup. There’s some people who’ve never set their dress-shoed foot in a panier west of Aumont who’ll be calling for stricter inspections and sanitation and hygiene and the next thing we know, the only barbecue pork you can get outside of your auntie’s house is under plastic wrap at Guston’s. Awful, awful thought.
I’m tucking into my fish soup and congee and barbecued pork (the hunk of bread is long gone, I had it with the coffee and gin from my flask) and thinking about all the many ways to skin the big cat they call the Progressive Convention. 600-plus Progressive big-shots from all around the country, everyone from the old president Brennan, that clod, on down to the greenest, chippy legislator from Bethune province who’s “just glad to be here, golly-gee, golly-gee.” And they’re all here to pick out the next man or woman to go trot around the country and save the Progressives from getting their elected asses kicked from here to Jinyu and back again.
And my job, thanks to the old man (not really my old man, more like everyone else’s at L’Origine) behind the editor’s desk who pays for my coffee and cigars and gin and the occasional hooker, is to go write about it for the magazine. I wouldn’t take the train (the click-clack click-clack doesn’t agree with my constitution) so I rented a cheap Amca sedan, with a passenger seat stuck permanently in the way-back position, to drive here from Laeralsford. Lotsa countryside in between Laeralsford and Songshan, not as much as there used to be but still plenty in between the long rows of public housing in the dreary suburbs.
I’m no stooge for the postcard-selling bus-tour type who love their small towns with their smaller egos, but when you get to step on the gas and be roaring down the township highway with the dog in the passenger seat, tongue lolling out in the breeze, it’s hard not to say that there’s a God and He is a loving god indeed.
12:25 am:
The bed in the hotel room is cozy even if the bathroom smells like the boys’ locker room after handball practice. It’s across the street from the Salaun Center, where tomorrow by 9:30 am the halls and conference rooms and 26,000 seat auditorium will be hopping with voting delegates and non-voting plebes all trying to climb to the top of the big heap of socialism-red crawfish that is the Progressive Party of Laeral.
I pull out my typewriter (a lot of things they produced during the Republic years were a piece of shit, but the little green Huet typewriters, 1944 vintage, are anything but) and type up these piss-poor words before a few of my pills and bed.
Friday
9:18 am:
My buddy Breeze is a great guy. Best forger I’ve ever known. Could’ve made it big with the triads if he wanted, because his fake IDs are good enough he could get your local booze market to sell 90-proof to a fast-talking 12 year-old. If I’d known Breeze at age 12, I woulda been a drug kingpin by 20 and wouldn’t have to lug around a typewriter to get my checks to cash.
But I met Breeze at 32, and so here I am writing about politics, culture, and crime like a chump, instead of doing the latter and winning at the former.
But enough about Breeze — all you need to know is that Breeze had made up a very nice badge identifying me as a staff reporter for Les Couloirs. Nothing gets a Laeralsford ass-kisser’s dick up like the thought of a mention in LC Nightly, and the doors that would be shut tight to “Franck S. Le Corre, L’Origine” open wide to a shiny press pass declaring me to be “Thierry K. Guillemont” of Les Couloirs.
As fine an example of the forger’s craft that my LC badge was, though, you can’t expect to use the same key to open all doors. So I’d stuffed my rucksack with Daryan cigars and eight bottles of Lightzer’s Own whiskey (finest export Summersea has to offer) with the vow that whatever I didn’t expend in the search of the truth would be for my own personal consumption. I left my T&K .45 and my dog in the motel room (with a dish and water — I may be crass, but I’m no monster) and went out seeking the convention.
The street outside the convention center was stark raving packed full of people, grade-schoolers to grandmas, waving signs and chanting at the top of their lungs. Save a thought for anyone trying to get to work in this whole mess. I don’t have the time nor the inclination to waste my breath with them, so I muscle my way through and end up in line at the entrance behind some 60-something stiffneck in a Séverine Huang shirt, bandanna, handball cap, the whole eighteen yards.
We’re yakking a little, partly so the security guards at the entrance don’t pay my rucksack too much mind, but once we’re through the metal detectors I’m off and away before he can start asking too many questions about where and how I got my hands on a delegate badge.
10:28 am:
Three cups of black coffee later, I’m at the Séverine Huang supporters’ meeting and taking a look at the old girl herself. We’ve never met before, but I think we might get along if we did. 150 elected delegates from the different Progressive chapters pledged to her means a sea of faces, but she’s circling around in the center like a high-school handball coach, smacking one palm against the other when she’s trying to make a point.
She’s a very visceral sort of woman, Séverine, with the kind of fire in the way she acts that usually leaves you by the time you get your first backache. “The majority is in our hands if we just reach for it,” she keeps saying. I may not swallow everything she says about the Republic and the Dignity of Work and the Call of the Moment the way her captive audience here is, but all the delegates packed into this convention center room believe her and it’s hard not to be nodding all along with them. Makes my shriveled-up little heart grow a little.
10:41 am:
Scratch everything I just said. Wandering the merchandise section, it’s hard not to go cynical about this whole political party everyone is here to celebrate. In between the “advocacy toolkits” and signed books and other expensive paraphernalia, there’s table after table of t-shirts and fans and branded scarves and bobbleheads, and the way the hawkers keep shouting at me like a bunch of carnies reminds me of going down Quansu Avenue in the summertime, tourist season. Even the branded Eméric André shot glasses seem tacky as a kissing booth at a society house.
Another thing — there is nothing quite so much a Progressive pol likes so much as history. Well, a certain type of history, between about 1922 and ending in about 1980 when big bad Li Suilang smashed the unions and practically pissed on old Gramont’s grave. There’s a bunch of booksellers here in this merchandise hall, and like any good Laeralian street hustler, they’ve stocked up on books perfect for the occasion. As it turns out, Progressives are utterly and completely incapable of writing anything besides a history book about the good old days when people’s hearts beat red beneath their union-made, made-in-Laeral Zhou jackets. Reminds me of the old political cartoons showing the Progressives and their forerunners as an ostrich — forever looking backwards.
Séverine Huang’s book, a history of sugar factories starting with one where, apparently, her father’s mother once became a foreman, is the shortest and most readable of the bunch. Eméric André has an utterly bog-standard Republic biography, this one of some rural development program that’s apparently a “blueprint for how Progressives can win back rural communities.” Guess they have still yet to figure out that it’s a lot harder to “win rural communities” when your party doesn’t control the bank, the railroad, and the feed store, plus the bloke that counts the ballots if they want it.
11:04 am:
I get my first glimpse of the big man himself, Eméric André, walking from place to place. He moves quick on his two feet, but I know from a previous go I had at corralling him for a question that he’s as slick as an eel dipped in grease when the press is around. I get real close to him as he’s moving, close enough that I get to hear him muttering that the singing is his least favorite part of these conventions. That’s something I can agree with the sea eel on — the songs are starting to get on my nerves. I give the finger to a few numbskulls draped in Republic flags singing something about the Rose Revolution loudly and off-key.
So what’s so awful about the old blobfish, André? It’s not even something he’s done or voted for — he’s no more dirty than any Progressive politician. It’s that he’s a big cardboard cutout for Tanvi Misra and the other party bosses to hide behind. Aside from talking loudly and repeatedly about how his father was a garbageman (the sanitation worker’s union is doubtlessly mildly ticked-off at this, but then their leaders are already behind Séverine big-time), the former Speaker of the Commons has nothing to offer the good people of our nation but platitudes and the best mealy-mouthed dishwater opinions a focus group can buy.
Séverine, depending on who you ask, might be horribly, urgently off-base from what Laeralites care about, but at least, goddam it, she has some goddam opinions! You can talk to her about the Republic or paychecks or unions or climate or whatever else she stands for. Eméric André mumbles about housing and seniors and pensions in the kind of tone even the most devoted of party drones can hardly leap up and applaud.
At least President Liu, for all of her faults, will get into the weeds with the media on what her policy is, and she’ll be damned if she doesn’t have an explanation down to the last decimal place of why it is and what’s there. André has about as much life and soul as the average license-plate renewal form; he’s a damned robot that might go puttering around on his own for a day but goes to plug in in the Misras’ back room at night.
12:40pm:
I’ve made a new friend. Mathis from Laeralsford, a cheery, backslapping sort of fellow who took a shot of my Lightzer’s Own in his commemorative “Brennan 2010” shot glass, and tells me proudly that he’s been at every one of these since ’98. Congratulations, Mathis; I hope they give you a t-shirt for Outstanding Service to the Party.
Turns out Mathis is a Raoul Chen delegate. Who is Raoul Chen, you might ask? He’s one of those fresh-faced chaps who pulls his head above the scrum every few years to become the Fresh New Thing™ who will save his party by imbuing it with the mystical energy of youth and good looks — until one to three election cycles later proving himself to be either incompetent, drugged-out, or simply a fad whose light burns itself out after three years of Deputy Minister of Transport or something. There’s probably a book deal in the works for the meantime.
To Raoul’s credit, though, he looks good in a suit and hasn’t let any big commerce-related disasters happen during his time as Trade Minister. He’ll get eliminated from the convention second, right after the opportunistic no-hoper Chu and right before the big showdown between Huang and André, the actual biggest fishes in this particular pond. I ask Mathis about this and he gives a wide, long shrug through his pleasantly-addled face. “Then Raoul can go next time, after André has his turn.”
12:50pm:
Mathis is unable to get me tickets to one of the exclusive afterparties planned for tonight, no matter how many bottles of Lightzer’s I ply him with. I head back to the hotel to walk the dog.
1:46pm:
Walking back from my bounding, quick run around the block with my energetic dog, I’m heading back to the sweaty netherworld that is the convention hall when I run into Peter Chu. Not one of his volunteers, but the man himself, the Representative from Enara province. He’s wearing a button with his own face on it, while bundled up in a thick puffy jacket, and I offer him a few cigars in exchange for the scarf he’s wearing: it has his face on it too. He isn’t down to bargain: he doesn’t smoke. Doesn’t drink, either.
I look him up later, turns out he’s a vegetarian. Can’t win a convention vote when it seems like every interaction here between the delegates is prefaced with an offer of a drink, a smoke, or a plate of some kind of pork product.
2:37pm:
I was digging deep into my pockets in search of bills (carrying loose change on you is never a bad idea. Wrap it around a cigar and slip it to the doorman, get your bartender to treat you like you’re a silver-screen bigshot for a night, roll it up and snort a blow with your own damn money…imagine using mobile pay for any of those worthy purposes. Ha!) for a hobo hanging around the back entrance when I found, next to pencil stubs and a lighter and about 10 marks in loose change, a paper itinerary for Séverine Huang delegates. Don’t remember at all where I got it; the tragic natural consequence of wandering hands and a drugged-out mind.
4:04pm:
The delegates have started voting: a hasty vote by placard, everyone in their seats and a forest of white cardstock signs rising in the air for each candidate. The rules of procedure require three votes without a majority before they start eliminating the worst-performing candidate; whoever held the gavel at the convention stage far below (Huang’s people complained it was a stooge for Misra, but André’s people complained it was a stooge for Huang, so who knows) seemed to be in a rush to get through these. Probably trying to avoid taking up prime-time evening TV with these inconclusive first few rounds. André won the most elected delegates in the primary, so his hope is to win over enough of the non-elected constituent delegates (138 out of 230) to run away with the nomination early. Huang, on the other hand, would need 150 constituent delegates to swing her way — unlikely, for a woman who’s made so many enemies in the party leadership, especially Misra’s faction — so her game plan must be to hold off André til Chen gets eliminated and his delegates align with her. A gamble.
6:40pm:
The “Young Progressives for Séverine” mixer, to their credit, was at least in a bar — earlier, I saw some poor saps for Peter Chu gathering in a back corridor by the ice machine where the sun’s rays didn’t shine — so by that metric, even the bar at the hotel across the street from the convention was a step up. The whole place was packed with young people (young, in politics, is always a relative term, but as with many of the other crowds of Séverine supporters I’d seen, they trended to the 20s and 30s) nursing beers and mixed drinks and bottles of Haesanese soju (and other things besides), packed onto the barstools to watch the vote on the convention floor on the hotel TV, dashing off frantic messages on their phones. I was nudging my way through the crowd around the barkeep, trying to flag her down, when the bar erupted in cheering and chants of “Sé-ve-rine!” She’d gotten the most votes of any candidate in the first round of eliminations; that poor, eternally-optimistic bescarfed sod Peter Chu had been eliminated. I was by this point pleasantly-buzzed enough to sing along when they burst into “Banner of the Eight-Pointed Star.” Back when I was a young’un, we still sang it every Friday at school. One kid, maybe 20-something if I’m being generous, has a lapel pin of Gramont’s face and a patch on his jacket underneath identifying him as part of a railroad workers’ party chapter, for a party and a railroad workers’ union that ceased to exist decades ago. Gawd, sometimes I can’t tell if I’m at a party convention or the world’s biggest historical reenactment. Huang’s misty-eyed Gramont nostalgia or André’s soulless focus-group left-of-centrism, take your pick.
7:35pm:
Maybe that’s the whole problem with this country: the past is still alive and well here in Laeral, threatening to pick you up from behind and shake you back and forth like a bouncer at a Triad bar, and no one’s yet figured out how to make the future good enough to break past it. Sure, these enthusiastic young’uns in Republic costumes like it’s the Salaun U Halloween party are too tied to the past, but if you indict them for it, you have to indict every single one of the Gramontist Thought Clubs at college campuses and community centers around the country, and every single salt-of-the-earth night market street vendor who pastes up a Gramont portrait surrounded by a republic flag right next to the little picture of a Minjian saint, like a good-luck token. Deeply ironic, isn’t it, that the Gramontists who waged revolution to get away from the past and monopolize the future instead ended up touching Laeralites’ hearts most of all with faded pictures tacked up on the wall at teahouses?
There’s a cafe in Laeralsford where the main attraction is sipping your tea or coffee next to life-size statues of the heroes of the Republic (plus Liu Mei-han, weirdly enough) posed sitting at the tables next to you. Look, there’s Gramont, immaculately dressed, looking up into the future beside his cup of coffee! J.P. Salaun lowering his newspaper, frozen in a pose of contemplation! Zhou Wei-lin, in his trademark collared jacket, holding forth on equality or something while the eclair on his plate is replaced daily, like a shrine. People flock to there, imagine that?
But it’s not just the left that’s looking backwards hard enough to sprain its neck: it’s the Rén Self-Defense League, those bunch of clowns with their houses and battalions named for long-dead Laeralian warlords. It’s every single Laeralite who makes a living from giving guided tours of the historic houses that pop up like mushrooms wherever you look, or catering to Minjian pilgrims on the Divine Way, or every cafe owner who slings boba overlooking a plaza named for a dead revolutionary.
And the people who find a foothold in our politics by pledging to get away from it all? They’re trapped in the same cycle, fighting the same battles that every right-of-center Laeralian politician has fought for decades, just to turn back the clock on the Republican era. Pledging first to privatize, and now to go legalize religious schools or abolish the hiring quotas. Stirring up headlines every Republic Day with their choice to go or not go to the grand Mausoleum to pay their respects at the shrine. The Gramontists might have lost the battle in 1954, the day the Republic ceased to be — but as long as they still suck up the oxygen in every political debate, they’re still waging the war.
And speaking of battles waged over fights that only paused that day seven decades ago, the delegates have wrapped up voting. Chen, as we’d expected, has been eliminated, and it’s only Huang and André now.
7:51 pm:
I rush out of the bar with the young Séverine supporters and back to the convention center, where the big show is finally going down. André versus Huang at the Progressive National Convention, with the fight on for all of Chen’s 60-odd delegates, enough to win the race for either side. The convention is boiling over, swift chatter in French and night-market Mandarin, the candidates themselves, surrounded by knots of supporters, circulating on the convention floor. I’m feeling the alcohol hit my head now, blinking hard under the bright lights, and I take another few swigs from my flask for good measure, stumbling over to one of the convention chairs and letting everything wash over me. No point in trying to follow it now, it’ll all be over before long, and I wish idly that I had my dog here to scratch his ears while I wait.
8:28 pm:
The delegates are voting now, order has been restored, and I’ve crept over to a little ways behind where Séverine and her team are sitting: one of her aides is jotting down notes on a notepad with every vote that’s cast. We’re getting near the end of the voting now, and I’m close enough to her aides that I can see them swallowing, fidgeting, pens posed over notepads in anticipation. Séverine herself is an image of tranquility.
When we’ve gotten through the thicket of Zhangs, Zhaos, and Zhous to reach the end of the alphabet, the entire convention hall falls eerily silent, and the chair reads off the vote totals: Eméric André, 323 votes. Séverine Huang, 300.
The blobfish has won.
Séverine looks down at her lap for a moment, but soon enough the politician mask is back on, and I can practically see her whispering to herself “there’ll be other elections.” The convention itself seems too shocked to act; I can’t tell whether they’re relieved that they’ve chosen a candidate who’ll be electable or awed that the vote came down to 12 people, pledging silent revenge or cheering silent joy. Eméric will be up there in a minute to give his speech; I have no interest in listening. We all already have an idea of what the Progressive nominee will say.
—from the Salaun Center, Songshan, Franck S. Le Corre is signing off.
*******************************************
Want to dive deeper into Laeral?