8 Notes on Politics, Science, and Lit

Mamdani, Albanese, Weiss, and Chomsky — notes on reform and revolution — and an extended excerpt from forthcoming "Target Revolution," Chapter 33 of Most Revolutionary

Jul 11, 2025

Note One: In certain revolutionary circles you often see criticisms of reform and progressives as expressed like this, by Jaebien Rosario in “Zohran Mamdani and Reformism”:

Reformism has been a poison to the revolutionary socialist movement. A potent weapon that buys time for the bourgeoisie and disarms the working class from achieving the end of capitalism towards socialism.

First, it’s time to retire the word “bourgeoisie.” There are much more accurate and intelligible words available. Capitalism, big money, plutocracy will do.

There’s a difference between the way of revolutionary reform and establishment reform. Revolutionary reform shows the capacity to walk and talk at the same time — juggle flaming swords, keep all plates spinning, run the show and be in it too, and otherwise multitask like a pro — to put it in common language.

Yes, reform has often been weaponized against revolution, and far more often simply against greater reform, but so too have promises of revolution and great reform been weaponized against making any badly needed gains at all or even against fending off backsliding.

A revolutionary movement that is incapable of implementing reforms, or at least advocating for them, is typically dead in the water — kaput, toast, flatlined, circling the drain.

Focused revolutionaries need to make strong allies among focused reformers, and vice versa. One could write great essays, of both reform and revolution, explaining how and why. One could also undertake great acts of the same, including electoral acts. This is why revolutionaries should run in the Democrat primaries, alongside and along with the progressive reformers, and against the fake niceties of the establishment candidates.

Note Two: On the rise of Zohran Mamdani, recent Democrat winner in the NYC primary:

“Identity” derives from “the same.” “Populist” from “the people.” Zohran Mamdani and other progressive populists transcend identity by connecting it to the specific (typically material) needs of the people — the people in general. Progressive populists can and must connect identity to class and to the human condition(s), thereby creating a transcendent social and political identity, a human identity, a revolutionary identity to leverage power — to express, mobilize, organize, and act.

Dilshad Alia touches on this in Religion News Service, “Mamdani's win unleashed a surge of Islamophobia — and showed how to beat it”:

Asad Dandia, a New York City historian, community organizer and early supporter of the campaign, agreed, saying Mamdani’s consistent messaging is what resonated with voters. “It doesn’t matter your religion, it doesn’t matter your ethnicity, it doesn’t matter your social outlook — everyone has to buy groceries. Everyone has to pay bills. That was much more powerful than (Mamdani rival Andrew) Cuomo’s message,” Dandia said.

Note Three: Related and telling facts about New York City and its mayors, Zohran Mamdani, and the rise of progressive populists, by Richard Tofel in “Mayor Mamdani and the News Judgments…”:

As no less than the Wall Street Journal editorial page recently observed, “If Trumponomics fails to deliver strong growth and gains in real incomes, the leftwing populists will be waiting as the main alternative.” Dismissing them by brandishing the word “socialism” represents weak news judgment and disserves readers.

Note Four: The leaders of Empire are the faces of Evil in our time. Someone should capture the full human condition and write a novel about it. See the great commentator on power and its abuses Caitlin Johnstone in “The Empire Is A Nonstop Insult to Our Intelligence”:

The US has imposed sanctions on UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese for using her position to oppose the most thoroughly documented genocide in history.

Note Five: In another Fiction Gutted moment for the establishment, at the influential hip literary journal n+1 Lisa Borst claims in “New TV Novels” that

A novel never got anybody elected President.

And yet many scholars and observers have noted that Harriet Beecher-Stowe’s accomplished and impactful literary and popular novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin paved the way for the Republican Party and for Lincoln to get elected President, and may well have been a decisive factor, or the decisive factor. Further, 100,000 copies were purchased and used in Lincoln’s campaign.

Tolstoy claimed that Uncle Tom’s Cabin had more impact than anything Lincoln ever did.

The novel was the greatest seller of its sweeping age, aside from the Bible, with great global appeal, and major geopolitical and literary impacts, including internationally, plus huge effects on decades of influential novels of social reform and revolution.

Eric Meisfjord notes in “The Untold Truth of Uncle Tom’s Cabin”:

Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel of the 19th century, second only to the Bible. As Biography relates, the book sold 10,000 a week, and in its first year of publication, over 300,000 copies were sold — even while, remember, the book was banned in southern states. …
During the 1860 presidential election campaign, Lincoln's party bought and distributed another 100,000 copies as a way to gather abolitionist support for his run. It was Abraham Lincoln, now president of a nation fighting against itself in the Civil War, who met Stowe and allegedly told her, "Is this the little woman who made this great war?" It was also Lincoln who observed, very aptly, "He" (or, in this case, she) "who molds public sentiment is greater than he who makes statutes."

Novels like Most Revolutionary or Tamara Pearson’s The Eyes of the Earth or Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow or Andre Vltchek’s Point of No Return and Aurora that set out to be epic in their own right, even if influenced by contemporary script writing, provide grounds for none of the insecurity that’s noted by n+1 author Lisa Borst as an “anxiety of obsolescence” in the same article:

“the anxiety of obsolescence”: an apprehension — expressed sometimes bitterly, sometimes with acceptance or opportunism — about literature’s diminished, even parasitic status relative to TV’s cultural might.”

Reading novels online is growing like never before, and many new bookstores are being built, in part thanks to TikTok.

Note Six: An interesting overview by Mark Iosifescu of The Aesthetics of Resistance by Peter Weiss — a difficult semi-autobiographical trilogy of novels of left-wing resistance against the Nazis.

Iosifescu’s overview of the trilogy spurs some questions and considerations, such as why was Weiss so convinced of his dense and difficult structural approach — and to what effect? "...a tough read in any language" is hardly compelling. Should it have been titled The Arcane of Resistance?

What is most compelling about the structure or content of the left trilogy for today? The idea of "Build unity" is important — at least there's that. We can see the imperative expressed today in electoral realms, at the least, in the efforts and achievements of Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani and (though she is much neurotically decried) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and similar others, not least Rashida Tlaib.

As for the trilogy’s debates between reform and revolution, some interesting and penetrating things can be said in general, but when either side flat rejects the merit of the other the thinking is typically simplistic and of no actual world. The Mamdani, Bernie, and AOC examples are telling.

Today remains a genocidal age in a newly ecocidal era, so novels today should manifest as an endless flow of Resistance rather than the glorified idiosyncratic Desistance that they too often are. Would be good if vital new considerations of The Aesthetics of Resistance could open doors in that regard.

Note Seven:

The great literary scholar and Palestinian-American Edward Said on the novel and power in Culture and Imperialism:

The modern history of literary study has been bound up with the development of cultural nationalism, whose aim was first to distinguish the national canon, then to maintain its eminence, authority, and aesthetic autonomy…. [There has been] an absolute requirement for the Western system of ideology that a vast gulf be established between the [ostensibly] civilized West, with its traditional commitment to human dignity, liberty, and self-determination, and the [supposed] barbaric brutality of those who for some reason—perhaps defective genes—fail to appreciate the depth of this historic commitment, so well revealed by America’s Asian wars, for example.

A novel is the choice of one mode of writing from among many others, and the activity of writing is one social mode among several, and the category of literature is something created to serve various worldly aims, including and perhaps even mainly aesthetic ones. Thus the focus in the destabilizing and investigative attitudes of those whose work actively opposes states and borders is on how a work of art, for instance, begins as a work, begins from a political, social, cultural situation, begins to do certain things and not others….

Contamination is the wrong word to use here, but some notion of literature and indeed all culture as hybrid…and encumbered, or entangled and overlapping with what used to be regarded as extraneous elements—this strikes me as the essential idea for the revolutionary realities today, in which the contests of the secular world so provocatively inform the texts we both read and write.

And on art and Empire:

“Much of what was so exciting for four decades about Western modernism and its aftermath—in, say, the elaborate interpretative strategies of critical theory or the self-consciousness of literary and musical forms—seems almost quaintly abstract, desperately Eurocentric today. More reliable now are the reports from the front line where struggles are being fought between domestic tyrants and idealist oppositions, hybrid combinations of realism and fantasy, cartographic and archeological descriptions, explorations in mixed forms (essay, video or film, photograph, memoir, story, aphorism) of unhoused exilic experiences.”
“The major task, then, is to match the new economic and socio-political dislocations and configurations of our time with the startling realities of human interdependence on a world scale….”
“The fact is, we are mixed in with one another in ways that most national systems of education have not dreamed of. To match knowledge in the arts and sciences with these integrative realities is, I believe, the intellectual and cultural challenge of the moment….”
“Surely it is one of the unhappiest characteristics of the age to have produced more refugees, migrants, displaced persons, and exiles than ever before in history, most of them as an accompaniment to and, ironically enough, as afterthoughts of great post-colonial and imperial conflicts.”
“The émigré consciousness—a mind of winter, in Wallace Steven’s phrase—discovers in its marginality that ‘a gaze averted from the beaten track, a hatred of brutality, a search for fresh concepts not yet encompassed by the general pattern, is the last hope for thought’.”

Note Eight: Is science superior to literature? It has been absurdly suggested so by a contemporary novelist at The Metropolitan Review:

“Insofar as fiction primarily seeks to examine human nature, it does so only in proportion to our ignorance of our own neurology. Science will always be above literature. One day, after filling the gaps in our knowledge, it will render the entire discipline obsolete.”
Without question, many of us dinosaurs hope that day never comes.

Science is not above literature and cannot render it obsolete — so notes Noam Chomsky, an all-time great scientist:

I think the Victorian novel tells us more about people than science ever will...and we will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology…. In fact, most of what we know about things that matter comes from such sources, surely not from considered rational inquiry (science), which sometimes reaches unparalleled depths of profundity, but has a rather narrow scope.

—

If you want to learn about people's personalities and intentions, you would probably do better reading novels than reading psychology books. Maybe that's the best way to come to an understanding of human beings and the way they act and feel, but that's not science. Science isn't the only thing in the world, it is what it is...science is not the only way to come to an understanding of things…. If I am interested in learning about people, I'll read novels rather than psychology.

—

It is not unlikely that literature will forever give far deeper insight into what is sometimes called “the full human person” than any modes of scientific inquiry may hope to do. … That’s perfectly true and I believe that. I would go on to say it’s not only unlikely, but it’s almost certain.

—

The sciences give you a certain kind of understanding—deep, precise, but very narrow. Other approaches, like literature, give you a different kind of understanding—less precise, but often much broader and deeper in a different sense.

Fiction examines human nature and the human person in large part in relation to our knowledge of society, ecology, and people. If you don’t dig deep into society and politics in story, and the full human and natural environment, you’ll miss most of what there is to know about the individual person and people, about the personal and the social, about human nature and the full human condition.

Excerpt in advance — from Most Revolutionary — Chapter 33 — “Target Revolution”:

Chapter Thirty-Three — Target Revolution

While the revolutionaries and their captives in the Perez farmhouse wait for Acting President Alecta O’Roura-Chavez to fly out to Iowa from Washington DC in the proverbial dead of night, Sabia Perez stands between the kitchen and the living room reading aloud from the opening pages of George Orwell’s great personal and partisan account of the Spanish Revolution, Homage to Catalonia.

She reads to all those gathered who listen and try to understand the moment, the situation, and Sabia, each in their own way. Sabia reads to her abuelo Roca, and to her water protector allies Jenna Ryzcek and Jasmine Maldonado, and to her high school comrades Roane Alexandre and Gabe Makato, and to her young neighbor boyfriend Avery Yonkin, and to his older brother, Sabia’s spy neighbor nemesis, Billy “The Moto Kid” Yonkin bound on a chair, and to FBI Director Priama Steiner and Secret Service Director William Kingsley both bound wrists and ankles on the couch.

Sabia reads with calm and resonant oration through the opening of Homage to Catalonia as if she were creating a revolutionary tradition or leading a ritual of revolution, a revolutionary rite of passage in service to the People:

This was in late December 1936 … I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do. The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing. To anyone who had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists... Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘Señior’ or ‘Don’ or even ‘Usted’; everyone called everyone else ‘Comrade’ and ‘Thou’, and said ‘Salud!’ instead of ‘Buenos dias’. Tipping was forbidden by law; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and all the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loudspeakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no ‘well-dressed’ people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. Also I believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers' State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed, or voluntarily come over to the workers' side; I did not realize that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being.
Together with all this there was something of the evil atmosphere of war. The town had a gaunt untidy look, roads and buildings were in poor repair, the streets at night were dimly lit for fear of air-raids, the shops were mostly shabby and half-empty. Meat was scarce and milk practically unobtainable, there was a shortage of coal, sugar, and petrol, and a really serious shortage of bread. Even at this period the bread-queues were often hundreds of yards long. Yet so far as one could judge the people were contented and hopeful. There was no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low; you saw very few conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars except the gypsies. Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. In the barbers' shops were Anarchist notices (the barbers were mostly Anarchists) solemnly explaining that barbers were no longer slaves. In the streets were coloured posters appealing to prostitutes to stop being prostitutes. To anyone from the hard-boiled, sneering civilization of the English-speaking races there was something rather pathetic in the literalness with which these idealistic Spaniards took the hackneyed phrases of revolution. At that time revolutionary ballads of the naivest kind, all about proletarian brotherhood and the wickedness of Mussolini, were being sold on the streets for a few centimes each. I have often seen an illiterate militiaman buy one of these ballads, laboriously spell out the words, and then, when he had got the hang of it, begin singing it to an appropriate tune…
There were still women serving in the militias, though not very many. In the early battles they had fought side by side with the men as a matter of course. It is a thing that seems natural in time of revolution. Ideas were changing already, however. The militiamen had to be kept out of the riding-school while the women were drilling there because they laughed at the women and put them off. A few months earlier no one would have seen anything comic in a woman handling a gun.

Sabia walks over to the kitchen table and sets down the book and picks up the shotgun that she commandeered from Avery after he blasted his brother Billy’s spy drone for Sabia when it closed in on the winter greenhouse where she often works.

Sabia lifts the shotgun above her head with her left hand than holds it out in front of her. “We might not need this tonight. But then again we might,” she says.

She directs the butt of the gun at Billy bound in the chair.

“No one better laugh at me,” she says. Billy holds his retrograde emotions in reserve, for once. “Or at Jenna or Jasmine or Roane.”

Sabia waves the butt of the gun at the Directors Steiner and Kingsley bound on the couch. “You’re not the boss of me. Capiche?”

Sabia puts the gun back on the table. She picks up Homage to Catalonia and shows it again.

“These words we will always need,” she says and shakes the book like a promise, like a weapon mightier than a gun.

Dark, cold, windy — snowbound southcentral Iowa around the farmhouse of Sabia Perez — where the fate of a country, an Empire, and the world hangs in the balance.

Sabia is torn. Should she surrender captive President Kristen Silver, the fulcrum of the Revolution against Empire, for pardons from Acting President Alecta O’Roura-Chavez? Or go to prison now at the iron hand of FBI Director Priama Steiner, to best extend the Revolution? The Perez farmhouse is entirely surrounded by the overwhelming weaponry and forces of the state.

Yet how much easier to fight than to surrender. How much harder to surrender than to fight. But what happens when personally you must lose for the Revolution to win? What happens when your personal win means the Revolution will lose?

Does Sabia go to prison like fearless anarchist leader Buenaventura Durruti through two decades, off and on, leading up to the Spanish Revolution, or does she stay where she is and go down on the front line like Durruti did in the end, fighting in Madrid, Spain’s capital city on the high plateau.

During the Spanish Revolution, the gory civil war, freedom versus tyranny, the endlessly brave anarchists rammed taxis into machine gun positions in the cities and threw themselves into many other acts of life-and-death bravery, often hand-to-hand, bullet-to-bullet. The anarchists and socialists fought the Empire: the fascists, and the conservatives, and the military, and the big industrialists and landowners who were supported by Hitler and Mussolini and plutocrats everywhere, including in America — the usual suspects. The anarchists, the organized workers, attacked military barracks with homemade bombs, clubs, and stones. They fought against the supremacy of money and guns over the everyday lives of the People. They fought for democracy and their rights as human beings. They fought against the attacks and abuse by the big owners, the police state, and the church. The anarchists and socialists won briefly before being crushed by force and suffering the dictatorship of the plutocracy and military for forty years, until the late 1970s.

40 years is far too long. 4 years is too long. 4 minutes.

So in southcentral Iowa Sabia attacks the plutocrat state with her bare hands and mind, at first, before gaining weapons and allies to defend the revolution against the state’s monopoly on violence and material power.

The Revolution as it turns out has the people, the 80 percent, if not the 99.

Maybe now Sabia can let go of the sharp edge of the Revolution, and leave the far greater forces of the collective Peoples to push beyond what she and her close allies have achieved. A strategic hand-off — hands-off. Hasn’t she done enough already? Has she?

What does the Revolution demand? What can Sabia bear? What more can she and her close allies achieve?

Acting President Alecta O’Roura-Chavez feels pushed around, all around the country now, half against her will — first from the White House to the South Lawn and Marine One, then to Joint Base Andrews and Air Force One, then to Des Moines International Airport in Iowa. What a difference a few hours makes. Here she goes in flight to ever greater crisis from the reporters screaming at her as she left the Press Room after her big speech, after her revolutionary declarations and Presidential Orders for social change. It’s her own mind screaming at her now that she will lose the revolution if she pardons Sabia to free President Silver. She will lose everything newly gained, newly changed.

Her emergency meeting with Chief of Staff Shakeeta Glazier and Press Secretary Tisha Nouri and her decision to fly out to Sabia in remote Iowa puts the power of the revolution at total risk, but what choice do they have? Sabia seems forced by Director Steiner to give up the whereabouts of President Silver, and if President Silver is found and freed and restored to power what good can come of it? No good. None and nothing. Alecta has the entire flight from DC to Des Moines to worry the twist in events, a couple hours to think away catastrophe. What can be done? What can be done now if Sabia is truly defeated? What must be done? Or maybe Sabia has something new and even more revolutionary in mind.

Alecta doesn’t see what it might be.

Air Force One lands in darkness in Des Moines, where Alecta transfers onto a newly staged Marine One helicopter that hammers the winter air and rises remorseless into the cloudy, icy sky. Marine one flies south and soon descends through the dark toward the snow-buried field and remnants of prairie by the Perez farmhouse. The helicopter aims for a cleared spot inside a semi-chaotic, semi-organized mob scene of uniformed officials and professionals and bared guns lining the remote country road, surrounding the Perez farmhouse.

Marine One lands amid endless snow.

Sabia is not ready, Alecta is not ready, no one is ready for what is to come.

Secret Service Deputy Director Grace Lamont sits near Alecta on Marine One.

They don’t speak beyond the perfunctory, each lost in their own lines of responsibility. Upon landing, Lamont exits first to confer with the onsite commanders. It’s on her now, to decide whether or not it’s safe proceed, to move the Acting President from Marine One to the Perez farmhouse for negotiations with Sabia.

No one advises her not to do it though no one insists it’s necessarily a go, no one except her boss in the farmhouse, Director William Kingsley. Deputy Director Grace Lamont separates herself from the ground commanders and looks to the farmhouse. She sifts through her thoughts. One might even says she rifles through her thoughts, though the etymology of “rifle” stems from old European words meaning to break, rob, pillage, and plunder. Lamont looks around at the many guns, at the nation state that aims dozens and hundreds of automated long guns at the Perez farmhouse tonight. Guns, guns, and more guns — what a state — with infinite more guns ready to be called up, manufactured and made, aimed and fired.

But you can only break and pillage one place, in one place, so much. A monopoly on firepower takes you only so far, strategically, Lamont knows. Sure, you can go all the way to complete obliteration. You can even destroy the entire planet with all the guns and other lethal weapons in your possession, but who really wants to go entirely terminal?

Other than the plutocrat fatalists and zealous fanatics.

Lamont worries.

Sabia is tricky, Lamont knows. How so tonight? Or have things changed? Has Sabia been forced to truly surrender to Lamont’s boss Kingsley and to FBI Director Priama Steiner?

On the farmhouse porch, a few exterior lights dent the black, while police state floodlights are prepped and ready to blow it all up.

The whole situation feels like a setup to Lamont, one in which there may be no real winner. It feels like a trap.

Deputy Director Lamont like Director Steiner would prefer to interrogate Sabia at a prepared site, dark or otherwise. But her boss Kingsley like Sabia wants it done here and now, and so it must be. Otherwise, Sabia says she won’t confess to the whereabouts of President Silver. Maybe she won’t regardless. Maybe though they will catch a break and Sabia won’t give in but can be broken, for once, to the will of the authorities.

Who can resist the seemingly infinite power and resources of the militant capitalist state? Not Deputy Director Lamont. How can any one person hold out, and for so long? Even Sabia Perez has her limits. She must. No one person can be a match for Empire. Not Sabia, not anyone. How much can anyone give? Even if Sabia gives everything, it won’t be enough.

Deputy Director Lamont thinks there is no victory in death, if it is death that Sabia wills from the police state tonight. There is victory only in life and triumph. That’s why Grace Lamont joined the Secret Service, an organization far larger and stronger than herself, to succeed and to survive in this life. Lamont is no Sabia, choosing to fight forces that cannot be withstood. Deputy Director Grace Lamont is a realist. Sabia is not. Sabia is—

What?

Lamont considers. She can’t really conceive. A revolutionary? That’s bullshit.

It doesn’t matter what Sabia is. Sabia is a threat to win against the authorities, against Lamont’s colleagues, and so Sabia must be defeated and that will define what Sabia is — not what Sabia wills herself to be, a revolutionary or whatever. Sabia will be what she is made to be. Prisoner, martyr, casualty of war, fatality of operations. She’s got it coming. Sabia and her allies, they’ve all got it coming. And Lamont is here to see that it gets done. Deputy Director Grace Lamont is here to make the official reality prevail over Sabia’s hopeless notions of the world. It’s what her boss would do too, and presumably is doing.

Sabia may be an alpha dog. But Grace Lamont and her colleagues are the alpha dog’s masters. No matter that the alpha dog theory has been debunked, and that dogs are not humans, Grace Lamont, like the plutocracy and the police state, is out here tonight on the cold hard white winter ground in Iowa to keep the world in its proper alignment, to keep Sabia in line.

Like a mean and brutal sun, FBI floodlights explode the dark behind Deputy Director Grace Lamont as she steps through the blast of raw electricity. She comes up through layers of snow onto the porch to the farmhouse front door where everything is illuminated and nothing is clear. Lamont holds four pardons in a hard-backed folder stamped with the the Great Seal of the President of the United States of America.

The office of Alecta. Currently. Acting President Alecta O’Roura-Chavez.

Secret Service Deputy Director Grace Lamont stands at the Perez farmhouse front door not as herself, really, but as an officer and agent of the United States of America, and as a representative of Acting President Alecta O’Roura-Chavez. She is thoroughly imbued with the idea and responsibility of her official role and position. In a life and world of much violence and chaos, Deputy Director Grace Lamont knows who she is, officially, and what she must do tonight.

She must help control and crush all opposition to authority in the Perez farmhouse — here and now against Sabia Perez and her allies.

Standing just inside the front door, Sabia and Jasmine flank the now unbound FBI Director Priama Steiner — though Steiner remains threatened physically by Sabia and her comrades, and threatened moreso by Sabia’s real options for noncompliance.

So even now Director Steiner feels free to do little or nothing against the will of the young warrior. Nothing, that is, if the negotiations to find and free President Silver are to have any great chance of success.

Deputy Director Grace Lamont rings the doorbell — a wireless device installed by the Perez family as less of an amenity and more of a security feature, linked to their underground home, than anyone outside the family can know. Not the Secret Service, not the FBI. The people, after all, can be as ultra cautious and clever as any police state, probably even much more so. A simple doorbell activated throughout the premises to fight any would-be intruders, official or otherwise — why not? — not that it might matter tonight given the totality of the situation. A pity.

Behind the barrage of lights, and on both ends of the porch, and all around the curtilage of the farmhouse, tactical teams of FBI and Secret Service agents level their guns at the front door and at the windows masked by blinds — the highly mechanized fire-and-metal-breathing police state designed to attack with overwhelming force.

Not that any of that might matter tonight either — in what would be a colossal shock to the police state and its systems.

Inside the farmhouse, FBI Director Steiner knows she will be the focus of all weapons from within and especially from without when she goes onto the porch. She breathes deep. She knows what can happen. She’s seen it. Not pretty. She’s ready. She needs to be.

Sabia’s allies and classmate Jenna and Roane grab Director Kingsley and Sabia’s opportunist spy neighbor Billy and push them from the front of the house to the back where they are sequestered in a utility room with a rarely watched TV.

Roca, Avery, and Gabe stand out of sight near Sabia and Jasmine by the front door. Roca is armed with Castelan’s stun gun in pocket and Kingsley’s handgun tucked in his waistband, while Jasmine has holstered Castelan’s handgun to her lower back beneath her shirt. Sabia’s shotgun and Roca’s rifle and all effects of the three hostages in the farmhouse are stored in the back room now with Jenna and Roane holding Billy and Director Kingsley.

Ah, yes, America — the country that remains the absolute worst, most weaponized place on the planet for a civil war. Armed to the teeth, household by household, business by business, military base by police headquarters, street by fortified street. Sabia’s revolution is not your Daddy’s protest march, in a country with an absolute brutal and bloody ongoing history of electing blood-slurping thugs to the Presidency on regular basis — call it what it is, let them be offended, who cares — the hired henchmen of the plutocracy who gather their gold by the predatory systems of pillaging and profiteering against the People and planet.

Sabia slits the blinds and peers into the burning glare outside. She knows. She knows the need to dispense with niceties in this seething age of genocide. The Big Shots have brought each and every recrimination upon themselves. All of them, almost, except Alecta.

Sabia feels it in her bones, every moment of every day, going back to the death of her mother and beyond, going back to the first blunt awareness of the truth of the deranged demolitions of Empire.

Angry in her left hand, Sabia reaches out and squeezes the right elbow of FBI Director Priama Steiner. “Remember, Steiner. Give the game away at any point, and I lock myself in this house with my happy hostage Kingsley, and it's a mad standoff,” says Sabia. “Then I go to prison — or more likely be killed — and you will never hear from President Silver or Ellen Lin ever again. That's on you — got it? You can look the world over and you will never find them, and they will never be found. Meanwhile, Alecta will rule and the People will be free and defended by her revolutionary rule. Anyway you like it, or don’t, I win. So now you decide if you want to lose Silver and Lin forever, or not. She’s your lousy President, not mine. Is it clear?”

“Crystal,” says Director Steiner.

“Good. We play this my way. Or no way. Especially not yours.”

Sabia opens the door.

Director Steiner steps into the icy winter wind on the porch. She takes the lights like a punch to the face as she squints against the floodwall of brute energy. She is the focal point of all weapons — angry, outraged weapons from every angle.

Everyone sees her bright as day by their bared eyes and weapons, while FBI Director Steiner can see no one other than Secret Service Deputy Director Grace Lamont directly in front of her, a shadow figure, otherworldly, distorted by the blaze of artificial energy, looking like a monster even, monstrous, shielding glare — her comrade-in-arms.

Sabia stands on the threshold of the doorway, watching closely.

Steiner sees the folder in Lamont’s left hand. She shakes Lamont’s right hand with both of her own, as if to make sure of the grasp, as if to convey that the two officials need each other here tonight more than can be openly expressed.

The bright lights indicate lots of power, at last, to Director Steiner, lots of officials and agents, weapons and control. Exactly what’s needed to show who’s boss, to be boss.

“Come in, Grace,” says Director Steiner. She leads Deputy Director Lamont past Sabia into the Perez farmhouse kitchen.

Sabia is struck and dazzled for a moment by the full light of Empire before she slams the door shut behind her, and locks it.