"Oh. So you're going to hit me with this great revelation of yours, and then I'm supposed to fall all over myself trying to spread your so-called gospel? No thanks. I've had enough of your games, so if you'll excuse me, I have an appointment to get to."
He turned and reached for the door.
"You could smear me," she said to his back, "but do you have the stomach to smear yourself?"
Jurdens opened the door a few inches, and then stopped. "Smear myself?"
"That's right. Because if you go to that appointment, that's exactly what they'll ask you to do."
He turned. "You know about my appointment?"
"I do. I also know that the religion they want you to shill for will do for Christianity what that religion did for the ones that preceded it: smear it, and everyone who practices it." A heartbeat later, she added, "Or, in your case, professes to."
The door clicked shut behind him.
"Okay. First I want to know how long you've been stalking me. I've been in the business of manipulating people's minds long enough to know that all it takes to enfold someone in a comforting sham is knowledge of whatever deep framing supports their world view."
Corie didn't say anything for almost ten seconds. Long enough, she knew, for his deeper emotions to surface, and for his heart to quicken. Waiting wasn't her usual pattern, but she'd practiced the scene endlessly, and knew it was important to pull him out of his comfort zone.
"Not long. Three months was all it took to make your patterns. But I didn't come here to out you to your homophobic masters. All that would accomplish is to have you replaced. No, I want you to keep your job. I want you to keep it so you can start manipulating the puppet-masters. If they're ever going to be brought down, it will have to be done right. And you're the person to do it."
Jurdens turned his palms up. "Are you going to make your point, or don't you have one?"
"It's this. Everything they've done for over a century has been focused on changing the foundations of the belief system on which this nation was founded. The gang of shopkeepers that met in Philadelphia laid it out in the first few words of the Constitution: "We the People'. It was all about individuals, about how a group of like-minded people could come together to constitute a government intended to protect those individuals from the trading empire that confronted them with the weapons of commerce and of war.
"By the time of the Civil War, the people wielding the real power in this country had decided that our vaunted founders were wrong, and that the only way to counter the aggregated power of the groups that stood in their way was to transform this nation from one based on individual liberty to one based on corporate liberty. That was why they finagled their way into getting corporations recognized as people before the law. It was their wedge, their foot in the door.
"What they accomplished by sacrificing the people in the twin towers was to strip the people in this country of their individuality. That morning, on the anniversary of their own formal birth as a hidden military government, in the crucible of unthinking rage against an ill-defined enemy that they generated with the complicity of the media they controlled, they forged the basis for what they are about to ask you to do for them."
He stood transfixed. "A rousing speech. Does it ever end?"
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