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Friday, December 27, 2024

Prologue to Chapter 18, "The SwiftPad Extinction"

 ERICK DUKE, MERCENARY, MEETS HIS TROOPS
Early October
Erick Duke’s father, Parnell, had made a fortune in direct marketing. When Erick was born, his family lived in a single-story, three-bedroom red brick house in St. Louis. Parnell was an Army helicopter mechanic, but he left the service under a cloud after the failed Iranian hostage rescue during the Carter years. Erick was only an infant then.
    Parnell joined the first Pentecostal Fellowship Council and started a multi-tiered direct marketing company called NewLife with a partner who later died under mysterious circumstances. NewLife sold ammunition, handgun components, and various other combat paraphernalia. It also sold women’s make-up and “survivalist feminine hygiene” products plus self-help books (How to NOT be a Homosexual, Clean and Sexy Makeovers, The Psychiatry Cult, Jesus in 30 Days, etc.).
    It took almost eight months for Parnell to cull through all of his potential business partners, who were promoted as an exclusive group, and he was very public in his sermons at his growing church about the need to be very selective (as well as the sacredness of the number 12).
    He sold the lifestyle to the associates. He made them feel special and exclusive. It was the lifestyle of the committed evangelical. Lots of meetings, deep regret about nothing, deep amnesia about the really bad shit. But that was just theatrics, the “small talk” before the short strokes. Parnell
instinctively knew he needed to convince them to be “slaves” (to the spirit of Jesus), and make them believe their business served a higher cause. For the first six months  they war-gamed their plans. They were to burn through family, grade school buddies, buddies’ parents, plus anyone else they could guilt into paying 5–10 times more than they would pay at Target, or Cabela’s or even online for stuff they didn’t need.
    Maybe 1 out of 20 people had the willpower to go outside their own “circle” and find strangers to buy the shit. They had to be determined not to end up with boxes of the shit in their garage. That’s the trick. Find those people, the 1 out of 20. Parnell taught them to be their own cult leader. They had to be as careful in finding their first “12” as Parnell had been. Once they learn the trick of lying, the rest is easy; there are an unlimited number of suckers out there.
    Those people who shamelessly promote the shit are your “bottom bitches.” You just need to find some good bottom bitches. Everyone has those people in their lives. They depend on you for their self-worth. So do them a favor, and put them to work. It’s what they want anyway. They understand what’s going on, but what they get out of it – self-worth, a reason for getting up every day – THAT is all the payment they need or expect. Just teach your bottom bitches to feel like royalty, better than royalty, and for them to do the same to their bottom bitches. There is an endless supply of BBs. And once you show them how you did it for (to) them, they will know how to do it themselves, and they will all believe that they are going to get rich too. Erick watched his father carefully through his youth and early teenage years as he grew his business.
    In actual fact, 98% of all “associates” in all multi-level marketing schemes (pyramid selling), regardless of the products, lose money. The math proving it is simple. And his always ends up the same. You need the maniacal qualities of a psychotic narcissist to be a leader in multi-level marketing. It is Cult Leading 101.
    Erick, or ED (not Ed as in Edward), understood his dad’s business and knew he could do it better. He thought his dad was lame and declared loudly that he didn’t need his fucking money or his bullshit company (or his evangelical religion for that matter!). He left home after finishing his homeschooling and getting an approved Missouri GED, joined the Navy, then quit that and with the secret help of his dad’s money got into Virginia Military Institute (VMI). Graduated with a degree in Geopolitics. 
    Joined the Navy (again) via Officer Candidate School. He got very fit and made it onto SEALs and within a year, on his second deployment, was charged with machine gunning 19 Arab villagers. He spent six months “under house arrest” but was never brought to trial. He was thrown out of the SEALs, but the murder case disappeared. Rumors said a lot of money flowed for a little silence. Congressional investigations circled all around his “honorable discharge” but again, crickets. Nobody would talk.
    Meanwhile his younger sister Martha became a Christian Internet sensation. Little innocent sister – caught in the maelstrom of our perverted culture! She was shrewd, built her image as a cult slut – long bizarre rants about how rap music and vaccines had stolen her sense of right and wrong – called out over fifty celebrities for “psychically” raping her as a child, had actual sex with three rich, local notables, all older men, one after the other, over a single week, videoed it all, and then outed them. She started an S-Plog that morphed into a high-production popular show on RFD network about the Satanic influence in popular culture along with cooking tips. She dressed in white, and wore daisies in her hair.
    On Sundays she delivered screeching video sermons in tight t-shirts and often would spin around when delivering a punchline, to show off her tramp stamp of Jesus on the cross just above her low-slung, cut-off jeans. She claimed prominent Dees were recruiting young girls into a sex cult and she had nearly been caught in it herself! They came for her, but she had fought them off, attacks which she described in graphic detail, attacks that nearly lost her newly restored virginity! No place or person was safe!
    On her show Martha interviewed another young woman who claimed to have been violated in her own bed by demons (“They told me that Black-Prez had sent them and that he was laughing and jizzin’ all over me!”). The woman gave tearful, long detailed descriptions of being raped repeatedly by big men – white men, “Chinamen,” and bringing up the rear, a Black man batting clean-up with a huge dick! How big? asked Martha. How is that possible, she asked, looking at how far her hands were spread apart.
    Martha talked about the power of her visions, and how those visions told more truth than anything – they told her the future, and most importantly, they told her what was in the hearts of people. Millions of views.
    She soon was preaching at her father’s mega-church, and quickly became the star attraction, driving attendance and collections too of course, higher and higher. And then – ED’s little sister was asked to be the Official Chaplain of the White House.
    Erick, a civilian again, hiding from his SEAL fuckup, had taken over his father’s business. His father had died on the pulpit while preaching. Some say he was trying too hard, competing with his daughter, who watched in what appeared to be fascinated horror as he flopped around on the stage like a walrus trying to get off the beach into the water. For the first 30 seconds of his death throes, the congregation clapped in unison to the strange rhythm of his convulsions. But when the true nature of his moribund condition was finally evident, they all burst into “Nearer My God to Thee.” When he died, Parnell was worth nearly a billion dollars.
    The autopsy found strychnine. The church had had recent infestations of rats, and the theory was he had accidentally eaten some of the poison left out. An investigation failed to find any evidence of foul play.
    ED sold his shares of his dad’s pyramid marketing company, NewLife, to Amway for $16 billion. He immediately kick-started a domestic protection force, based on the SEAL model. It was all white men (except for Echo Devious) and came to a certain kind of fame during the rise of Hassan Coleman. There were kidnappings of squatters, shootings, and social media campaigns against Hassan. Some of his guys got caught and begged for forgiveness. But there was no extrajudicial action; trials were judged fair by all accounts. After the (V)ICE debacle in Portland, when it was slowly revealed how Coleman had been closely involved in the defeat of the (V)ICE forces, the battle for Memphis’s soul was over and a warrant was issued for Erick Duke in Memphis.

From The Fall of It All – A History of the Big Dump