The Detonation Of A Mediocre Man

I’ll tell you exactly what I saw: they had the mediocre man trussed in a wheelbarrow and they rolled him out into the middle of the street and blew him up. He was round, agitated, and full of guts, and he babbled nervously right up until the moment when they set off the detonator.

I suppose to be fair I should point out that there were feeble bursts of indignation in the midst of the nervous babbling. I’m sure the mediocre man had some points he wanted to make, but by that time it was too late. Nobody had any interest in hearing what he had to say; we were all just there to see the explosion.

One of the –I’m not sure, really, what they called themselves. Rebels? Insurgents? I know there was some kind of acronym involved. At any rate, one of the leaders of this group read a prepared statement, but it was difficult to understand him, speaking as he was through a ski mask and without a microphone. I’m pretty sure I heard him say something about the ideals on which this great nation was founded, and I’ve no doubt he railed a bit about the corruption and abuse of power and the only justice unchecked power understands.

That, at any rate, was the sort of thing these characters were always carrying on about.

There was a decent crowd on hand (and it was growing by the minute), and the few government soldiers who were present merely observed from a safe distance. The guy who was doing the talking finally got around to pronouncing a formal sentence on the mediocre man. I didn’t catch all the wording, because the crowd was getting pretty riled up at this point –some people were throwing things– and there was a television news helicopter hovering directly overhead. What I did make out, though, seemed to follow standard bureaucratic boilerplate –“We hereby declare…,” that sort of thing. The usual nonsense, I suppose, but it struck me as kind of odd, given that these characters fancied themselves rebels.

I also thought it was odd that in pronouncing the sentence the guy actually spoke the mediocre man’s full name –Karl Christian Rove. The speaker, I think, clearly did a little improvisation at this juncture, declaring that the prisoner’s middle name alone represented a grave enough blasphemy as to provide all the necessary justification for the detonation.

It was quite an explosion, I can tell you that. I can also tell you that the mediocre man made a spectacular mess.