Philadelphia Convention Center
In a Philadelphia concert venue, packed with more than 25,000 of her adoring fans, Belle is backstage preparing. The stage is all set up and the show is ready to start. Belle is working, putting the final changes on the special prologue she has written for this six-city concert tour. She is confident about her music, but fusses over her pre-show remarks to her fans, wants her message to her many faithful followers to be precise and unequivocal, delivered with practiced precision and her special “Belle” brand of emotion.
“Are you ready, Belle?” her manager and boyfriend, Rob Mork, asks.
“Just a couple more minutes,” she responds, holding up a hand.
Her fans now are used to the special monologues that are always at the start of her show. They are heartfelt, sharply political, and as much a trademark as the broad, floppy-brimmed, silver-banded black hat—with her name inscribed in a bold silver monogram across the crown—that she always wears during her performances.
As an entertainer, Belle is a phenom—with the kind of excitement and onstage electricity that light up the whole concert hall. Coming out onto the platform in her skin-tight black patent leather suit with silver garters and high boots, she usually goes first to the front of the stage to touch hands and exchange love and affection with her ardent fans. She wears a white silk kerchief around her neck that she takes off and tosses out into the wildly cheering crowd. Then against a backdrop of flashing lights and stage pyrotechnics she immediately takes up the mic and begins her speech to the audience.
It has become her habit at the top of the program to spend fifteen to twenty minutes talking about the ills of the current day society—the economic and social injustice, the still rampant racial discrimination, the bigotry, and hatred that have become more pronounced, more normalized, and seemingly acceptable since back to the time The Bad King first descended on the escalator in his New York tower at the start of his campaign in June 2015. Her fans have come to accept these monologues as a “Belle” trademark.
The popular song Pillar of Fire, currently at the top of the weekly Playbill list of hits, is a bluesy, soulful song written by Belle as a tribute to Sandra Bland the young black woman stopped in a Texas town for a faulty taillight. She had come from Wisconsin and was expecting to begin a new job the next day. When it was discovered in a computer search that there were outstanding warrants against her from earlier traffic violations, the officer on the scene wanted to arrest her. She resisted. After a brief scuffle, she was put in handcuffs and taken away to jail. Unable—through family and friends—to raise the required $500 for bail so she could report to her new job the next day, she was subsequently found dead two days later in her cell, the victim of what the police called an apparent suicide by hanging.
Belle has been giving these monologues since she first started entertaining in public. Though she isn’t a candidate for political office, she talks about the need in the U.S. for quality and affordable health care for all, and the need—hopefully under a Progressive Democrat administration—for the U.S. to take the lead again in fostering new more aggressive climate change initiatives. She talks about how it is essential to re-invigorate the CFPB—started by Elizabeth Warren and gutted under The Bad King—to help protect working poor people from the predatory practices of pay-day lenders, the need to again strengthen the regulatory agencies like the FDA and the EPA that had been eviscerated in their power under the current president, and how the states need to enhance voter protections with new, stronger voting rights laws.
In his campaign appearances throughout the Midwest, The Bad King reminds his followers of their grievances (real or imagined) and blames them on the amorphous they, the entrenched political establishment in Washington against which he has proclaimed himself their champion—even though he has taken into his embrace the entire Republican establishment in the Congress, referred to in the Liberal media as The Reichstag.
In polling matchups against leading Democrats, however, the president is losing against Biden, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg. He is also suffering head winds from a slowly eroding U.S. economy injured by his now unpopular trade war with China. To help in support of their candidate, Republicans in the states—through their legislatures—are mounting a full-scale attack against Roe vs. Wade, the popular abortion law that provides vital reproductive health care protections for women. More than thirty states have passed new more restrictive abortion laws, and there is a case from Mississippi headed to the Supreme Court to test the constitutionality of the almost fifty-year-old Roe decision. On the Democrat side, Kamala Harris has come out strongest in support of abortion rights and women’s health care issues, stating that if she is elected president her administration would require that state laws be reviewed by the Justice Department for their constitutionality.
Belle advocates for a new wave of Democrat elected officials in the states and at the federal level to take up the challenge to protect women’s health and privacy rights by stopping, in the courts, efforts to overturn Roe vs. Wade. She begins each of her monologues with Martin Luther King’s famous refrain, “I have a dream that one day . . .” and then she mentions in a list the changes she would like to see to bring about a more just and equal society.
Manhattan, New York City
In his upper East Side 50th floor townhouse, with its expansive view over Central Park and the Hudson River, far right-wing (radical) conservative billionaire hedge fund manager, Thomas Merced, is watching MSNBC—not his usual cable venue. He is a devoted Fox News viewer and Rush Limbaugh listener. He once owned—prior to The Bad King’s election—Boston Analytics, the political consultancy company where his daughter Rachel was chairwoman while Steve Bannon (known as Sloppy Steve in the environs of the WH)—the former Breitbart chief executive, current Bad King campaign adviser, and lead anarchist—was a serving board member. MSNBC political correspondent Ali Vitale is in Philadelphia covering the Belle concert and the network is broadcasting Belle’s opening remarks.
Belle is at the end of her monologue, again intoning Martin Luther King:
“I have a dream . . . that one day we can have an administration in Washington that is compassionate and caring instead of cruel and inhumane . . . one that works for all the people instead of just the entrenched elites, corporate kleptocrats, and the 1%.” She goes on:
“I have a dream that one day the power goes back to the people and away from the moneyed special interests.”
Hedge fund titan Thomas Merced turns off the TV and, in a fit of rage, throws the remote down on the couch in disgust. His thirty-five-year-old daughter, Rachel, a close conservative confidant of her father, happens to be in the room.
“What’s the matter, dad?” she asks.
Angrily her father gestures at the TV. “It’s people like her,” he says with a scowl, and that other woman from Brooklyn, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who are going to ruin things for people like us. They want to redistribute the wealth and turn the country into a socialist nirvana. And they will start a revolution to do it. People like us cannot just stand by and let the left-wing extremists like her and the rest of that mob takeover America. They are a danger to everything we hold dear . . . our very way of life. This Belle needs to be stopped. If left to continue,” he pauses significantly, “she will radicalize all the young—everyone under forty—a whole generation of the country’s youth against our conservative values and principles. She is already turning out thousands of new Democrat voters at her concerts.”
Rachel is alarmed. For her usually taciturn—monosyllabic—father, this is a tirade of epic proportion.
“Something needs to be done,” he goes on, “and something will be done . . . even if I must take matters into my own hands.” He raises his eyebrows and shakes a fist to emphasize the point.
Surprised, Rachel looks back at her father. “What do you propose to do?” she asks. He stares back in mute silence. The look in his eyes sends a chill down her spine. She knows her father well enough to know he is not one to indulge in hypotheticals or traffic in idle threats. This is a threat—a promise—to act against the attractive young entertainer, Black social activist, who is now, across America, winning the hearts and changing the minds of the country’s youth.