Intermission: the Modern Tempest Trust Explained

A sort of character analysis.

I've been publishing a serialized novel on Substack. The working notes are a bit of a mess, but as I reviewed them over the last few weeks for story direction, it struck me that I might owe you a bit of a character explanation. If you haven’t read the serialized novel, this explanation might give you a peek into my brain. I'm not running 10,000-lumens bulbs up there in my noggin, so bear with me.

This piece is particularly for subscribers because there's nothing quite so divisive as applying theology to fiction. C'est la vie.

To read this story from the beginning, follow these links: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, and Part VII.

If you’d like to help fund this story in the interim…

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“I told him I’d lost something in these weeks of work. I wasn’t sure what, but it felt—what’s the word?—fundamental. … I could only describe it this way: An inability to care about the many things writers are supposed to care about these days. All those tiny tempests made by the Modern Tempest Trust.”

From Part I of Finding Seth Haines (American Hearts)

1.

On Wednesday, I met with one of Bukowski’s Real Ones, the kind of person that doesn’t suffer the

self-congratulatory nonsense as the
famous gather to applaud their seeming
greatness[.]
(Bukowski, "This")

She does not suffer nonsense, but this is not to say she doesn’t suffer. This year has been the year of suffering, the year in her life arc signified by conflict. She has been diagnosed with cancer.

In the cafe, between bird bites of a winter Caesar salad, she says with a half smile that the prognosis is good. She’ll lose some tissue here and there, but the genetic panels are good and they caught it early and she probably won’t have to do radiation and… and… and…. She silver lines these little black spots on the sun of her marvelous life, says she’s really one of the lucky ones because there's insurance and resources and... and.. and....

She is not wrong. But cancer? Some silver linings aren't so silver; Lord have mercy.

Anyway, we do what humans do—turn to cause and effect. She’s relatively young, disciplined, and she loves workouts that include death in the title—Death by Burpees, Death by Deadlift, Death by Devil’s Press. She eats her greens and grilled chicken, takes her vitamins, and flosses her teeth. She’s the kind of person the gathering famous might envy. And still, cancer.

She does not ask the question directly, but our conversation pushes against the edges of a fundamental human question: Why me?

I don’t know, but there are hunches. I share about a concept of sin I read long ago, a concept separate and apart from the sort of individualized, volitional sin over which all humans obsess. There is another kind of sin, I offer, one that permeates the world. It’s this sin—the yeast in the dough, so to speak—that affects us all. Black and white. Young and old. Rich and poor. Sinner and saint.

It's the collective sin--the sin compounded by billions of humans following their lesser angels--that leads to war, pollution, consumerism, exploitation. Maybe even cancer. But can we put a name and a face to it? Put another way, is there some cabal (shadowy or otherwise) that perpetuates what theologians call social sin?

2.

A few weeks ago, I accidentally began writing a serial novel. Accident—the word is anti-volitional. For instance: Iaccidentally tripped on the stairs; I accidentally dropped the mug; I accidentally left the chicken coop open and the foxes got in. But we use the word in so many other ways, too. For instance: I ran the red light and t-boned the other car… manwhat a bad accident.

Humans—we’re linguistic contortionists. Anyhow.

I use the word accident because I didn’t set out to write a novel. In fact, I hadn’t set out to write anything coherent at all. My only intention was to clear some creative cobwebs, and in that clearing, a story emerged. As I typed, a structural character poked his head up: The Modern Tempest Trust.

In the book, the Modern Tempest Trust is a group that stirs the proverbial scheiß suppe of the world, which is to say they perpetuate social sin. It’s the group that twists and contorts society against the common good. The members of the MTT are somewhat akin to vampires, except they hide behind business suits and corporate facades instead of cloaks and crypts.

The MTT is a construct of my imagination, of course, but not everything we imagine is untrue.

3.

You need not hyperextend your imagination to find examples of social sin or the progenitors of it. Consider a few examples.

Example No. 1: The Nuclear Problem

In 1942 a group of cigarette-smoking sociopaths came up with a brilliant idea. We’ll create a doomsday weapon, they said.

This ultimate shock-and-awe bomb would be an indiscriminate murderer of soldiers, women, children, the elderly, the handicapped, Christians, Buddhists, the animals, the crops, the microbial substructure of the soil. By 1945, these Marlboro men had succeeded in developing their killing device, and in August of that year, they dropped two of these devices on Japan.

You know this story.

In the years following the utter annihilation of Japan—the years in which all nature cried out to God—sociopaths all over the world saw the strategic advantage of this doomsday device, and a group of educated idiots in Russia decided to level the playing field. They created their own doomsday weapons. Thus began the nuclear arms race, the race that would change the face of the world forever.

My grandfathers fought in World War II, and yes, they would have done anything to stop the bloodletting. So would their wives, who were stateside raising families and waiting for their husbands to return—either in the flesh or in a body bag. But were they given a say in the creation of the atomic bomb? Did they have a vote? Of course not. Democracy only works when it’s convenient, after all.

So, all the world of men, women, children, and animals was thrust into the nuclear age, an age marked by the assurance that If you drop yours, I’ll drop mine and then what a mess we will have. All these decisions made by madmen and politicians set the world aflame in fear. Their actions changed the course of history, and even today, we live under the threat of that history.

The nuclear bomb is the most obvious example of how powerful people—the MTT—stir up the troubles of the world. But there are less obvious iterations of the same problem.

Example No. 2: The Microwave Oven.

In the late 1950s, my grandfather—a manager at Woolworth’s—bought a microwave oven. My grandmother once shared how that device seemed magical, how she could take cans of tamales, chili, and a slab of Velveeta cheese and turn it into the meal she called “Mexican” in less than ten minutes. The microwave revolutionized her cooking and saved her time, allowing her to catch up on her back issues of Reader’s Digest.