Open Letter to the Counselor

Suppose a young, enterprising business law grad with a dark recent past, who ambitiously climbed the corporate ladder only to find that perch less satisfying than he once thought, suddenly fed up with the temporary comfort of consumerism and lack of lengthy attention to the concept of a civil society, is driven to escape his western surroundings to travel east in search of unrequited love and religious, immutable truth, unaware that his holiday destiny was lying in wait for him, back at home, the entire time.

Suppose, as he chases his casual desire, worrying in his heart that what he wants is always just out of his reach, dejectedly feeling that whatever he’s done always turns out wrong, struggling with his own false perception of what is his place in this world, he inadvertently stumbles upon a different and unwelcome truth.

Suppose, through the momentary embrace of a nonchalant harlot who once caught his wandering eye, he finds that a certain organization, full of harlots of every color, overtly painted as a defiant obstacle to capitalistic empiricism, an enemy of the West which he at one time so anxiously defended, is in fact funded and resourced by the Empire itself.

Money, bags full of it, washed through unidentified off-shore accounts, virtually hand-carried by the harlot and those like her, funneled into Shanghai to support the growth of the Red Dragon, secretly skimmed and dispatched from the hidden coffers of The Beacon of Democracy to terrorists and the like who unknowingly do the dirty work for the conspiracy every day of the week.

Suppose he realizes then the punch-line of the big joke, how the elite have hedged their bets under the cover of darkness, assuring their unlimited profit no matter how the mass of fools may suffer along the way, and how the love he so desperately wanted, like pointless thoughts of world peace and good faith in the ultimate inspiration behind the human condition, was all just a viscous tease, haunting him forever, leading him blindly to even further despair, and never, never intended for his poor grasp of reality in the first place.

That might be a real slap in the face, eh?

I wonder if that would be a good story. And I wonder how that guy would wind up in the end?

Cheers,
Mb