Adjustment Day

by Chuck Palahniuk

“You teach something called ‘The Arrogant Legacy of Privileged Euro-Colonial Cultural Imperialism’?”

Dr. Brolly who taught Patterns in Politics had explained as much. For all in-coming freshmen, he’d led a module examining a book by some German braincase. The smarty-pants academic, Gunnar Heinsohn, theorized that all major political upheavals in history were due to an excess of young males. A “youth bulge,” the savvy kraut called it. Teaching the concept left Professor Brolly breathless with excitement. The basic idea held that if at least thirty percent of a population consisted of males between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine—watch out! Such surplus young men, if they were somewhat educated and well fed, they yearned for status and would create havoc in pursuit of it. Gunnar held that starving people don’t strive for recognition. Likewise, illiterate boys will never recognize how history ignores them. But if the youth bulge is fed, well fed and schooled, they’ll become a pack of ravenous, attention-seeking wolves.

They were preemptively building a memorial to the soldiers who’d be dead by Halloween. This was someone’s extremely efficient idea. Rising from that ominous pit would be a white-marble confection of Greco-Roman statues and columns, the usual emotionally cathartic frou-frou. It made sense to begin construction now, even before the war was declared. The faster the dead could be honored, the faster they could be forgotten.

Beautiful people become powerful because they recognize the nature of power, early, and fear losing it. People beautiful in their youth learn to transfer power by investing it in subsequent forms. They trade their youth for education. Their education they invest in developing contacts and expertise in a skill. Their money they invest in redundant forms of power, back-up resources.

Toe the line. Follow the straight and narrow, and no one cares if you live or die. Walter can starve to death or stumble into traffic and get mowed flat. He can ship out to some combat zone and get bayonet-raped. He’s nobody’s little baby, not anymore. Nobody gives a crap whether he lives or dies. But kill off a few of his fellow nobodies, and society will move Heaven and earth to keep track of him. A billion taxpayers will provide for his food and shelter for the rest of his life. Dress him in clean clothes. Stop eating, and they’ll shove a tube down his throat and pump him full of food, a treatment he hasn’t enjoyed since he was a fetus.

As Dr. Brolly had explained it, every youth bulge had a text. It had a book to justify the actions its men must take. The Conquistadors had the Bible. Mao’s army had his book of quotations. The Nazis had Mein Kampf just as American radicals had Saul Alinsky.

John Steinbeck, had been a pussy, too afraid to make anything happen. He’d abandoned his characters to suffer. As had God. Only a white man had the inflated self-worth to write that book, and only a white man would have the secret pride to read it. It’s only the white man who clings to his guilt. Guilt for Adam’s fall. Guilt for Christ’s sacrifice and for black African slavery. It was clear to Jamal that for whites their guilt constituted a uniquely white form of boasting. Their breast beating was a humblebrag always saying: We did this! We thwarted God in the Garden! We killed his son! We white people will do with other races and natural resources as we see fit! Showing off disguised as a mea culpa.

Shaking his head dismissively, Talbott muttered, “Palahniuk. All of his work is about castration. Castration or abortion.”

A man might hesitate to kill if it meant only his own benefit, but if his action would crown his sons and, in turn, their sons and their sons as royalty in a new society, that man who had no option but to commit murder in someone else’s war, that man would gladly create a meritocracy based on murder.

To make a career of rescuing people is also to create a permanent class in need of rescue.

It was a national disgrace. Nothing less than a badge of shame, as far as Charlie saw it. Blacktopia had only recently announced a successful launch of its new flying pyramid, based on a long-forgotten antigravity technology suppressed by Eurocentric interests. After centuries of white denial the blacks had proven that pyramids built by the Egyptian pharaohs were in fact flying machines.

“Bring me,” Talbott directed, “your learned helpless.” His voice rose to a shout. “The wretched results of jobs off-shored. Lend these, the hopeless, diversity-vanquished, to me . . .” Whereupon Talbott had appeared to swoon. In little more than a whisper, he’d uttered, “I’ll foot the bill. The world is yours.”

As they soared above the open country Jamal lectured on the state of things since Adjustment Day. Gays, who’d lived such gadabout and footloose lives, in Gaysia they were yoked to the national campaign for reproduction. Draconian sperm drives left most men with little money or energy. And women had lost all control over their reproductive rights. Healthy women were required to register, and eventually to be conscripted to bear—not arms—but babies! To sustain their population via export left them with scant time for sadomasochistic antics or meth-fueled circuit parties. Jamal shouted to be heard above the wind, “Liberation has enslaved them!”

“Of all people, only Mr. King came close to exposing the true magic of black people,” Arabella explained. “For many years we debated killing him for our own protection.” Miss Josephine listened in amazement. “Blacks killed Martin Luther King Jr.?” Arabella scowled. “Not Doctor King . . . ,” she exclaimed. “We hired a man to kill Stephen King. Unfortunately the assassin was inept, and the intended hit-and-run was a failure.” In the author’s masterpiece novels, she said, books such as The Shining and The Stand and The Green Mile, King had almost convinced white people of the majestic uncanny powers blacks kept under wraps.