Seth Sundance takes the stand: Part 1
Scene: Courtroom of the Dishonorable William Bill Publowsky. The case being tried is the firing murder of Saint Stephan, who had been cast from his position as chief editor of the Kyiv Poster at the start of 2008, just before the global financial crisis hit Ukraine, being replaced by Zippy Zamazda, whom Stephan had hired in good faith to work under him as an editor a mere several months earlier.
The ‘working under’ part apparently didn’t sit well with the short, overweight, and arrogant Zamazda, who, as it was clearly shown in the last episode of this drama, had no qualms about allowing clandestine forces at the Poster put him in Stephan’s place, from which it is absolutely correct to infer that he never once questioned the move as the scheme unfolded – being an ambitious, highly intellectual go-getter with a wife to impress and support, a family to make, and a future to live – unlike Saint Stephan, who was clearly an alcoholic and low-class loser, stupid, laughable, derision-worthy, whom life would do well to exclude from procreating, and unbelievably lucky to have gotten the chief editor job in the first place, under fluke conditions, at precisely the moment when the media market was at its commercial height, no thanks to him, of course, who just sat back, doing nothing and taking all the credit, while the money rolled in, making it clear that just about anyone else in the same position would have done significantly better.
And instead of suffering from the MERE profits that Stephan was bringing into the company through the Poster – or, more precisely, passively watching flood the company’s coffers in dumb-animal, bovine-eyed wonder as he sat back, a drunken charity case with a blank stare, drooling mouth, and idiot smile, taking advantage of a sinecure, thanks to the up market, doing nothing, for what for him was undoubtedly a salary he could only have dreamed of but never, ever have otherwise gotten, had life not suddenly turned so inexplicably and wastefully good for him – a real, unnatural and unspeakable aberration of justice – a fluke, a fluke, a fucking fluke!!! – a deviation from what was good, desirable, and normal, an annoying blip in an otherwise smooth continuum – which simply had to be excised and healthfully corrected – Seth Sundance could have had even MORE money. Even MORE and MORE and MORE money!!!
Indeed, why be made to suffer because of a blithering fool posing as a professional competent chief editor who actually knew what he was doing? This is like beggars feasting on top of garbage cans pretending to be aristocrats. This is intolerable. What if people like this began to take over the world? His presence, that façade of real success, as though truly achieved, through hard work, talent, wisdom, superior management and leadership skills, as well as a surprisingly unexpected and refreshing, and therefore infuriating, store of charm and charisma, had become oppressive.
No – better to hire someone who at least physically, for some reason, perhaps because of his shapeless locomotive waddling, arouses a sympathy and favorable disposition from Sundance, who daydreams, between surfing porn sites on the Internet, of working with someone who is quite possibly a naturally highly talented operator after his own heart, maybe engaging, time permitting, in the occasional tete-a-tete up in his penthouse office overlooking the construction of an underground parking deck next to a gloomy highway cutting through barren Mars-like wastes of high-stacked post-Soviet residential excrescences disguising the city’s largest waste-disposal-and-incineration works, chat about things they might have in common, and so forth.
AND LIKE THE MONEY AND CONDITIONS STEPHAN OFFERED ZAMAZDA WEREN’T GOOD ENOUGH!!! NO, THEY WEREN’T FUCKING GOOD ENOUGH!!! THINGS SHOULD HAVE BEEN EVEN BETTER; YOU SHOULD HAVE GOTTEN EVEN MORE!!! SHOULDN’T YOU HAVE?!? I ASK YOU AGAIN – SHOULDN’T YOU HAVE???!!!??? YEAH, SAINT STEPHAN SHOULD HAVE JUST LAIN DOWN UNDER YOUR FEET RIGHT THERE, RECOGNIZING HE WAS OUTCLASSED BY YOUR SUPERMAN QUALITIES AND VACATED THE TOP POSITION FOR YOU, ONLY BEGGING YOU MAYBE ALLOW HIM TO WORK IN SOME CAPACITY AS YOUR SUBORDINATE, CASTING HIMSELF UPON YOUR FUCKING MERCY!!!!!!!!!
So why did you take the job, fat ass? Had you planned, somehow understanding it would be easy, to take Saint Stephan’s job all along??? Did you realize that the person interviewing you and offering you the job, which you wouldn’t have gotten if it had not been for him, would be the victim of your diabolical and scummy blitzkrieg? Is it possible that you had so much contempt for that person, who gave you something you hadn’t had before, that you gladly conspired to throw him out like the piece of garbage you just knew he was? Is it possible that someone can take what they desire from their benefactor with one hand while incapacitating that same benefactor with a blow from the other hand?
Oh, of course, you didn’t care. After all, what business does riffraff have holding a job that should have been yours in the first place? What would this world come to if you, the natural, rare, and true elite of the world stopped every minute to think and worry about the fate of worthless bums?
You, spawned of twisted Diaspora maggot seed, crouching in your overalls, the way your Diaspora Daddy taught you, and you, his proud progeny who’re supposed to carry on the royal name, take charge of the world, you sick, fat, squat, low-to-the-ground, flattened-pumpkin-bodied, delusional, disgusting, warped, physically deformed Diaspora freak. You and your degenerate seed. May you and your precious ilk be wiped from the face of the Earth.
Now, as its next key witness, the Prosecution has called to the stand Seth Sundance, mentioned above, the legendary founder, and now former owner and publisher of the Kyiv Poster. Morality for Sundance had nothing to do with his decision to fire Stephan, since he was running a business, one that belonged to him (as well as to the banks he borrowed from for the further expansion of his publishing empire (using the success of his company as collateral, little knowing those loans would soon become distressed, forcing him to sell most of his quickly depreciating assets), and to highly sensitive stockholders who held shares in his publicly traded company)), and so he could do whatever the fuck he wanted.
But that’s not the issue in this case. What this trial is driving at is another force, an insidious weasel-like one, which it is the Prosecution’s mission to argue manipulated the major players, Zamazda, Sundance, through a complex matrix of lies (advancing them geometrically to several powers beyond their original sizes and selves) into the precise psychological positions that were necessary to bring off the coup. And this is precisely where the question of morality does come in; morality, conscience, malice aforethought proving the act culpable by establishing the requisite mens rea; and whether a certain someone, or something, namely, The Ferret, being held in the courtroom cage for the accused, as per the custom in this former Soviet backwater, did in fact act immorally, evilly, vilely, reprehensibly, sinfully, before God, Whom he renounces more than he denies, when he got Saint Stephan fired, in pursuance of none other than his own convenience.
Damn, this introduction is too long already, so the drama of the courtroom trial will have to go into… Part 2.
Filed by Jack Step, April 21, 2013