The Advent of General Rodigard

General Rodigard appeared one afternoon at the Harbinger Cafe—he took his usual stool. The television blared the news from above. It was an interesting time to be living: wars, famine, and cholera ravaged exotic locales, names you never heard of before: places like Angola and Swazi-land. The General glared skeptically at the television set.

‘In my time,’ he said to no one in particular, ‘we never had those.’

A very tan barkeep looked blandly at the General as he wiped down a glass.

‘In my time,’ the General went on, ‘we actually went to those countries, we actually saw what was happening, and by God, we took care of it. There was none of this hearing about suffering on the radio. If suffering occurred, you already knew about it, you were already en route to the scene. You had bandage materials clasped in your fists and a rope around your neck. You took knapsacks full of flour along, and you air-dropped them. We even had a loudspeaker, which is no joke.’

There was a pause during which the General sipped his beer. The tan barkeep could no longer stand it.

‘What was the loudspeaker for?’ he asked.

The General turned on him mercilessly.

‘What do you think it was for! To tell the victims and refugees where to go, how to get medical insurance, in what places to wash themselves and with what amount of soap. We had to guide them around their own country. First we taught them to read human language, then we told them what democracy was for. That way they could sit around waiting rooms endlessly filling out forms to replace the empty void left by their folk dances, which they forgot as soon as the helicopters seared over the ridgelines of their ancestral homes like so many assault batteries. Oh well! There you go! That’s progress for you: we can’t have a bunch of third worlders cutting jigs all day when there’s real work to be done. We can’t have unwashed bodies go stinking up the newly-constructed assembly halls, mocking parliamentary procedure for a country joke! If they want culture they can enroll in university, or go look at their grandparents immortalized in a museum display, pounding corn on some miserable shelf of rocks. What more could they or anyone want?’

And the General went on sipping his beer, glancing occasionally up at the television screen.

‘Angola indeed!’ he cried finally. ‘Swazi-land!…’


‘General Rodigard!’ cried Spanner, a local politician, from his seat near the middle of the bar. He quickly hopped off his stool and ran up to the General. ‘It’s good to see you, General!’ he said, smiling and slapping the General’s shoulder. ‘I’ve been meaning to speak with you, if you please. You look strong! I hope I am correct that you’re retired? A retired General! And what would you be doing otherwise, if you weren’t retired? Certainly nothing here. Why?—because this is one of those places on God’s green earth where there’s eternally nothing to be done, at least nothing to be done by generals. No, here it’s all civilian work! We catch dogs, leash them and put them down, we do the same to any straggling elderly. Do you know how I was elected, General? I’ll tell you how: it was on a platform of elderly disposal. I would round them up, I promised, I swore by my heart of hearts! I would clean up the streets and the cellars of houses, make our community respectable again! And that’s how I captured the young vote. My two opponents were themselves elderly, so it obviated any backlash. What hasn’t happened since then! You notice an odd sort of vigor on the street and in the supermarket. No shuffling, no stumbling for words, but only vigor, sharpness, and youth! Yes, General, that was my plan: to achieve health by cutting out the weak parts of our being. Do you suppose I’ll be criticized for it? Do you imagine the history books might take a dim view? Well, don’t suppose I haven’t anticipated these eventualities. Don’t worry, General! I’ve laid in stores of kharma for hard times and bogus looks. The name of Spanner will range itself with the like of Caesar, Cicero and LaRouchefoucal…’

‘Spanner,’ said General Rodigard. ‘I don’t care. Tell it to someone who thinks about the present—I’m too caught up in the old days.’

Spanner insinuated himself onto the stool beside General Rodigard. He said nothing. General Rodigard sipped beer and placidly watched television. Spanner pretended to do the same, while all the time he was in fact very closely monitoring the General.