The Wartime President
What if Kamala Harris had won the election?
The Wartime President is sitting in her office. She has just received word that the enemy has surrendered and the tides of war have turned.
The Wartime President will now be replaced by the President. The people’s darling – and by extension the people who elected him – will have no blood to wash from his hands. The Wartime President was not elected, but installed, when the situation demanded her sufficiently. It was her hand that pressed the button, her voice that gave the order, her knife that cut the nuclear codes from the volunteer’s still-warm heart1. Her ears upon which last-minute regrets fell, deaf and blind and tasteless.
Most things now are done by robots. Everyone pretends that the Wartime President is a robot, an android. Everyone knows the technology isn’t quite there. The Wartime President is not an android. The Wartime President was chosen by a committee chosen by another committee and so on until the degrees of separation from any electorate advanced to infinity.
Another man equally blameless, a weapons manufacturer, bankrolled the clandestine conditioning and constructing of the Wartime President out of his own pocket, the years of strategic training and memorized speeches from which she sprung reinvented as Athena from Zeus’s bleeding skull, beaten, tempered, made inhuman enough to face her deeds in full on this fractured final dawn.
Now the bloodless President returns to his seat. And his people rejoice and take pride in their judgment of him and are bloodless. And the system is bloodless. And the country is bloodless. And all of us are bloodless.
The Wartime President is dragged out by the sweating pits of her arms and shot.
Harvard Professor Roger Fisher once suggested implanting nuclear launch codes in a volunteer’s heart and requiring the President to personally cut them out in order to activate nuclear weapons.