The Deluge, page 30
Kate Morris Yeah, I mean, it’s missing some stuff we’d like to see put back in. The tax starts at $30 a ton, and $3 trillion is not nearly enough in investment. Then there’s a miserable chunk of money that goes to arming rich communities on the coasts, some insurance bailouts—look, it’s not perfect, but the framework is there. Joy [LaFray] and Tracy [Aamanzaihou] have been key in getting Democrats in line, and now we’re counting on Cy Fitzpatrick to help push this over the finish line in the Senate. But we are as close to major action as we’ve ever been.
Alana Afzel The bill has come under criticism from some environmental justice groups that say it fails to properly address racial and gender hierarchies.
Kate Morris That’s horse——. This is a frontal assault on chronic inequality. Folks are trying to hold climate policy hostage to single-payer health care and jobs guarantees and slavery reparations and police reform and other forms of social policy while our planet collapses. It’s all backward. They’re trying to put Band-Aids on a gunshot wound before we go in and get the bullet out. That’s the climate crisis. Folks keep touting these reparations proposals that are deficit-financed conscience-laundering for affluent white liberals, and it pisses me off when those same people scoff at the tax-and-dividend plan. We are literally taking money from rich polluters and putting it in the pockets of working people as a foundational piece of a reparative project. It doesn’t just offer the fiction of “Hey, here’s a few bucks so you can build generational wealth, even though yours is the last generation to enjoy a functioning atmosphere.” That would be a funny joke by white people, I guess.
Alana Afzel Yes, but I think their point is you rarely comment on patriarchy or white power structures. That you’re focused on technocratic solutions.
Kate Morris Alana, girl, for real. If that’s what people think, then they’re not listening to me. That’s all I comment on. Who I will work with—that’s a different story. You think I don’t get pissed when some conservative pol tells me all I care about is identity politics? I’m like, dude, if you were constantly reminded of your identity in every f—— interaction of your life, you’d probably form some opinions of it yourself. But none of this stuff is metaphysical. We are not interested in bettering this world into a woke ash heap. We are committed to taking capital, and therefore political power, out of the hands of a fossil-fuel oligarchy. That is the global recipe to attack a primary source of misogyny, racism, and endemic inequality. Distributed systems of energy will redistribute political and economic power faster and more decisively than any other action, period.
Alana Afzel And your embrace of nuclear energy? Which is also in this bill? How’s that for “distributed systems of power”?
Kate Morris I embrace nuclear energy because I can do math. The coal-fired power plants set to come online in India and China alone—it’s apocalypse. But those countries also need energy, particularly air-conditioning, because they’re facing land temperatures that are killing people by the tens of thousands every year. Renewables won’t provide that quickly enough, and the only way to square the circle is nuclear. Do we need to pay attention to the trade-offs involved? Absolutely. We can’t put our heads in the sand even about the impacts of solar power and wind on ecosystems or mining waste. Trade-offs are inevitable because we are in deeply uncharted territory now.
Alana Afzel Not to switch gears from, you know, the fate of the planet to gossip—but you’ve also been in the news lately for a different reason that has gotten you a lot of heat. Allegedly you were arrested in 2026 for an indecent act in a restaurant bathroom with the musician Lucas Frisk, who then bribed the arresting officers.
Kate Morris That’s an oldie but a goodie. Right-wing media dragged it back out, now joined by lefty internet trolls. It’s the convergence of the hard right with left-wing cancel-mania, and yes, am I having a blast with all the slut-shaming. Great fun.
Alana Afzel Did the incident happen?
Kate Morris Well, I can neither confirm nor deny. I’ll say three things: I’m still madly in love with my partner. We don’t believe in monogamy. And this is clearly an awkward political hit job, so ultimately, I have no comment.
Alana Afzel But do you understand why feminist writers have taken issue with this? You proudly speak about nonmonogamy and flaunt the freedom of your own sexuality while allying yourself with politicians who want to restrict abortion access and contraception. How has Mary Randall been on women’s issues, for instance? She reinstated the global gag rule, and she’s assured conservatives and the Christian Right that she will appoint yet another pro-life justice to the Supreme Court.
Kate Morris These are acceptable trade-offs in a tactical war. We’ve been clear that we will make political accommodation with anyone who’s committed to treating the biospheric crisis as the priority, and my personal life shouldn’t play any role in that.
Alana Afzel But there are groups you won’t make accommodation with—for example, the one that’s been blowing up oil pipelines.
Kate Morris No. We categorically reject violence, even against property. These people think they’re heroes, but they don’t understand what they’re opening the door to. The entire movement is now dealing with law enforcement scrutiny and harassment. Right-wing violence has never been worse, and these pipeline bombers—they will exacerbate that. They’re endangering everything we’re working for. On a more philosophically macro level, as soon as you pick up a brick, bat, or gun and tell yourself that this is the only way, then there is no end to what you will do.
Alana Afzel It’s interesting how malleable your philosophy seems. I read your honors thesis on ecofeminism, and that young woman sounded much more—I don’t know—ecofeminist?
Kate Morris Jesus, you are going to the bone, aren’t you? There are undoubtedly components of ecofeminism I find compelling, just like there are components of Marx or Adam Smith or Heidegger I find compelling. But any earth-goddess-mother-hen squawking, no f—— thank you. I enjoy a grand vista as much as the next gal, but ultimately the solutions to our crisis are going to come from stuff like industrial carbon capture to produce building materials and hydrogen by electrolysis. We need the technocrats, scientists, wonks, and we need hard-headed women thinking about the built environment of our societies. As for what ecofeminism means to me, it’s like— Ha, okay. You want a rant that will make Sean Hannity shit his tampon? The history of capital accumulation has also been a history of women’s subordination and environmental degradation. Those three things are so intimately connected that you can’t unwind them. Our current order was built on the enslavement of women who were treated as free, on-call labor in the home. Until recently, any woman who bucked this domesticated chattel system and displayed any economic or sexual autonomy was imprisoned, tortured, burned at the stake, drowned—before the term “witch hunt” was used exclusively by insecure, baby-dicked men.
Alana Afzel You don’t think that’s still ongoing?
Kate Morris Of course it’s still ongoing! The institution of marriage still exists, doesn’t it? Shit, man, we’re a colonized gender, some of us just know how to get off with our preferred colonizing man better. What’s happened to women, it seems to me—and I think Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen got this exactly right—is that we are in the process of achieving the dream of all oppressed peoples: we’re moving into the Master’s house, when really what we should be doing is burning the house down. Instead, we’re clamoring to be a part of the patriarchal, phallocentric political, economic, and social ecology. Look at the Wonder Woman–themed presidency of Joanna Hogan. This is what we define as a powerful, accomplished woman because she’s cracked the capitalist patriarchy. But there has to be an “other” for that system to maintain because it sees a world of scarcity and the only solution is an inequitable hoarding of resources. Part of that “other” will always be women, and bitches are kidding ourselves if we think otherwise. If a system views everything in the biosphere as a resource, whether it’s buffalo, maize, fresh water, a gas deposit, or our internet data, it’s going to view women as extractive resources as well. [Laughter] Alana, c’mon, who the f—— is going to want to listen to this interview?
HOW TO STOP A REVOLUTION
2029
I was visiting my mother when I got the call that we lost Procter & Gamble. It wasn’t that this was worse than my father’s passing, but when I got the news from Linda Holiday in Chicago, I felt a resurgence of that grief. P&G had been unhappy for some time. They were a generations-old institution suddenly caught up in an inexplicable fad that sneered at home bathroom products. You know those cosmetics we’ve been smearing on ourselves for more than a century? Turns out they’re vile markers of hyper-consumption, poisoning our water, and one can get by just fine with a simple bar of soap. Profits go down for a few consecutive quarters, and the easiest, oddly ritualistic, sacrifice is the ad agency.
“Mom?” I came out of the bathroom. “Hey, I need to make a call for work. It’ll just be a minute.”
Mom sat at the kitchen table folding my dad’s clothes before delicately packing each item in a garbage bag. It was all going to a secondhand shop in Anamosa. Though I’d forced her to get to his clothes during this trip, she’d failed to put a dent in the stacks of agricultural almanacs, magazines, and bulletins he’d compulsively hoarded in the den. Today’s Farmer, The Corn Producer, and the Iowa Farm Bureau’s Spokesman. Why he’d kept issues from the nineties was anyone’s guess.
“Jack, do you think Erik will want Daddy’s sweaters?” she asked. I couldn’t see my brother wearing any sweater Dad had ever worn. He also lived in Florida, but pointing this out would only lead my mother to accuse me of being flip.
“You’ll have to ask him.”
On my way outside I passed through the modern quadrant of kitchen that Dad had built onto the side of the house, which had been in the family since 1902. Survivor of two tornadoes, according to family lore. Hanging on the peg by the door was his hunting vest, Mossy Oak camo, the pockets still bulging with shotgun shells. On another peg hung a wooden turkey call and duck-cloth bibs. His work boots neatly twinned on the shoe rack, covered in creamy streaks of last fall’s dried mud.
On the porch, I dialed Gruber and walked farther into the backyard twilight so my voice wouldn’t carry. I stared out over the eight hundred acres of corn and soy my father had been forced to sell as the profits in small plots dwindled. He would have had to grow the farm to an enormous size to compete with Cargill. “You farm small, you might as well take a vow of poverty,” he’d muttered to Mom just before the sale that changed his life.
A foreign haze hung in the winter air. I thought of “walking the beans” with Erik and Allie. Dad would hand us machetes to hack away at weeds in the soybean rows, one of the only chores he ever made us do. Erik hated it. He hated everything about the farm.
“How you doing, Jackie?” asked Gruber, my art director. It was eerie. The voice tech on the new generation of phones made it sound like the person was standing next to you.
“We saw this coming. P&G thinks it can rebrand something that’s more structural than they realize. Fine. Let them try.”
“McClann is pretty pissed off,” he said. “She thought we could hold on to them.”
No matter how successful you got in this business, you were only measured by your most recent victory or defeat, and this implosion lay heaped at my feet. Maybe the “Live Simply” campaign had been defeatist and uninspired, as Beth had warned, but my specialty was steering into the skid, and that’s what I’d done.
“All Beth needs to worry about is Thursday’s pitch.”
“Are you two even on speaking terms?”
The people with whom I wasn’t on speaking terms were my brother and the man whose miscarriage I’d had the year before. Beth McClann and I were just competitive.
“We’re fine. How’s the art coming along?”
“We’re ready. Beth doesn’t like that you took two days off before this pitch.”
“My mother’s bereaved and my selfish siblings won’t handle anything. Tell her I’ll be good to go. I’m driving back first thing tomorrow.”
“He’ll be there, by the way.”
“Who?”
“Who else? Wimpel. Dark Arts himself.”
I hung up but stayed outside a moment, hugging myself in the chill. To the south, the three large grain bins that once stored the corn and soy no longer looked like skyscrapers as they had in my childhood. To the north were the two Morton sheds that held my dad’s tools, equipment, his tractor and wagon. There’d been a barn that my great-grandfather built, but when I was in junior high it blew apart in a storm. An acrid smell hung in the air now. The remnants of a dust storm coming up from the plains, carrying a fog across Amber, Iowa. I thought of what Allie had told me: that Dad had been seeing the woman from church even at the end. She’d come to the hospital when my mother wasn’t there.
When I returned to the house, my mom had CNN on, and I couldn’t help but stop and watch, as the anchor reported on a once-famous actor who’d just legally changed his name.
The next day, on the plane from O’Hare to LaGuardia, I overheard two middle-aged women talking about the actor. I ordered a screwdriver and instead of scanning through content on the VR set, I listened to the two women. He’s gone full cuckoo clock, they said.
I tried to think if I’d ever told anyone the story. Maybe Trish, before she moved to Naperville and our friendship dried up. I could picture us drinking wine in her last apartment in the city, her jaw on the floor when I divulged, but then it also had the tinge of an invented memory. Maybe I’d never told anyone.
Eventually, I put on headphones and opened the file on my AR glasses. I looked over the artwork and my notes. Stirring in my gut, the anticipation of the pitch at least distracted me from all the raucous hurt banging the walls for my attention. I messaged Gruber: There’s still too much green in here. Green’s a dead brand.
He wrote back, The earth is not without shades of green to it.
Darken it. A forest green. Not a limp “recycle more” green. Make that blue of the water pop.
When measuring grief, I’m always surprised by what lingers and what dissipates. That night I thought often of the actor—how his eyes had grown sad and wet in that violet bar—and occasionally about Procter & Gamble, and almost not at all about my father.
* * *
Everyone from our agency met an hour in advance in the creamy Manhattan lobby of Palacio-Wimpel to go over the game plan, and how to pivot if my “unorthodox approach,” as McClann called it, bombed.
The way I saw it, our team felt fifty-fifty on this bid. Linda Holiday, our global chief creative officer, and Darnell Greene, our chief strategy officer, had backed my approach. McClann had fought it every step of the way, and seeing as how it was her account, this had produced a month of turbulence and backbiting in the office. Our CEO, Patrick Yeats, only a year into the job, had a consummate poker face. It was my first pitch with him in the room, and I couldn’t read where his head was at. I’d come up in the company under Linda, a chain-smoking, twice-divorced munchkin spitfire who claimed she’d never actually had a good idea in all her years in advertising but knew how to spot secret artists when she saw them. We became close, and she mentored me to never think of the audience. Let the work speak.
“My question,” said McClann, pointing to Gruber, “is do we keep him in the room?”
As expected, Gruber showed up to a meeting of professionals wearing a short-sleeve denim shirt buttoned to his neck. The tattoos coating his arms glowed darkly, and the word written across the right ridge of his jaw that looked almost like an odd birthmark: COLLIDE. Gruber had been my right hand for two years.
“He’s my art director,” I said. “This pitch wouldn’t exist without him.”
“These aren’t the kind of clients who want to see Post Malone,” said Darnell.
“It’s meeting theater,” I explained. “Part of the client problem is generational. Gruber represents the demographic that grew up not trusting them.”
“You’re the meeting theater,” said Yeats. “A young, attractive woman who calls to mind a kind of…” he spun his hands around in the air, not in a hurry to get to his point, “Kate Morris for the rational set.”
“She Who Must Not Be Named,” said Darnell, and he laughed at his own joke.
The debate went around for a bit. Finally, I interrupted Beth McClann to say, “Gruber stays. I need him in case there are questions about the art.”
McClann glared at me. Over the years, you learn to say things in such a way that people stop arguing with you.
* * *
These corporate boardrooms always gave off a sense of desperation. They are spaces meant to demonstrate wealth and control, but no matter how historic the client, the room and the people in it are ephemeral, trying to hold on to the market share that allows them the skylight and high-end seating. This particular boardroom required a long, supervised walk through the tight security of Palacio-Wimpel, the PR firm specializing in crisis management. Then it was our choice of bottled water or coffee and a tray of fruit and pastries that no one touched. The Sustainable Future Coalition was an unprecedented black box of money that counted among its members the National Association of Manufacturers, the Aluminum Association, GM, Ford, four agribusiness firms, several railroad companies, a dozen electric utilities, fifteen major real estate developers, three private security and logistics firms, including the behemoths of the field, Sentry and Xuritas, and every major player in the oil, coal, and gas sectors, from primary energy developers to the associated industries that serviced exploration and transportation of fuels. We shook hands with several junior-level railbirds, two middle-aged men, a tight-lipped Asian woman, and the president of the SFC, former Exxon chief Tom Duncan-Michaels. They were led into the room and shown around the table by Dark Arts himself. Though I’d seen him before in some of our HoloChat meetings, in person Fred Wimpel reminded me of the actor. They had the same kind of faux-rugged handsomeness that was likely more the product of fighting off middle age through Botox and light plastic surgery than it was honest weathering. He wore a short brown beard streaked with gray. Despite his and his firm’s reputation, he didn’t demand attention in the pre-meeting scrum of handshakes. When he reached me, he put his hand on my elbow. “I’m a big fan of your work.” His voice was unexpectedly high and melodic for a man I was certain had Sun Tzu on his office bookshelf. “I’ve been showing Tom and Emii what Sine qua non did for Adidas. Not to mention your work for the Pentagon. Beyond impressive.”
