I didn’t react. Why would I want to see? This was coming too quick, secrets piled on secrets. When that happens, there’s always a trade lurking close. She got to her feet, walked out of the room. She was back in a minute, holding a slick–paper magazine with a black and white photo of a woman bending over on the cover—there was another person in the photo, but all you could see was the paddle in their hand. I stood up, joined her under the light. She thumbed through rapidly, looking for the ad. It was marked with a red ink star, hand–drawn. I held it close to read the small type:

Proverbs 13:24(!) Next time your kid
has a good one coming, make a
full–size cassette of the chastisement
and send it to me. I pay $50 for
fifteen minutes, more for longer.
Good sound quality a must. I travel
frequently, with my own equipment.
Write to make arrangements.

Only a P.O. box was listed, no name. A new kind of kiddie porn, legal too—I’d never heard of it before. Freaks carefully recording their own children getting whipped. To entertain other maggots. For money. I felt ice–picks of fire in my chest.

“Why did you show me this?” I asked her, my voice flat and level.

“Cherry told me. A long time ago. She said that’s what you do.”

“*That*?”

“No. She said you … hunt people like that.”

There’s already four million slaughtered in the Congo, and blue helmets on the ground are about as effective as Tom Cruise working a suicide hotline. Joseph Kony was a witch doctor-turned-warlord who ran the Lord’s Resistance Army, a gang of rape-for-fun, kill-for-kicks zombies. Basic training was simple in that army. They kidnapped children, made them watch a few torture-mutilations, pointed at the bodies, and gave the children a choice: Join us, or join them. Kony started in Uganda, but was now based in the south of Sudan, where he was getting paid to make sure the region stayed destabilized.

The World Court issued a warrant for his arrest. They didn’t say who was going to serve it on him.

It sure wasn’t going to be the UN—they probably figured their “condemnation” of the use of child soldiers would fix everything. Just like their “oil for food” program had in Iraq. That monument to impotence still thinks that you can hand out food to warlords, and count on them to distribute it … after the boss’s son gets his cut, of course. Or that a good, stern admonition will deter missile launches. What’s their next move: calling for a boycott of genocide?

Besides, Kony can always make a deal. Call off his army of psychotic children, hand over some weapons, go in front of some “Truth and Reconciliation” committee, admit every crime known to humanity, be told he did bad things … and be forgiven. Just like going on Oprah. Only, instead of some door prize, you get to keep the fortune you’ve stashed away in a nice “safe” country.

You don’t run across straight blackmail much anymore. Why risk doing time when you can make a bigger score from selling secrets to the media? Treason is fashionable today. You have an affair with someone famous, there’s a cash market for letters. For tapes, whatever. It helps if you’re willing to pose nude later—show the people what the famous man wanted so bad. The important thing is to do it for the right reasons—because you got this desperate need for the public to know the truth—the media likes its whores better when they dress up. 

The church doesn’t call them child molesters, or baby-rapers, or anything so terribly stigmatizing. No, predatory priests were “ephebophiles,” part of the church’s PR campaign to “dimensionalize” its own degenerates.

They know exactly how to play it. First, you make up some “syndrome” or “disorder” that covers the crime. Then you give it some fancy-sounding name, and count on the whores and fools to spread the word. You don’t have to prove anything, just repeat it often enough, preferably through a good media machine. Doesn’t matter if the entire scientific community sneers at it. What counts is that it gives defense attorneys an argument for a “non-incarcerative alternative.” And black-robed collaborators all the excuse they need.