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In the spring of 1994, the military industrial complex sent me to America’s urban east coast to predict the future. My boss at a nuclear weapons laboratory instructed me to interview national security experts and ask them where they thought the world was headed over the next few decades and how they thought the United States should respond. Their answers would help inform management at the weapons laboratory of the decisions they might have to make.

Dutifully, I rode the subways in Washington DC and New York City, shuffling into office buildings and university campuses. I sat down with various experts. I remember one of them stared at me with unconcealed contempt (Why are you wasting my time), mumbling monosyllabic answers. Two decades later I saw him on a YouTube video, a mid-range official for the Biden Administration, smooth and telegenic, informing a journalist that all would be well.

The other people I spoke with were cordial and professional. They all gave me some variation of the standard New York Times-Washington Post narrative. In the next few decades, the United States would be a hyperpower with no military rival, competing in a global economy that would demand adaptation and discipline from ordinary Americans. If the rank and file chose wise behavior patterns, they would be okay. The country would be okay. The recent end of the Cold War would turn out to be the greatest blessing in human history, the harbinger of a peaceful, prosperous, democratic age.

One man I interviewed disagreed. No, he said. It’s not going to be okay. The people telling you that don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

I sat with him in a cramped, tiny office, stuffed with piles of books and paper. He wore a disheveled button down shirt and a loosened tie, in the glow of a bulky mid-1990s computer monitor.

Let me tell you, he said, what I think is going to happen.

Some version of the guru’s story had circulated outside the capital, of course, for ages. Maybe since the foundation of the world. You just had to know where to look.

In Montgomery, Alabama it was told, in one of its many versions, sometime around 1950. The preacher Vernon Johns stood before his Negro congregation at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and smiled. Two years in the future, Martin Luther King, Jr. would replace him as pastor. For now, Johns held sway.

The congregation wasn’t happy with him that Sunday morning. The smell of fish wafted through the always stifling, non-air conditioned church. Johns saw his duty differently than his parishioners did. He wasn’t there to give them comfort. He wasn’t even there to give them a good cry about their sinfulness, purging them of their guilt before going out again into the world.

He was there to make the congregation angry. His well-to-do, middle class Negro flock looked down on the manual laborers who made up most of the Negro population in Montgomery, Alabama. For the well-off churchgoers, getting their hands grubby in a field or factory was beneath them. They were teachers, administrators at the local Negro college, bookkeepers, and the like, with maybe a handful of doctors and lawyers.

Reverend Vernon Johns warned his complacent congregation, in sermon after sermon, that their ancient religion glorified the field hands and the laborers. To teach this lesson by more than words, Johns left the church after each sermon, went out front to Dexter Avenue, and sold produce from the back of his pickup truck. The congregation nearly fainted at the sight of it. Their eloquent preacher, gifted with learning and oratory not of this Earth, got his hands all slick and soiled from handling tomatoes and cucumbers, selling them to passersby, black or white. The spectacle soiled the preacher’s own church, the gagging parishioners thought.

Recently, Johns had also begun selling piles of fish. The stench of it wafted through the church that morning. Johns reminded them that the Savior they claimed to worship had recruited his first two disciples from the fishermen of Galilee. Follow me, said the maker of all creation as he walked the Earth in human form. Be fishers of men.

The congregation wasn’t impressed. Johns surely infuriated them even more with his tales of what had caused whites in America to enslave Africans in the first place. The culprit, Johns thundered, was white disgust at the prospect of doing manual labor. Whites didn’t import slaves to make white supremacy. They did it to make cotton. And money.

Decades later, historian Taylor Branch would record such scenes in his epic history of the civil rights era, America in the King Years, 1954-1968. Many other events were taking place in the year Johns preached to the stench of fish. In 1950, the Soviet Union had recently exploded its first atomic bomb. With the approval of Joseph Stalin, North Korea invaded its southern neighbor. In response, President Harry Truman went to war, blatantly ignoring the Constitutional mandate for a declaration of war from Congress (Truman helped build a bipartisan, post-Constitutional tradition, still bearing fruit). Some historians of today argue that Stalin may have been seriously contemplating a Third World War against the United States and its allies, even before the ruins from the last such war had been rebuilt.

Meanwhile, officials in Washington sat in conference rooms with stacks of books and papers, nervously designing policies for continued global economic reconstruction, so that a Second Great Depression would never happen. As they did so, Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin ranted on radio and television that the officials meeting in DC conference rooms were blood sucking parasites, selling the country out for the right to lord it over their inferiors, in what would one day be known as flyover country.

Taylor Branch doesn’t write about any of that in his story of Vernon Johns, because to Johns none of it mattered. The world was gonna do what the world was gonna do. So was Johns. MLK, his successor as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, paid more attention to the global stage. He became a player. But for both men, something about the American system rotted the soul. That’s what Martin Luther King came to realize as the bullet hurtled toward him through the air in April 1968.

The system doesn’t believe in souls, of course. Got to keep that kind of hokum separated, safe behind a wall. In practice, the system recognizes only numbers and data and logic. Profit and loss. Costs and benefits. Megatons and throw-weight. Bits and RAM. There is no need, anymore, for the fisher of men. Martin Luther King, Jr., begged to differ. Right up until impact.

A few decades later, in the spring of 1994, I sat across the desk from the DC think tank guru, surrounded by stacks of his books and papers in his cramped little office as the window admitted gray evening light. I had read his books and articles before coming. He was a bit iconoclastic, sure. A bit skeptical of both tax cuts and the bureaucratic welfare state. But this night he confessed unspeakable heresies – to me, a total stranger, albeit a harmless 26 year old with no name.

No, he said. None of the people in charge know what they’re doing. They’re all just mouthing what they know will curry favor. On all of it. Defense policy, healthcare, manufacturing, Social Security, fiscal policy, free trade. The politicians get their information mostly from media, or little talking point briefs, because that’s all they have time for. I’m at the Library of Congress every day, he said, burying myself in books so I have a prayer of understanding how all this stuff really works. I never see the media here or even people from the think tanks. They know everything already. So everything they say is basically made up. It just confirms their priors. Smoke and mirrors.

Take NAFTA for instance, my think tank guru continued, referencing the North American Free Trade Agreement among the US, Canada, and Mexico. He recalled how maverick populist tycoon Ross Perot had debated Vice President Al Gore on CNN about NAFTA last fall. The media pronounced Perot the loser. That brainless knee jerk populist, said the jeering narrative, falsely claimed that NAFTA would cause a “giant sucking sound” as high-paying American manufacturing jobs left the country. Al Gore, expert policy wonk, had exposed Perot for the ignoramus he was. Globalization was a win-win, said Gore, for America and the world. Everyone will be richer, or almost everyone, and the remaining few will, in fact, be okay. They’ll get new jobs. It will be fine.

The think tank heretic said to me in 1994: it won’t be fine. If you read up on how trade and finance actually work, he said, you’d know it. The giant sucking sound will happen. Not just with Mexico, but the whole planet. The loss of manufacturing jobs will happen. What replaces them will be overregulated, bureaucratized, low wage, credit and aid dependent subsistence. But nobody on cable TV news gives a shit. Because they’re the ones who will be fine.

I thought of that a day or two later, sitting next to a semi-famous journalist from The Atlantic, and a diplomat from Australia, in a fancy hotel ballroom under glittering chandeliers, listening to Thomas Friedman of the New York Times tell everyone about the future of a golden globe. Everyone in the room – journalists, professors, diplomats Congressional staffers – believed Friedman’s narrative, which my heretical guru had told me was the purest, quasi-theological bullshit. That’s why conspiracy theories, he implied, are so pernicious. They assume the power elite has a clue.

Three decades later, the occupants of the fancy ball room, the ones still alive, wonder why MAGA is coming for their skulls. My framing of it that way, the ball room set might say, is an oversimplification. Their predecessors, makers of the Marshall Plan and Vietnam, would have said the same thing in 1950 to Vernon Johns, as he bellowed his warnings to all who would listen about the virtue of manual labor. The lords of the ball room will go on theologizing complexity, to whatever end.

This morning as I slurped my coffee in a post-globalization hinterland of the United States, the news told of US Treasury bonds being dumped on world markets, a microscopic cog in the catastrophic plan of Donald Trump (credit to Nick Cave). Things that can’t go on, don’t. It’s all Trump’s fault. Of course it is.

I still check in on my heretical guru from time to time, reading his prolific essays. He’s more open about his heresy now, regarding the official story of Our Democracy. For him, MAGA didn’t arrive like a sudden, unforeseen asteroid from the abyss, summoned by the deplorables and their black magic.

Historians will find the evidence to back my guru up, eventually, just as they belatedly saw the rot at the core of the USSR. For example: at least some of the economic statistics telling the official American story, there’s good reason to conclude, have seriously understated — for decades — the actual level of unemployment and bloated everyday prices in the United States. Official statistics also consistently underestimated support for Donald Trump. Surely a coincidence, not causation.

In towns and rural expanses far from DC ballrooms, the disgruntled have felt realities beyond the official statistics. Day after day, year after year. The disgruntled can be dismissed, of course. The towns and counties they inhabit aren’t the most influential or innovative. The disgruntled don’t need statistics to know this. The consequences of their knowing live as a collective psychic emergence, from millions of minds (disgruntled and otherwise), like a ghost. Or a soul.

Something in it was rotten, Martin Luther King thought as the bullet hurtled toward him through the air. Vernon Johns, in his own way, had sensed the same rotten thing, railing against it all his life. Both men knew, like a carpenter from Nazareth, the rottenness couldn’t be fought on the material plane alone. You can’t put a number on it. Or a color. So it didn’t exist, the number counters decided.

It’s almost here.

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