I Believe

The banana cost forty-seven cents.I got it from the vending machine at work. I grab it on my way out to the parking lot. Fifteen minutes of freedom. The break room smells like microwaved fish. I just need to be outside for a minute.I lean against the wall by the loading dock. Trucks roll past on the 15. The sun’s already down, but the sky is still that burnt orange it gets out here. The smog holds onto the light.I peel the banana without looking at it. Four bites. I toss the peel in the trash on my way back in.I don’t think about where it came from. Nobody does. It’s a banana. Forty-seven cents.Later, I can’t stop thinking about it. Maybe there’s blood in the fruit.Act I. The Racket. Scene 1.My name is Elena. Twenty six. I work at a fulfillment center in Fontana. One of those massive warehouses off the 15 where the trucks run all night. You’ve ordered from us. Even if you don’t think you have. Everyone has.I’m good at my job. Fast. Reliable. Management likes me. I’ve been there four years now, since I dropped out of Cal State San Bernardino. Couldn’t afford to stay.I live with my parents in San Bernardino. A working class town on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Railroad, then steel, then military, now shipping. Hot and dry. The mountains trap the smog from LA, but on a clear winter morning, when the wind comes down the pass, you can see the snow on Mount San Gorgonio.My grandfather bought the house in 1971. He never talked about where he came from before that. None of us asked.He worked the railyards in Barstow. Saved everything. Bought the house outright. Three generations later, we’re still there. We don’t love it, but we own it. The only security that feels real.My parents are citizens. I’m a citizen. Born at St. Bernardine’s. San Bernardino County, California. Seven pounds six ounces. Birth certificate in the safe.But my mother won’t answer the door if she doesn’t recognize the car in the driveway. My father keeps a folder in the fireproof box by the bed. Birth certificates. Naturalization papers. Deed to the house. Just in case.I asked him once. Just in case of what?He didn’t answer.You know what I want. I want to stop living like we’re here on a pass that could get revoked. I want my mother to open the door without checking the driveway first. I want my father to throw that folder away. I want to feel like I belong in my own country, like the word citizen means what it says. I want to be able to drive down my street and not worry about being shot during one of the raids.Three generations. My grandfather built a life here. My parents built a life here. I was born here. I am an American.And still there’s a folder in the safe. Still my mother won’t answer the door. I was home when the news broke. Saturday, January 3rd, 2026. Half watching something, scrolling my phone.My mother had the TV on in the kitchen. Background noise. She doesn’t really watch. She likes the sound of voices.The news broadcast cut in. Urgent.“US special operations forces have successfully captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in a predawn raid in Caracas. Maduro, who has been under federal indictment since 2020 on charges of narco terrorism and drug trafficking, was extracted by helicopter and is currently in US custody. President Trump addressed the nation from the White House…”My mother turned it off. Didn’t say anything. Started wiping down the counter. She cleans things that are already clean when she worries.My father was in his chair. I said, “Papá, what do you think?”He didn’t look at me. Pursed his lips. Glanced at my mother. He said, “I think it’s going to be a long year.” Then he went to get a tool from the garage.I could feel something in the room. Old. Something they weren’t saying.That night I can’t sleep. I have homework for my history class at Chaffey College. Latin America. Colonial Period to present. A speech by some old dead guy from the 1930s. I hadn’t started it.I made coffee. Sat at the kitchen table. Opened my laptop.Started reading.Act I. The Racket. Scene 2.Elena: 1935. A Marine Corps general named Smedley Butler. I keep reading.Then…I was there. A folding chair. Wood seat, cold metal frame. Room smells like cigarette smoke and wool coats. A banner on the wall. VFW Post something. American flags on either side of the stage.The man at the podium is old. Sixty, maybe. But he stands like he’s still in uniform. Proud. Shoulders back. Chin up. Two medals on his chest I don’t recognize.He’s looking out at the crowd. Starts to speak. His hands grip the podium. Knuckles, white. Holding on like he might fall if he lets go.Butler: “War is a racket…at the expense of the very many…a few people make huge fortunes…I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business…I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914…Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues...Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909 to 1912…The Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916…Honduras right for American fruit companies in 1903…There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes. And the other is the Bill of Rights.War for any other reason is simply a racket.”Elena: He stops. Quiet. Someone coughs. Butler looks at a man in the front row. Old. Maybe his age. Maybe they served together. He doesn’t look away.Marine Corps General Smedley Butler. The most highly decorated Marine in history. The only Marine to earn both the Brevet Medal and two Medals of Honor. A gangster, he said, for Wall Street.He didn’t say we should never fight. He said we shouldn’t lie about why we are fighting.Next morning I go to work. Same shift. Same trucks. Same routine.On my break I go outside. Banana in the vending machine. I stand there looking at it through the glass.Forty-seven cents.I don’t buy it.Act II. The Blood in the Fruit. Scene 1.Narrator: Chaffey College. Health Sciences Building. Anatomy lab.The room smells like formaldehyde and cold air. Fluorescent lights. Steel tables. A skeleton hanging in the corner like it’s waiting for someone to ask it a question.Valentina: My name is Valentina. I left Caracas, Venezuela in 2018 with two suitcases and a pharmacy degree.The suitcases are in my closet. Degree framed on my wall. Neither useful here.I work at CVS in Rancho Cucamonga. Shift supervisor. Not a pharmacist. I wear the red polo and the name tag. I answer questions about where the cough syrup is. Sometimes people ask me for medical advice. I give it because I know the answer, then I tell them to talk to the pharmacist. I’m not allowed to know the answer.Three years I’ve been trying to get my credentials transferred. Forms. Fees. Evaluations. More forms. They want me to retake classes. They want transcripts that don’t exist anymore because the university can’t keep the lights on. They want me to prove I am who I say I am, over and over, in a language that isn’t mine.The bureaucracy isn’t a wall. It’s a maze. It lets you keep walking so you don’t notice there’s no exit. So here I am. Chaffey College. Twenty-eight years old. Anatomy and Physiology. Sitting in a room full of nineteen-year-olds, learning the names of bones I learned six years ago in Spanish.Narrator: She’s at a lab table. Skeleton hand in front of her. Index cards.Valentina: Carpals. Metacarpals. Phalanges.I know this. I knew this before most of these kids had driver’s licenses. But the paper says I don’t know it, so I’m learning it again.My phone buzzes. I should ignore it. Lab policy. Professor’s a hardass about phones.But I see the notification. WhatsApp. Mamá.I grab my bag and walk out.Narrator: Hallway. Cinder block walls. The hum of vending machines.Valentina: I lean against the wall and press play.The connection is bad. Static. Her voice cutting in and out. But I can hear it underneath. Something I haven’t heard in a long time. Hope.She’s talking about the news. Maduro. The Americans. She’s saying maybe, maybe, maybe. Mijita, están diciendo que todo va a cambiar. Que por fin. Baby, they’re saying everything’s going to change. Finally.I play it again.Her voice sounds younger. That’s what hope does. Takes years off. I remember what she sounded like before. Before the lines for bread. Before my brother couldn’t find work. Before the hospitals ran out of everything and people started dying from things that shouldn’t kill anyone.She sounds like that again. Just for a minute. Just in a voice message from eight thousand miles away. I want to believe it. I remember 2019. Guaidó standing in the plaza. Declaring himself president. The crowds. The speeches. The whole world recognizing him, saying this is it, this is the turn.And then. Nothing. Maduro stayed. More sanctions. Hospitals got worse. People kept leaving. People kept dying.I left.I press record. Te quiero, Mamá. Vamos a ver.I love you. We’ll see.I send it before I can say anything else.Narrator: Night. Studio apartment. Rancho Cucamonga.Small. Clean. A bed, a desk, a hot plate. The pharmacy degree on the wall, next to a calendar from a Venezuelan bakery in Panorama City.She’s in bed. Phone in her hand. The only light in the room.Valentina: I open WhatsApp. The family group chat. Familia Caracas.Seventeen members. I scroll through the icons. People I grew up with. People I left behind. My mother. Brother. Tía Rosa. Cousin Diego. Cousin Maria. The photos are old. Everyone frozen in time. My mother’s icon is from 2016. She’s wearing lipstick. Smiling. She doesn’t look like that anymore. I scroll back through the chat.It used to be different. Memes. Birthday messages. Photos of food. My brother posting terrible jokes. Diego sharing fútbol highlights.Now it’s logistics.Does anyone have power? The water’s been out for three days. Mamá found rice at the bodega on Avenida Sur. Expensive, but it’s there. Has anyone heard from Abuela? She’s not answering.When the news broke that the Americans grabbed Maduro, the chat exploded. Forty-seven messages in an hour. I watched them scroll past.Diego: SERA QUE POR FIN??? Maria: Dios mío, I can’t believe it. My brother: Don’t get your hopes up. Tía Rosa: Praying. Just praying.I didn’t respond. I didn’t know what to say. I still don’t.Everyone was so happy.I know what this is. I’m not stupid. The Americans aren’t doing this because they care about Venezuela. They’re not doing it for my mother. They’re doing it because there’s oil in the ground and someone’s getting paid.I know there are contracts being signed right now, in rooms I’ll never see, by people who couldn’t find Caracas on a map.I know.But my mother is sixty-three. She walked six hours last year to find bread. Six hours. And if the ships come and the shelves fill up and she can get her medication, I don’t care why they did it.Is that wrong? Probably. But I’m tired. Tired of being right about how broken everything is. I just want her to eat.Act II. The Blood in the Fruit. Scene 2.Narrator: Later that night. Valentina’s laptop, open to a PDF. Testimony from the Ciénaga massacre. Translated from Spanish.Valentina: I’m in this history class. Need the credits. Latin America, H108, Colonial Period to Present. Preparing a response paper. Two pages, double-spaced. Due Thursday.I’m reading testimony from a survivor. A woman. Age nineteen in 1928. Describing what she saw. Narrator: Ciénaga. Colombia. December 6, 1928. The banana zone.I can smell it. Salt. Rot. Gunpowder. I can feel the heat. I can see their faces. People everywhere. Thousands of them. Workers. Families. Children sitting on their fathers’ shoulders. Women holding babies. Old men in white shirts, sweating through the cotton.They’ve been on strike for weeks. Twenty-five thousand banana workers. They work for United Fruit, except they don’t. Not officially. The company uses subcontractors, so they don’t have to call anyone an employee. No contracts. No protections. No rights.They get paid in scrip. Company money. Only good at the company store, where the prices are whatever the company says they are.They’re asking for direct contracts. Cash wages. Toilets at work. The company said no. The US government sent a message to Colombia: Protect American property or we send Marines. Colombia didn’t want American boots on their soil. So they sent their own army instead.The soldiers arrive in the plaza. They form a line. Rifles ready.Valentina: I see a woman near the front. Young. About my age. Holding a little girl, maybe three years old. The girl is playing with a piece of ribbon. Red. She keeps winding it around her fingers.I want to yell at them to run. A general steps forward. Cortés Vargas. He reads from a piece of paper. His voice carries across the plaza. He says, “You have five minutes to disperse.”Nobody moves. Where would they go? They’ve been camped here for days. This is where they wait during the negotiations.Five minutes. The soldiers raise their rifles. The woman with the little girl. Looking around now. Confused. The girl, still playing with the ribbon.Then. The guns. Loud. Sharp. The sound hits your chest before it reaches your ears. The screaming. And then. Silence. And then screaming again.Trains. Waiting at the edge of town. They load the bodies onto the trains. Hundreds of them. Nobody counts. The trains go to the coast. The bodies, into the sea.The official report will say forty-seven dead. Survivors will say hundreds. Some three thousand. Nobody knows. The company reopened the plantations within a week. The strike, broken. The workers who survived went back to the fields. Company scrip. No toilets. Nothing changed.The government called it restoring order.Narrator: Years later, Gabriel García Márquez will write about this. One Hundred Years of Solitude. A chapter. The massacre. Thousands dead. Then the town forgets. Everyone forgets. The rain comes and washes the blood away, and the streets look like they always looked, and life goes on, and nobody remembers.Valentina closes her laptop. Opens WhatsApp. Plays her mother’s message again.Act III. Butler. Márquez. The Question.Narrator: Chaffey College. The courtyard. Concrete table. January sun, cool air. The hum of the freeway.Elena: Valentina’s already there. Bag of Takis and a Monster Energy. I sit down. Pull out my tupperware. Rice and beans. I tell her she’s eating a breakfast of champions.Valentina: You know your mom’s food makes my Takis taste like depression.Elena: (I push her the Tupperware.) You want some? She made too much. It’s better than that red dust.Valentina: The red dust has caffeine. I need to be awake for my shift.Elena: Suit yourself. Hey, did you read the Butler speech? For Thursday?Valentina: I skimmed it.Elena: You skimmed it? Val, it’s the whole thing. “I helped make Mexico safe for oil.” “Honduras for the fruit companies.”Valentina: Yeah. I saw it.Elena: And then Ciénaga. The strike. They killed them because they wanted toilets. And the US threatened to invade, so the Colombian army did the dirty work. Valentina: History repeats itself. I know.Elena: And now Maduro. They’re saying it’s for “democracy.” It’s not. It’s the Racket. The oil. The contracts. It’s a setup. You should be furious.Valentina: I am furious!Elena: You don’t look furious. You look like you’re doing homework.Valentina: Because I am doing homework. I have an Anatomy quiz in ten minutes.Elena: How can you care about Anatomy when they’re invading your home?Valentina: Elena, stop. If I fail Anatomy, I don’t get the degree. If I don’t get the degree, I don’t get the raise. If I don’t get the raise, I can’t send money home. You think I don’t know it’s a racket? I know exactly what it is. I know they’re stealing the oil. I know they don’t care about us. But my mother called me yesterday. And for the first time in three years, she wasn’t crying about the blackout. She was talking about bread. You get to write a paper about the “racket.” You get an ‘A.’ You go home to your parents’ house. I don’t have that luxury. I don’t care if the bread is stolen. I just need her to eat.Narrator: (Silence. The campus noise fades away. The air feels heavy. Elena pulls her Tupperware back slightly. Neither woman moves.)Elena’s grandfather never talked about Guatemala. She used to think that meant it didn’t matter. Old news. History. Now she thinks he carried it the whole time. Like weight you don’t name because naming it doesn’t make it lighter. Valentina looks at her phone, but doesn’t unlock it. The message is still there. Her mother’s voice, full of hope. Valentina will play it again later, alone, like she’s checking that hope is still real. They sit at the concrete table. The campus noise moves around them. The freeway hum doesn’t stop. Elena slides the Tupperware a few inches farther away from Valentina. Valentina folds the Takis bag down flat, presses the crease with her thumb. Red dust on her fingers.Neither of them speaks.Then Valentina stands. “I have to go.” Elena nods. “Yeah.”Valentina walks toward the lab. Elena stays seated, watching her go, like she’s watching a door close slowly. A minute later, Elena gets up and heads for the parking lot. She passes the vending machines by the student center without meaning to.Bright glass. Rows of salt and sugar. The banana.Forty-seven cents.She stops. Stares at it. Her hand hovers near the button like it has its own memory.She turns and keeps walking.At home. Her father’s folder. Still in the safe.Music byArtist: rakeySong: Limelight Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

Act I. Tick Tock[SFX: The noise of New York City][Narrator] New York City in December. Manhattan. No snow yet, but the cold sits like it’s waiting for something.A kid walks home from work. Twenty-four years old. Jacket zipped to the throat. Same route he always takes. Down from Midtown, cutting through the side streets. Too many tourists on the main streets.He wants to move through the world without it touching him.It’s 6:12 PM. The sun is already gone. The crosswalk timer across the street blinks 12, then 11, then 10. Tick. Tick.Cars honk. Little beeps, long beeps, the ones that hold down the horn. Trash trucks. Ambulances with sirens blaring. Delivery drivers on bicycles. All stuck.The kid walks by the way he walks by everything. Eyes forward. Keep moving.Cops on almost every corner. Keeping the peace. On the buildings, American flags, lit from below, snapping in the wind that cuts between the towers. Red and white and blue against the black.And the steam.It comes up through the grates, the vents. Somewhere underneath. The water in the gutter catches it, and the whole street looks like it’s breathing. Like the city has lungs.A waist-high stack painted orange and white hisses near the curb. Warm air in cold air.He asked someone once. Why does it do that? Why is there always steam? Like the water is smoking.The subway, they said. The pipes. The heat below. The cold above. The whole city is a machine, and the steam makes it run.[Daniel] I love it. The city breathes. Exhales. Makes it feel alive. Like something’s happening under the surface, even when nothing’s happening at all.I put my headphones on.The noise is still there. I can see it. Mouths moving. Cabs lurching. Cops talking into their radios. But I can’t hear it. I’m inside my own head now.The tourists look up. They stop in the middle of the sidewalk to take pictures. Big coats. Shopping bags. Walking three across, like the city belongs to them.The New Yorkers move like water around rocks. They don’t stop. Just flow toward wherever they’re going.I’m one of them now. Four years in. The headphones that say don’t talk to me, don’t see me, I’m not here.[Narrator] The lights from a bodega spill onto the sidewalk. Red and gold. A pizza place on the corner, line out the door. A woman arguing into her phone in a language he doesn’t recognize.He turns onto his block. Streetlights tinge yellow-orange. A guy smokes on his stoop, looking at nothing. Somewhere above, music loud enough that the bass comes through the walls.Home.He steps inside.[Daniel] There he is. My little brother. Sitting on the couch. Looking at me like he’s got something to say.[Narrator] Daniel stands in the doorway. Doesn’t move. His brother looks up. People call him “K.” Nineteen years old. Named after his great-grandfather. Same face Daniel’s known his whole life, but something’s different now. The way he sits. The way he holds himself. K speaks first.[K] “I tried to call you. A few times.”[Narrator] Daniel pulls off his jacket. Tosses it on the chair. He moves to the kitchen, opens the fridge.[Daniel] He’s right. I never pick up.“You hungry? I’ve got leftover Thai. The good place.” K says he’s not hungry.[Narrator] Daniel grabs two beers. Pops the caps. Sets one on the coffee table in front of his brother and sits down across from him. K has been waiting for him to sit down.[K] “I joined the Navy.”[Narrator] Silence. Daniel’s beer stops halfway to his mouth.[Daniel] “What?”[K] “The Navy. I leave in two days.”[Daniel] I don’t say anything. I’m trying to hear it again. Navy. Two days.“When did you decide this?”[K] “A while ago.”[Daniel] “And you didn’t tell me?”[Narrator] The brother looks at him. Doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t apologize.[K] “I’m telling you now.”[Daniel] “That’s a waste.”[Narrator] It comes out before Daniel can stop it. K’s jaw tightens.[Daniel] “You’re smart. You could do anything. You’re going to swab decks and take orders from guys who peaked in high school?”[Narrator] K doesn’t look away. But something closes behind his eyes.[K] “Great-Grandpa Kenneth was Navy.”[Daniel] “That was different. That was a real war.”[Narrator] The words hang there. K picks up his beer. Sets it back down.[K] “I needed to do something.”[Daniel] “You were doing something. You had a job.”[K] “I was delivering packages.”[Narrator] K stops. Looks down at his hands. Then back up.[K] “I wanted to matter.”[Daniel] He says it like it’s simple. Like that explains everything.And I just told him it was a waste. Told him his war wouldn’t be real enough.[Narrator] K stands up.[K] “I should go. Early flight.”[Daniel] “K—”[K] “It’s fine.”[Narrator] It’s not fine. Daniel can hear it. But K is already at the door.[Daniel] “Be safe. Okay?”[Narrator] K nods once. Doesn’t look back.[Daniel] The door closes. I sit there with two full bottles and the thing I said still in the room.He wanted to matter. So he signed a contract. Raised his right hand. And now he belongs to something I don’t understand.Act II. Duration[SFX: Train wheels on tracks, rhythmic, then slowing. Station announcement muffled.][Narrator] The train pulls into the station. New Jersey suburbs. Christmas Eve.Daniel is on the platform. Cold air. Gray sky. Not cold enough to bite. Just there. He didn’t want to come. His mother called three times. The third time, she didn’t ask. She just said what time dinner was. So. Here he is. The house is twenty minutes from the station. His father picks him up. They don’t talk much. The radio fills the space. Sports. Weather. Traffic.[Daniel] Dad asks how my place is. He asks if work is good. We talk about sports. That’s the whole ride.[Narrator] The house is already full when they arrive. Cars in the driveway. Lights on in every window. A wreath on the door. Same wreath since Daniel was a kid.Inside, the house is warm. The smell of food. Voices overlap. Christmas music competing with a movie playing in the other room.His grandmother finds him first. “There he is. Look at you. So skinny. Are you eating?”[Daniel] “I’m eating.”[Narrator] She doesn’t believe him. She never believes him. She tells him she made a brisket and pulls him toward the kitchen.His mother finds him before he gets there. Hugs him like she’s checking if he’s real.[Daniel] She says I look tired. She asks about work. She asks if I’m seeing anyone.And there it is. I say no.She tells me about a girl. Rachel’s daughter. In law school. Very pretty. She could introduce us.“Mom.”She’s just saying.I need air. Quiet. To be anywhere but in the middle of this.[Narrator] He escapes. The back room. Used to be his grandfather’s study. Now it’s just a room with old books and a chair nobody sits in.Except tonight.Kenneth is there. In his late nineties. A circle of cousins around him, laughing at something he just said. He’s holding a glass of wine like a prop. He won’t drink it. Just likes having something in his hand.[Daniel] Great-Grandpa Kenneth. Everyone’s favorite person. Always has been.He’s the one who remembered every birthday. Sent five dollars in a card until I was ten, then switched to twenties because, in his words, “inflation is a thief and you deserve to keep up.”He’s sharper than anyone expects. Mixes up some names. Thinks my cousin Mike is still in college, even though Mike is thirty-two and sells insurance. But he knows what year it is. Knows who’s President. Has opinions about both.[Narrator] The cousins drift away when someone announces food. Kenneth stays in his chair. Daniel sits down across from him.[Daniel] “Do you think the Jets will make the playoffs next year?”[Narrator] Kenneth laughs. A real laugh. Starts in his chest. [Kenneth] “I’ve been waiting on the Jets since nineteen-seventy. I thought we were going to repeat.”[Narrator] He looks out the window. His fingers tap the arm of the chair. Something shifts behind his eyes.[Kenneth] “You know what waiting really is? I learned it in the Pacific.”[Narrator] Daniel didn’t expect this. But you don’t interrupt Kenneth.[Kenneth] “Picket duty. Small ship. Radar watch. You sit out there and wait. Okinawa, 1945. We were the first thing the kamikazes would see. That was the job. Spot them. Report them. Hope they didn’t get through.”“We were at sea when Roosevelt died. April. Someone came through the ship saying the President was dead.”[Daniel] “What did you think?”[Kenneth] “We didn’t believe it. He’d been President my whole life. Since I was a kid. Didn’t know there could be another one.”“You know what they told us when we signed up? ‘Duration Plus Six.’ That was the contract. You serve for the duration of the war, plus six months. No end date. Just... until it’s over. However long that takes.”[Daniel] “What if you wanted a different deal?”[Kenneth] “Only deal there was. You signed, or you didn’t. I signed. I wanted to matter.”[Narrator] He looks at Daniel. Eyes clear. Present.[Kenneth] “I heard your brother signed up.”[Daniel] “He just started boot camp.”[Kenneth] “I know. Your mother told me. Navy. Like me.”[Narrator] He nods. Proud. But something else crosses his face.[Kenneth] “I enjoyed serving. Proud of it. Still am.”[Narrator] He pauses. Looks at Daniel like he’s deciding whether to finish the thought.[Kenneth] “But the men who send them. The men who decide where they go. What we did was right, but it isn’t always right. Those men should be bound too.”[Daniel] “What do you mean?”[Kenneth] “Limits. A clock on them. Something that says you can’t keep sending boys forever just because you feel like it.”[Narrator] Someone calls from the other room. Dessert. Kenneth waves his hand. He’ll be there in a minute. Daniel waits for more. But Kenneth is looking out the window now. Somewhere else. Sixty years back. Small ship. Radar. Waiting.[Daniel] I sit there another minute. Then I get up. “Thanks, Grandpa. You want me to bring you some food?” I walk back into the noise. The laughter. The questions. But I’m not there. I’m somewhere else.The men who send them. They should be bound, too.[Narrator] Daniel leaves the next morning. Early train. The city, waiting. But something is different.He wants to move through the world without it touching him.Act III. The Debate. Scene 1.[SFX: Espresso machine. Cups on saucers. Quiet conversation.][Narrator] January. The city has its rhythm back. The holidays are over. The tourists have thinned out.Daniel is at a café in the West Village with his friend Margot. She loves the coffee here. Says it’s the only place in the city that does it right.They’ve known each other since college. Margot works at a think tank now. Policy stuff. She reads everything. The kind of person who sends you articles at midnight with “thoughts?” in the subject line.[Daniel] Margot is my smartest friend. She’d tell you that herself. Not in a bad way. She just knows what she knows, and she knows a lot. When I want to argue about something, I call Margot. When I want to feel dumb, I call Margot.[Narrator] They’re on their second espresso. Margot is reading something on her phone. Frowning at it. Then she looks up.[Margot] “You following this term limits thing? You should. Someone’s going to float it again. Repeal the 22nd. Let him run again. Or let whoever comes next run forever.”[Daniel] “Why would we do that?”[Margot] “Why wouldn’t we.”[Narrator] She takes a sip. She’s enjoying this.[Margot] “The 22nd isn’t a founding document. It’s from 1951. A reaction to Roosevelt. Republicans shoved it through because they were mad at FDR. Now they’re the ones floating ways to get around it.”[Daniel] “So we just erase it?”[Margot] “If the people want someone, why should dead people get a veto? The men who wrote the rule are gone. Every generation should get to decide for itself.”[Daniel] “So term limits are antidemocratic.”[Narrator] She leans in a little.[Margot] “If sixty million people want someone to be president, and you tell them no because of a rule written by guys who’ve been dead for seventy years, who’s the tyrant?”[Daniel] “What if they’re wrong.”[Margot] “Then they’re wrong. You don’t get to protect people from themselves.”[Narrator] She sets her cup down.[Margot] “I’m not saying I want it. I’m saying the argument against it is weaker than people think. The 22nd is a leash. And the hand holding it has been dead for decades.”[Narrator] Daniel’s cup is empty. He doesn’t order another.[Daniel] I think about Kenneth. The chair by the window. The men who send them should be bound too.Margot doesn’t know about K. Doesn’t know about Kenneth. She’s arguing in the abstract. I’m somewhere else. But I don’t say that. I don’t have the words.[Narrator] They step outside. The cold hits them. Margot heads uptown. Daniel walks home.The city hums. Steam from the grates. American flags wave in the sunlight. He puts his headphones on. But today they don’t work the way they’re supposed to.Kenneth’s voice is there. The men who send them should be bound too.And now Margot’s voice. The dead have no rights over the living.They don’t agree.Act III. The Debate. Scene 2.[SFX: Neighborhood bar. Quiet. A Knicks game on low. Someone shooting pool in the back.][Narrator] A week later. Daniel is at a bar near his apartment. Not his usual place. Just somewhere close. Didn’t want to cook.It’s a Tuesday. Almost empty. A couple in a booth by the window. A guy at the end of the bar, watching the game. Daniel sits in the middle. Orders a burger and a beer.The bartender is older. Sixties, maybe. Gray hair, kept short. Moves slow, but not tired. The kind of guy who doesn’t need to talk, but will if you want him to.[Daniel] I’ve been carrying it around for a week and haven’t said it out loud to anyone. And then I say to the bartender, “My brother just shipped out. Navy.”[Narrator] The bartender looks up. Nods once. Keeps wiping the glass.[Bartender] “Where to?”[Daniel] “He can’t say.”[Narrator] The bartender nods again. Like he knows that feeling.[Daniel] I don’t know why I ask him. Maybe because he’s right here.“What do you think about term limits. For presidents.”[Narrator] He doesn’t laugh. Doesn’t act like it’s weird. People talk to him about all kinds of things. He sets the glass down. Thinks about it.[Bartender] “You know why we have them?”[Daniel] “Roosevelt served four terms. People got nervous.”[Bartender] “That’s the history. Maybe not the reason.”[Narrator] He shrugs, like the rest is simple.[Bartender] “We don’t do kings.”[Narrator] He says it plain. Like Daniel should already know.[Bartender] “That’s the whole point. Some guy sits in the chair until he dies, and then his kid sits in it. We said no. We said the people get to choose.”He leans in a little.“But the people choosing the same guy forever, waiting for him to die, that’s just a king with more steps.”[Daniel] “But if the people want him…”[Bartender] “People thought they wanted kings for thousands of years. Might have worked for Europe. But it’s not America.”[Narrator] He pours a beer for the guy at the end of the bar. Comes back.[Bartender] “There’s no guy so important the whole thing falls apart without him.”[Daniel] I think about what Margot said. The dead have no rights over the living.[Bartender] “The guys who wrote the Constitution, they’d seen what happens. A guy gets power, he wants more. Stays long enough, he thinks he deserves it. Stays longer, he thinks he’s the only one who can do it.”He taps the bar with two fingers.“After that, you’re not voting him out. You’re waiting for him to let go. And men like that don’t let go.”[Daniel] “So the limit protects us from ourselves?”[Bartender] “It reminds the guy in the chair it doesn’t belong to him. He’s just sitting in it for a while. He gets up and someone else sits down. That’s the deal.”[Narrator] The burger comes. Daniel eats. The bartender moves down the bar, checks on the other guy, comes back.[Bartender] “Your question. You’re chewing on something.”[Daniel] “I keep thinking about it. My brother. He signed. He’s bound.”[Narrator] The bartender nods.[Bartender] “Then the guys who send him shouldn’t be able to do anything they want.”[Narrator] He lets that sit.[Bartender] “If my kid’s going to war, the man who sends him should know he won’t be there forever. The longer you sit in that chair, the more you think it’s yours. There’s gotta be a limit.”[Daniel] I stop chewing. That’s it. That’s what great-grandpa Kenneth said. Almost the exact words.[Bartender] “A king doesn’t think about that. A king thinks he’ll be there to see how it ends. A president with a limit knows he won’t. That changes how you decide. Something good for the country is one thing. Something good for him is another.”[Narrator] Daniel finishes his burger. Finishes his beer. Pays the tab. Leaves a good tip.Two voices in his head all week. Kenneth. Margot. Now a third.There’s no guy so important the whole thing falls apart without him. He walks home. Headphones off. The city. The machine. Noise surrounds him.Act IV. The Limit[SFX: Silence. A refrigerator hum. A radiator clicking.][Narrator] May. 3 AM. Daniel’s apartment. Dark. Phone buzzes. Unknown number.[Daniel] “Hello?”[K] “Hey.”[Daniel] “K? You okay? Where are you?”[K] “I’m good. Can’t say.”[Daniel] “Is it cold? They feeding you?”[K] “Yeah. Food’s fine. Look, I can’t be on long. There’s a line. But I need a favor. Tell Mom I’m good. Doing the job.”[Daniel] I picture it. A line of guys at sea waiting for two minutes with a phone. Two minutes of home. And he’s using his to check on Mom.“I will.”[Narrator] Silence on the line. Daniel hears voices in the background. Someone waiting for the phone.[K] “Hey, I gotta go. There’s a line.”[Daniel] “Wait. K. I was wrong. What you’re doing matters. I didn’t get it then. I do now. We’re all proud of you.”[Narrator] He stops. That’s not what he meant to say.[Daniel] “I’m proud of you.”[Narrator] Quiet. Just the static of wherever K is. When K speaks again, his voice is different. Younger, almost.[K] “Hey, I’ll be home in a few months. We can go to that Thai place.”[Daniel] That’s all he says. It’s enough.“It’ll be my treat. Be safe, K.”[K] “You too.”[SFX: The line clicks. Silence.][Narrator] Daniel sits on the edge of the bed. Phone dark in his hand. His brother, somewhere he can’t name. For a duration he doesn’t control.[Daniel] K signed the contract. Gave them his time. His body. Maybe his life. Duration Plus Six. That’s what Kenneth signed in 1943. You serve until they say you’re done.K trusts the people spending his life know the value of it. America sends her sons and daughters to serve. The nation owes them something back.If K is bound, can’t say no, can’t leave, can’t tell me where he is, then the men who sent him should be bound too. A clock. A limit. You don’t get to do this forever.But in my head, Margot’s voice is there too. The dead have no rights over the living. If the people want someone, who are the dead to say no?[Narrator] He walks to the window.[Daniel] Two ideas. Both American. Both true.The dead have no rights over the living. We owe allegiance to no king.What happens when they collide? The 22nd says the people will have no king, even if we want one. But the dead can’t enforce anything. The only thing holding the line is the living agreeing to keep it.K is inside the machine. Bound by iron. He serves the American people, not a king. His oath is to the Constitution, not a personality. If we unbind the men who send him, what was the point? What did Kenneth sit on that ship for? What is K doing right now, in the cold?The men at the top have to be bound too. Power is a loan. You are not a king. We don’t do kings. You sit in the chair, then you get up. That’s the deal.[Narrator] Daniel steps outside. Same route. The tourists. The cops. He reaches for his headphones.Leaves them in his pocket.[Daniel] I wanted to move through the world without it touching me.But my brother is somewhere cold. Someone sent him there. And that someone is either bound by a clock, or they’re not.[Narrator] He looks at the crowd. The living. The ones who decide.The dead have no rights over them. And they owe allegiance to no king. Both true. The question is which one wins.May God bless the United States of America. Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

[SFX: Solo Guitar playing Auld Lang Syne]Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? Should old acquaintance be forgot, and the days of long ago?We’ve forgotten the meaning of the song playing in the background when we toast on New Year’s Eve.Let’s remember.Back to Ulysses S. Grant. He couldn’t hear music. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t. And the most important moment of his life would be defined by a song.Act I. The Man Who Couldn’t Hear MusicWashington, D.C., March 8, 1864.Ulysses S. Grant walks into Willard’s Hotel. Forty-one years old. Filthy from four days on a train. He is the most famous man in America, and nobody recognizes him.The hotel is famous. Senators swagger and generals preen across its thick, patterned carpet. Gas lamps throw a yellow light that doesn’t reach the corners, so faces drift in and out of shadow. Furniture packed in tight clusters. Little tables and chairs arranged for waiting, not resting, crowded by hats, gloves, and half-empty whiskey glasses.The desk clerk eyes Grant as he crosses the room. Mud-spattered coat. Rumpled uniform. No entourage. His boots are caked with Tennessee mud, red clay flaking onto the carpet. The clerk judges his station in life and says there’s nothing available but a cramped room in the garret. The attic.Grant takes it. He signs the register in a plain hand: U.S. Grant & Son, Galena, Illinois.The clerk reads the signature. His face goes white. Suddenly, the Presidential Suite, the rooms Abraham Lincoln occupied before his inauguration, is available after all.Grant declines. The garret is fine.This is Grant. No drama. No ceremony. And something even more peculiar.Ulysses S. Grant cannot hear music.It’s not that Grant “doesn’t like music.” Not that he “has no taste for music.”He can’t hear it.When a band plays, Grant hears only noise. A choir sings, Grant hears chaos. Marches. Hymns. Sentimental ballads. They all register the same way. Pots banging. Wagons rattling. Nothing more.He once described it this way: “I know only two tunes. One of them is ‘Yankee Doodle,’ and the other isn’t.”People took this as a joke. A curmudgeon’s quip. But Grant wasn’t joking. He could recognize “Yankee Doodle” because it came wrapped in parades and flags and ritual. He knew it by context, not by sound. Every other tune in the world was the same to him. Noise.Doctors today call it congenital amusia. The brain can’t process pitch. Each note disappears as soon as it sounds. The pattern never forms.In 1864, they had no name for it. Grant just lived with it. He never explained why music meant nothing to him. But other officers noticed he would leave the room when bands played. He didn’t grimace. He didn’t complain.He just drifted away.Back to Willard’s Hotel. That evening, Grant cleans up and goes down to dinner.He and his thirteen-year-old son Fred take a small table in the crowded dining room. He orders. Within minutes, someone recognizes him. A congressman stands and bellows across the room: “Ladies and gentlemen! The hero of Donelson, of Vicksburg, and of Chattanooga is among us! I propose the health of Lieutenant General Grant!”The chant begins. Grant. Grant. Grant.The diners surge toward his table. He stands awkwardly, bows, tries to eat, gives up. The mob presses closer. For three quarters of an hour, he shakes hands with strangers. Finally, he escapes to his room. He never finishes the meal.Later that night, politicians appear at his door. They rush him through the rain to the White House, where President Lincoln is holding his weekly reception. The East Room is packed. Hundreds of Washington society figures, all hoping to glimpse the western hero.The crowd parts. Grant walks through.Abraham Lincoln stands waiting. They have never met, though they are now the two most famous men in the country. Lincoln is a head taller, six foot four. Grant is five eight.Lincoln steps forward, smiling, and extends his hand. “Why, here is General Grant. I am most delighted to see you, General.”Grant answers with a nod and a few words so quiet Lincoln has to lean in.The Union Army of Grant’s time was saturated in music.More than 500 regimental bands. Drummers and fifers at every unit. Bugles structured the entire day. Reveille. Assembly. Mess call. Sick call. Taps. Music lifted spirits. Stiffened resolve. Gave orders.And Grant was deaf to all of it.He understood music strategically. He watched what it did to other people. Saw men weep at certain songs. Stiffen at others. The way someone colorblind might notice how others respond to a sunrise.After West Point, Grant was a young lieutenant in Mexico. His regiment’s band raised morale, but it needed funding. Bands were absurdly expensive, and politicians loved them. Congress would argue over rifles, but bands needed paid.So Grant ordered the unit’s daily rations in flour instead of bread, at significant savings. Then he rented a bakery. Hired bakers. Sold fresh bread through a contract he’d arranged with the army’s chief commissary. The profit went to music he could not hear.This is who Grant was. Practical. Unsentimental. Results-oriented.Sentiment in the Union Army was a liability.The next morning, Lincoln hands Grant his commission. Lieutenant General of the United States Army. The highest rank in the army.Grant is now in command of all Union forces. More than half a million men.The war is in its fourth year. Two hundred and fifty thousand Union soldiers are already dead or wounded, with little progress to show. Every general Lincoln has appointed to fight Robert E. Lee has failed. They engage. Suffer losses. Retreat north to regroup. Then they do it again.The reality is that the Civil War is a war of attrition. Wars of attrition aren’t clever. Force meets force until one side can no longer continue.To achieve the nation’s ends, Lincoln needs someone different. Someone who doesn’t retreat.Days after the ceremony, Lincoln’s assistant asks what kind of general Grant will be. Lincoln thinks for a moment.“Grant is the first general I’ve had. He doesn’t ask me to approve his plans and take responsibility for them. He hasn’t told me what his plans are. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. I’m glad to find a man who can go ahead without me.”Lincoln pauses, then adds.“Wherever he is, Grant makes things git.”The Army medical corps had made it official. They called it nostalgia.Not nostalgia like we use the word today, a warm feeling about the past. Nostalgia as a diagnosis. A disease. A killer.Union surgeons wrote down thousands of cases. Men who wasted away, moaning for home. The symptoms look like what we would now call severe depression. Insomnia. Loss of appetite. Withdrawal. Despair. In the worst cases, they just stopped. Refused food. Refused nursing. Died.The army identified a trigger. Music.Sentimental songs did it. Ballads about home. Mothers. Sweethearts left behind. The most dangerous song in camp was “Home, Sweet Home.” Men heard it and broke. So officers barred bands from playing it.Songs like “Auld Lang Syne” carried the same danger. Remembering friends from long ago. Remembering home. Memory as a weapon turned inward. The song that made you weep for the past was the song that could kill you in the present.Grant would have understood that logic perfectly.Now Grant is in Washington, his new commission in hand. Culpeper, Virginia waits, his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac. Robert E. Lee waits, fifty miles south.Grant lays out his philosophy in a single sentence: “The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.”No sentiment. No retreat. Attrition.Act II: The Overland CampaignThe Wilderness, Virginia. May 5, 1864.Grant crosses the Rapidan River at midnight. Sixty thousand men. Pontoon bridges sway in the dark. By dawn, the Army of the Potomac is deep inside a seventy square mile tangle of vines and second growth so dense the soldiers call it, simply, ‘the Wilderness.’The Union Army was routed here one year earlier. Lee’s bold flanking maneuver sent them running. The bones of the dead from that battle lie in the undergrowth. Skulls grin up at passing troops. The new soldiers try not to look.Grant’s plan is simple: move fast and get through the forest before Lee can react. Fight in open country where Union artillery and superior numbers can be decisive.Lee reacts faster.By midmorning, the Wilderness becomes a killing ground that neutralizes every Union advantage.Soldiers couldn’t see twenty yards in any direction. Brush so thick you lose sight of the man next to you. Smoke from musket fire fills the gaps between trees. You only see the enemy by the muzzle flash when he shoots at you.There is no battle line. No coordination. No grand strategy. Only chaos. Small groups of men stumbling through the brush, firing at sounds, bayoneting shapes.Then the forest catches fire.Muzzle flashes ignite the dry leaves. Flames race through the underbrush. Men who are wounded and cannot crawl burn alive. Screams rise above the gunfire. The smoke turns black.The fighting goes on for two days. When it ends, 18,000 Union soldiers are dead, wounded, or missing. Nobody knows how many Confederates. The forest is eerily quiet.To this point, every Union army that faced Robert E. Lee followed the same pattern. Engage. Suffer terrible losses. Retreat north to regroup. Lick wounds. Try again in a few months.Grant’s men expect the same. They’ve been through this before with other commanders. They assume their next march will take them back toward the Rapidan. Back toward Washington. Back toward safety.That night, the army begins to move.The columns form up and start marching. At first, the men don’t know which direction they’re heading. The road winds through the forest. It’s dark. They’re exhausted.Slowly, as the stars wheel overhead, they begin to realize something.They are not marching north.They are marching south.Toward the enemy. Toward Richmond. Toward more fighting.A soldier in the lead regiment described the moment the realization spread: “Wild cheers echoed through the forest. Men waved their hats. They pounded each other on the back. We were going forward.”For four years, too many men had died to give up ground they had seized. They would move forward. Not to glory, but to finality.Grant sits on horseback by the side of the road, watching his army pass. He is smoking a cigar. He says nothing.Spotsylvania Court House. May 8–21, 1864.Grant races Lee to the crossroads. Lee wins. His men dig in before the Union forces arrive. They throw up earthen walls and trenches the soldiers call the Mule Shoe.For two weeks, Grant hammers at those works. He cannot break through. Each assault costs thousands of men. But he keeps attacking. Probing. Looking for weakness.On May 12, he finds one.Before dawn, Union troops mass for the assault. They surge out of the fog, overwhelm the Confederate line, and capture thousands of prisoners, nearly splitting Lee’s army in half.But Confederate reinforcements pour in. The two armies crash together along a trench line barely twenty feet wide. For eighteen hours, they fight hand to hand in the mud.Men bayonet each other over the earthen wall. Stab blindly in the rain. Grab rifles by the barrel and swing them like clubs. The trench fills with bodies.Behind the Confederate line stands an oak tree, nearly two feet thick. By morning, it is gone, cut down entirely by rifle fire. The bullets come so thick and so fast they saw through the trunk.Another 18,000 Union casualties.Grant’s army marches south.Cold Harbor, Virginia. June 3, 1864.The armies face each other across open ground. Lee’s men have spent days digging in. Trenches. Felled trees with branches sharpened and pointed outward, a wooden trap meant to tear apart anyone who tried to charge through. Overlapping fields of fire. As strong a defensive position as any in this war.Grant orders a frontal assault.The night before, Union soldiers know what’s coming. An officer observes something he has never seen. Men throughout the ranks are writing their names and addresses on slips of paper and pinning them to the backs of their uniforms.So they won’t die as unknowns.At 0430, the Union line advances.They cross three hundred yards of open ground under murderous fire. The Confederate line erupts in flame. Men fall in waves, whole regiments cut down before they can close the distance. In some places, the attack lasts twenty minutes. In others, less than ten. It fails.Several thousand men fall in half an hour.The survivors lie in the dirt, pinned down, unable to advance or retreat. The sun rises. It will be a hot day. The wounded begin to cry out for water.Grant and Lee cannot agree on truce terms to retrieve the bodies. For three days, the dead lie where they fell. The wounded die of thirst. The stench reaches both camps.By mid June 1864, Grant has lost fifty-five thousand men in forty days. The casualty lists fill entire pages of Northern newspapers. Mothers read the columns looking for their sons’ names. Wives scan for husbands. The country recoils.The papers call him “Butcher Grant.”Attrition. The worst of humanity. The Union can replace its dead. The Confederacy cannot. Every battle, no matter how costly, weakens Lee more than it weakens Grant.Eventually, the math catches up.Grant never answers the editorials or the accusations. His army keeps marching south.The newspapers won’t write the truth. The Union is winning. Stay the course. Lee is outnumbered and outgunned. He is falling back to prepared positions, killing Union soldiers from behind earthworks, and waiting for the North to lose its nerve.Every previous commander lost his nerve. Saw the bodies. Imagined the grief. Calculated the political cost. Decided the price was too high.Grant marches forward.He knows the alternative is worse.A war that drags on another year. Another two years. Another hundred thousand dead with nothing to show for it. A negotiated peace that leaves slavery in place. A nation permanently fractured.No. Forward is the only way through.[SFX: Solo Guitar playing Auld Lang Syne]And the men who follow him? The men who charge the trenches, pin their names to their coats, and die in the Wilderness fire?They hear the music Grant can’t hear. They carry melodies in their heads. Home, Sweet Home. Lorena. Auld Lang Syne. They sing around campfires. They hum on the march.They are dying of nostalgia, and marching south anyway.Somewhere is the end of it. Appomattox.Interlude: The RappahannockWinter, 1862.Union and Confederate pickets face each other across the Rappahannock. Close enough to shout. Close enough to hear.Informal truces. Coffee traded for tobacco in tiny sailboats floated across the current. Jokes shouted across the water.At night, a fiddle starts up on the Confederate bank: Dixie answered by Yankee Doodle from the Union side. Then, together: Home, Sweet Home. Auld Lang Syne.Melodies that turn enemies back into men.Should auld acquaintance be forgot?Grant wasn’t there.But the men who would follow him to Appomattox were.Act III: The SilenceAppomattox Court House. April 9, 1865.Grant arrives at Wilmer McLean’s house in a mud-spattered uniform. Lee waits in his finest dress coat, sword at his side. They both served in the Mexican War, though Lee would not remember the junior quartermaster who now stands as his conqueror.The Union has won. The terms are generous. Officers keep their sidearms. Men who own horses may keep them for spring planting. No trials. No reprisals. Go home.Lee signs. Mounts Traveller. Rides away.Union artillery batteries begin firing salutes. Soldiers cheer. After four years, they’ve won.Grant hears the guns, the one military sound he can’t misinterpret, and sends immediate orders to stop.“The war is over. The rebels are our countrymen again, and the best sign of rejoicing after the victory will be to abstain from all demonstrations in the field.”A heavy silence falls. Thousands of men who have been trying to kill each other for four years stand in the mud, not knowing what to feel. Near the McLean House stands the 198th Pennsylvania Regiment. Their band includes a young German immigrant named Justus Altmiller. He arrived in America ten years ago. He plays cornet.Altmiller lifts his instrument.The band plays Auld Lang Syne.Should auld acquaintance be forgot?We two have run about the hills, and pulled the daisies fine. We were boys together once, but broad seas between us have roared since the days of long ago.Here’s my hand, my trusty friend. Give me your hand too.Curtain. The Cup[SFX: Guitar playing Auld Lang Syne.]Every New Year’s Eve, we sing and toast. Champagne more bitter than it looks. Words to an old song we barely understand, in a dialect we can’t quite pronounce.Because of the people we were. The friends we had. The country we shared, and still share. The wars we survived.These deserve a toast.We don’t toast “to” the past. We toast “for” each other. The lyrics mean “for the sake of” old times. So don’t raise a glass to what is gone. We raise a glass for the people standing next to us right now. We honor what “was” by showing up for who’s here. Happy New Year.Hear, hear.May God bless the United States of America. 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This story is true. Except for the parts with the ghosts. [SFX: Theater applause]Dim the lights.Prologue. London. December, 1776.One lone leaf on the London plane outside the King’s window trembles in the light breeze, like the whole city just let out a quiet breath.It had clung to its branch through the long autumn, through winds that had stripped its companions and sent them spinning across the grounds of Windsor Castle. But now, in the stillness of a December evening, with no wind at all to speak of, it fell. The branch did not shake. The leaf simply let go, as if it had finally grown too tired to hold on, and drifted downward through air that smelled of coal smoke and coming snow.It landed on the stones of the courtyard without a sound. A guardsman’s boot crushed it a moment later, unknowing. The groundskeeper would collect it soon enough.Inside the palace, candles burned against the early dark. Servants moved through corridors with the particular silence of those who have learned that kings prefer not to be reminded of their presence. Fires crackled in grates throughout the residence, and the smell of roasting meat drifted up from kitchens where cooks prepared for the Christmas feast. The King had already declared he would not attend.George William Frederick, by the Grace of God King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, sat alone in his private study. Most called him King George III. He was not yet forty. His hair had not gone white. His eyes had not drifted to that far-off place that later painters would catch. He blinked once, slow, like the weight of the crown had its own gravity. He was still a young king, or youngish. The rebellion in the American colonies had aged him in ways the mirrors had only begun to report.On the desk before him lay dispatches from America.He had read them twice already. He would read them again before bed. Again, when he woke. Again, mid-morning. Searching for the thing he could not find in them. An explanation. The reason. The sense of it all.The rebels would not break.This was the fact that he could not understand. Would not. By every measure that mattered, this rebellion should be over. The Continental Army had been driven from New York. Their capital had fallen. Their soldiers deserted by the hundreds, slipping away in the night to return to farms and families, to sanity, to submission. Washington’s forces had dwindled to a ragged few thousand, starving and frozen on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River.And still they would not break.George set down the dispatch and walked to the window. The courtyard below lay empty save for the guards at their posts, still as statues in the cold. Beyond the palace walls, London prepared for Christmas. He could not see the preparations from here, but he knew them well enough. The garlands and the wassail, the church bells and the charitable distributions. The goose being fattened in every household that could afford one, and many that could not.Christmas. The celebration of a child born in poverty who had somehow overthrown an empire. George did not make this connection consciously. It floated somewhere beneath the surface of his thoughts, unexamined.He touched the back of a couple of fingers against the glass. It was cold. On the other side of that glass, on the other side of an ocean, men wrapped their feet in rags, leaving bloody footprints in the snow. Men were choosing to freeze.Why? What word had reached them that could make men choose cold over comfort?He did not doubt the outcome of this rebellion. He had the strongest Army and Navy the world had ever seen. His generals would see to their submission. But didn’t they understand what he offered? Order. Protection. The steady hand of a Crown that had outlasted plagues and pretenders, fires and mobs. A world where the rules did not change because a crowd felt hot blood in its throat.Obedience, in return. That was all. One plain word, and it was suddenly the only word nobody in America could stand to hear.He had read their pamphlets. Their petitions. Liberty was a thing you could hold in your palm and keep clean. As if “freedom without order” could live out in the open without turning into smoke and shouting.He told himself they would come back. This rebellion was a fever, not a cause. Noise. A few men with printing presses and loud mouths. The larger crowd would quiet down the moment winter did its work.But right now, his eyes refocused from the daydream. The light grew dim. The glass fogged at the edges, as if someone had breathed on it from the other side. Odd, but no matter. It must be the snow coming. George turned from the window and walked to his desk.The candle nearest him flickered, then steadied. The shadows in the room shifted and resettled themselves. Outside, the temperature dropped, the smell of snow in the air. A white Christmas for London, if the clouds obliged.In the fireplace, a log cracked and sent up a shower of sparks. George watched them rise and wink, rise and wink, like small rebellions burning themselves to nothing against the indifferent air.The clock on the mantel struck nine. Somewhere beyond the walls, a watchman sang the hour into the cold.George gathered the dispatches. He placed them in the locked drawer where he kept such things, away from prying eyes and gossiping servants. He would read them again tomorrow. He would search once more for the explanation that was not in the dispatches. The King prepared for bed. His evening routine varied little from one night to the next. He allowed his valet to help him undress. He said his prayers, more habit than devotion. He climbed into the vast bed with its heavy curtains, warming pans, accumulated weight of royal tradition.He closed his eyes.His sleep came and went, shallow and troubled. George tossed in the darkness, talking in his sleep. Words that his attendants, just outside the door, could not quite make out. The fire burned low. The candles, one by one, became a trail of smoke. The room, black.Outside the window, the first flakes of snow began to fall on London. Gentle. Silent. It covered the courtyard where the plane leaf had landed. The city asleep in a blanket of white that looked almost like a fresh page.He heard the clock strike midnight and keep ticking.George, alone in his royal bed, surrounded by luxury and power that brought no comfort, found the wee small hours. The thin place where a man is neither awake nor asleep. Some time later, the room, which had been empty, was suddenly not. A voice spoke out of the dark, as if it had been waiting for him.Act I. The Ghost of Christmas PastThe voice came from nowhere and everywhere, the way a church bell finds you three streets away.(inaudible) “George.”“George.”The King opened his eyes. The room was dark, but had not changed. The same heavy curtains and dying fire. Winter pressing against the windows. But this dark was different. Breath. Presence. “Who’s there?” His voice came out steadier than he felt. A king’s training. “Guards…”“They cannot hear you. Nor you them. We are between the ticks of the clock, you and I. In the space of memory.”“There’s no one here.”“There is,” the voice said, not unkindly. “Come. The night will not wait.”George sat up. His eyes adjusted. There was no figure in the room. Only shadow, and within the shadow, a deeper shadow. Not a person. Breath on the air.“What are you?”“I am what was. The road behind you. The roads behind that road. The choices made before you drew breath.”George felt his feet touch the cold floor, though he hadn’t moved. His hand reached for a robe that was not there, and he found himself in only his nightshirt, shivering slightly. A pale light gathered at the window. The glass, which should have been solid, yielded like water. He passed through it without feeling it pass, and then he was somewhere else entirely.London. But not his London.The streets were narrow and filthy. Choked with mud and offal and crowds that moved with dread. George had seen etchings of this time. He had read the history. But nothing had prepared him for the smell. Blood and smoke and fear. The smell coated his tongue.“Sixteen forty-nine,” the voice said. “The thirtieth of January.”The crowd pressed toward a scaffold erected in front of the Banqueting House at Whitehall. George moved with them, unable to resist. A ghost among ghosts. A woman near him wept openly. Through the crowd, George saw him.King Charles I walked to the scaffold with the careful dignity of a man who had practiced this moment in his mind. His shirt was white. His hair, gray. His eyes found no one in the crowd, as if he had already departed for some place beyond their judgment.“He wore two shirts,” the voice said softly. “So that he would not shiver in the cold. He wanted to look dignified. Strong.”George’s throat tightened. He watched Charles kneel. He could not watch. He looked away.But he heard it. The blade found its mark. Then another sound, a moan rising from the crowd. Thousands of throats releasing something that had no name. Not triumph. Not grief. “Why do you show me this?” George whispered. “I know this story. Every king knows it.”The ghost looked at him but did not speak.Britain had torn itself apart in those years. Men who had been neighbors became enemies. Law vanished. Titles meant nothing. Thinkers had dreamed of a solution, a sovereign so absolute that chaos itself would bow before him. It was a dream born of blood. Control that would not last.Then, George and the ghost in a different London. Cleaner. Calmer. Wider streets, newer buildings. Dawn breaking over the Thames, the water in shades of rose and gold.“Sixteen eighty-eight,” the voice said. “Forty years after the axe.”George watched a procession move through the streets. Not a mob this time. Something orderly, almost festive. A parade. People lined the route, cheering. At the center of the procession rode a man George recognized from portraits: William of Orange. Beside him, Mary Stuart. Coming to claim a throne.“The Glorious Revolution,” George said. “They invited William. Parliament invited him.”The people would only consent to be ruled. They could not be forced to submit. Power in exchange for purpose. Authority for accountability. “The Crown survived,” the voice said, “but it did not survive unchanged. Not rule by order. By consent.”The parade thinned like fog. The morning light dimmed. The Thames lost its color. He felt the pull of his own bed, like a tide.George’s eyes flew open. He was back in his chambers. The candle on the table had blown out, though no window was open. George sat up and gripped the bedpost.Outside, the snow fell steady and silent.The clock struck one.Curtain.Act II. The Ghost of Christmas Present. The fire had burned to ash. The room was cold in a way it hadn’t been before, as if the servants had forgotten him entirely.George told himself it was a dream. It did not feel like a dream.He lit a candle. His hands were nearly steady now. He poured a brandy from the decanter on the sideboard and drank it standing. Then he poured another.The snow was heavier. It buried London beneath it. He watched it fall and told himself again it was a dream. The mind does strange things in the wee small hours. Fever, perhaps. Or the dinner.The brandy warmed him. The candle, bright. The clock ticked on.He set down the glass and turned toward the bed. The sheets would be cold now, but he would sleep. Then wake, and it would be Christmas morning, and none of this would have…“You might at least offer me one.”George spun. A woman sat in the chair by the dead fire. She had not been there a moment before. She was there now.“A brandy,” the man said. “It’s cold, where we’re going.”The door to the King’s Dressing Room opened onto something that was not a room. George stood in the House of Commons.He knew this room, though he had never entered it as king. Convention forbade it, and he was nothing if not a man of convention. The galleries were full. The benches, packed. Candles blazed in their sconces, the air thick with sweat and wool and the peculiar smell of men who had been arguing for hours.A man stood at the center of the chamber, speaking.He was wigged but disheveled, his coat rumpled, his face flushed with conviction. His voice filled the room. Not shouting, but somehow reaching every corner, the way a bell fills a church.“...a great empire and small minds do not go together. If we truly understood what we are stewards of, if we felt the weight of it, we would approach every decision about America with humility. With our hearts lifted up. We have been handed something extraordinary. We should act like men who know it...”“Who is this man?” George asked, though he knew. He had read the speeches. He had dismissed them.“Edmund Burke,” the ghost said. “Member for Bristol. He is arguing against the war. He has been arguing against the war for two years. Asking Parliament to see the colonists as Englishmen defending the very liberties we claim to uphold. To understand that this fight cannot be won in any way that matters.”In the face of the American rebellion, Burke sought to address the British government’s missteps. He believed England should free the colonies to govern themselves. George watched Burke’s face. He spoke like a man trying to stop a carriage from going over a cliff, knowing he could not.“...our ancestors built this empire not by crushing other peoples but by raising them up. We grew great by increasing the wealth, the population, the happiness of those we governed. That was the old way. The honorable way. When did we decide to abandon it?”George looked at the benches. Some members listened. Many did not. Some whispered to each other. Some studied their papers. One man, near the back, had fallen asleep.“He speaks well,” George said. “He is wrong, but he speaks well.”“They will vote against him,” the ghost said. “They will vote to continue the war. To send more troops. More ships. More money. Some of them know he is right, but they will vote against him anyway. They would rather win the argument than be right.”George knew the war would be won. And Britain would win it.The chamber dissolved.Then…cold. A cold beyond anything George had known.He stood on the banks of a river, black water sliding past, chunks of ice spinning in the current. The snow had stopped, but the wind had not. It cut through his nightshirt as if he wore nothing at all.“Where is this?”“Pennsylvania. The Delaware River. Christmas Eve.”Across the river, George could see fires. An encampment. Rows of tents, though many sagged or had collapsed entirely. Figures moved between them, hunched against the cold.“The Continental Army,” the ghost said. “What remains of it.”They crossed the water without crossing it. One moment the riverbank, the next the camp itself. George walked among the soldiers, invisible, unheard. He had seen paintings of armies. He had reviewed his own troops, fine in their red coats and white breeches. This was something else.These men were ragged. Starving. Some had shoes. Most did not. He saw feet wrapped in cloth, in sacking, in what looked like the remnants of a coat. He saw blood in the snow where men had walked.“Nine thousand began the summer,” the ghost said. “Fewer than three thousand remain. The rest are dead, captured, or deserted. Those who stayed have not been paid in months. Their enlistments expire in six days. Most will leave. The officers know this. The men know this.”George stopped before a fire where a group of soldiers huddled. They were young. Boys, some of them. “They are beaten,” George said. “Look at them. They are finished.”The ghost said nothing.A commotion near the center of camp. George moved toward it and saw a man emerge from a tent, tall, broad-shouldered, his face drawn with exhaustion. He recognized the face from dispatches, from sketches his ministers had shown him.Washington.The general moved through the camp slowly, stopping to speak with soldiers. George could not hear the words, but he saw men straighten slightly as Washington passed. Not much. They were too cold, too tired for much. But something. A flicker.“He knows it is over,” George said. “Look at his face. He knows his army is dying. The revolution may have only days left.” Washington stopped at a fire where several officers had gathered. He was speaking to them, his voice low. George strained to hear but caught only fragments—the Hessians... Christmas...George paid it no mind. The American troops were freezing to death for an idea. Suffering for nothing. Hessian mercenaries garrisoned Trenton, celebrating Christmas. Professional soldiers holding down a foreign population. The sooner this ended, the sooner they could go home. Washington had failed. America had failed. The rebellion was done.The camp faded. George stood again in his chambers. The candle had burned down by half. The brandy glass stood where he had left it. Outside, the snow continued to fall.The clock struck two o’clock.Curtain.Act III. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to ComeGeorge sat heavily on the edge of the bed. He was shaking, but not from the cold. The fire had somehow rekindled itself in his absence, burning steadily.The rebels were finished. He had seen it with his own eyes. Burke was a fool, and Washington was a fool. By spring, this would all be over, and the colonies would return to their proper place, and he would be proven right. He had been right all along.The shaking would not stop.Christmas morning. The birth of a child in poverty who had overthrown an empire.George thought about bloody footprints in the snow. A general’s face. Men who would not go home.He sat near the fire to warm himself. It was not enough. He lingered near its warmth. He might have dozed off.Then…the clock struck three.George did not see the ghost arrive. One moment, he was alone by the fire. The next, he was not.This ghost was different. The first had been a voice. The second, a man. This one was silence and form. It stood in the corner of the room, darker than the shadows around it, and it did not speak. It did not move. It waited.“I know why you have come,” George said. His voice sounded strange to him, thin and old. “You are the last of them. You will show me what is to be.”The ghost said nothing.“I am not afraid of you. I have seen your kind before, this night. I have seen the past and the present, and I am still king. I will still be king when you are gone.”The ghost raised one arm and pointed toward the window.The room dissolved.Again, George stood on the banks of the Delaware.Christmas Day. The same river. Black water. Grinding ice. But hours had passed. The fires of the American camp were cold. The tents, empty. The army, vanished.No. Not vanished.The men massed at river’s edge. Hundreds of men in the darkness, barely visible, moving with a strange and terrible quiet. No one spoke above a whisper. No torches lit. Only the sounds of feet on frozen ground, the creak of wooden boats dragged to the water, the low moan of wind across the river.A group of officers gathered near the boats. Washington stood at the center, his face unreadable in the darkness. Men fell in around him. A massive figure who must have weighed twenty stone, a young officer with a French accent, others whose names would mean nothing to him but would be carved in stone within a century.“The river is worse than we thought,” one officer said. “The ice is moving. McConkey’s Ferry is the only viable crossing point. Ewing’s men cannot cross at Trenton Ferry. Cadwalader is stuck at Bristol.”“We cross alone,” Washington said. “The Hessians at Trenton will not expect us. That is the only advantage we have, and it expires at dawn. We cross tonight, or we do not cross at all.”King George watched Washington’s face. He had seen that expression before on commanders who knew they were ordering men to die. But there was something else. Resolve. A man who has made his peace with failure and decided to act anyway.“The password for tonight,” Washington said. “Victory or Death.”The officers dispersed. The loading began.George had never seen boats like these. Long and shallow, forty feet or more, with high sides and flat bottoms. Cargo boats. Meant for iron ore and grain, not soldiers. They sat low in the water, and the men packed into them like cattle, shoulder to shoulder, muskets held upright to save space.At the front and rear of each boat stood men who were not soldiers. Sailors. Fishermen. They handled their poles with a confidence the soldiers lacked, pushing off from the shore, steering into the current.These were Marblehead men. Massachusetts fishermen. Men who had spent their lives on the Atlantic, who knew how to read water and weather. They had volunteered for this work because no one else could do it.The first boats pushed into the river.The ice came at the boats like a living thing, spinning and grinding. Chunks the size of carriages slamming against the wooden hulls. The fishermen fought it with poles and oars, pushing the floes aside, searching for channels in the darkness.The crossing was supposed to take three hours. It would take nine.Midway through, freezing rain began to fall.Men shivered so badly they could not hold their muskets. Soldiers vomited over the side from fear or sickness, or both. Washington stood in the prow of his boat, perfectly still, staring at the far shore as if to will it closer.The crossing went on, hour after hour. Boats reached the Jersey shore and unloaded their cargo of frozen men, then turned back for more. The ice grew worse as the night wore on, piling up at the landing site, forcing the boats to find new approaches.Midnight passed. One o’clock. Two.Men stamped their feet on the Jersey shore, trying to keep blood moving. There was no fire. There could be no fire. The enemy would see it. They stood in the darkness and the freezing rain and waited for the rest of the army to cross.Three o’clock. Four. The artillery still had not crossed. Henry Knox, the massive man George had seen with the officers, bellowed orders at the river’s edge. The boats seemed far too small to hold the cannons.The last boats crossed as the sky began to gray in the early morning. Nine hours. Nine hours in the boats. The ice. The freezing rain. And now a nine-mile march to Trenton, in the snow, in the dark, with men who had not slept and barely eaten and whose enlistments expired in six days.Victory or Death.The march was worse than the crossing.The men passed beyond exhaustion. Their bodies moved because their minds forgot how to stop. They marched in two columns on parallel roads, Sullivan along the river, Greene inland. Washington rode with Greene.The freezing rain stopped, but the ground was frozen iron. Men with rags on their feet left bloody prints with every step. George saw a soldier stumble and fall, and watched two others drag him upright and force him to keep moving. He saw another man simply stop, sit down in the snow, and close his eyes.The column marched on. The man who had sat down did not rise.Two soldiers would freeze to death on that march. Anyone who stopped was lost.The sun rose behind heavy clouds, gray and cold. They had missed their window. The plan called for an attack at dawn, in darkness. It was now well past seven.Washington called a halt at a farmhouse a mile from Trenton. Officers gathered. George stood among them, invisible, listening.“We’ve lost surprise,” an officer said. “It’s full daylight. They’ll see us coming.”“The Hessians have been harassed by militia for three days,” Washington said. “They are exhausted. They have been on high alert so long as to be meaningless. And it’s Christmas. No civilized army attacks on Christmas.”“Sir, with respect, we are not a civilized army. We are barely an army at all.”“Yes,” Washington said. “That is our advantage.”Trenton was a small town, a few hundred houses clustered along two main streets that converged at its center. The Hessians were fifteen hundred professional soldiers. Veterans of European wars. They quartered throughout the town, their cannons fixed at key intersections.Colonel Johann Rall commanded the garrison. Rall heard rumors. Loyalist spies had told him an attack was coming. A patrol had skirmished with American scouts just hours before.A servant approached with a note. A local Loyalist sent it. It warned of American movements.Rall glanced at the note, did not read it, and slipped it into his pocket. He had received a hundred such warnings. The Americans were beaten. Everyone knew. The rabble across the river was starving and freezing and would melt away by spring.The note was still in his pocket, unread, when he died three hours later.The attack came from two directions at once.Sullivan’s column struck from the south. Greene’s from the north. They drove into the town along the parallel main streets. The sound of musket fire shattered the morning quiet. Not volleys, a rolling crackle. Building and building as more Americans entered the town.The Hessians were professionals. Surprised. Half-dressed, but well-trained. They formed up in the streets and fought. They spilled from houses, grabbing weapons, falling into ranks with the muscle memory of a hundred drills. Their officers shouted commands in German. Drums beat the call to arms.But the Americans held the high ground, and they had artillery.Henry Knox’s guns. The same cannons that had crossed the river on boats too small to hold them opened fire from the head of King Street. Grapeshot tore through the Hessian formations. Men fell. The survivors tried to form up again. The American fire was relentless.Colonel Rall mounted his horse and rode into the chaos, sword raised, rallying his men. He organized a counterattack. Led a charge toward the American guns.A musket ball struck him in the side.He stayed mounted. Another ball hit him. He slumped, slid from his horse, and his men caught him and dragged him into a church.The Hessian resistance collapsed.It was over in forty-five minutes.The Hessians laid down their arms. American soldiers, the same ragged, starving men on the riverbank the night before, herded prisoners into buildings. Washington rode slowly through the town. He returned salutes to men who had not believed they would survive the night.Nine hundred Hessians captured. Twenty-two killed, eighty-four wounded. Stores of food and weapons and ammunition seized. Everything an army needed to survive.American casualties: two frozen on the march. A handful wounded. None killed in battle.King George saw the bodies in the street. The prisoners being marched away, the American flag raised over the town. He looked at Washington, still mounted, still silent, looking back toward the river as if already calculating the next impossible thing.Then, the scene shifts. George sees the same army that had crossed the Delaware, now larger. Reinforced. Men re-enlist. New recruits arrive. The thing that had been dying somehow came back to life.More battles. Princeton, eight days later, another American victory. The British withdraw from New Jersey. The war that should have ended in the winter of 1776 ground on through 1777, 1778, 1779. America refused to die.“Stop,” George said. “I do not wish to see any more.”The ghost lowered its arm. The battles faded. The years folded in on themselves like paper. George stood again in his chambers, alone.The fire had become embers. The candle, a stub of wax. Outside, the snow had stopped. The first gray light of Christmas morning crept across London.He walked to the window. The London snow was white and perfect, a silent shroud. He saw his own reflection in the glass; he didn’t see a King. He had been fighting an army, but Washington was leading a haunting. He could not kill an idea that was willing to freeze to death: an army of bloody footprints in the snow, of no pay and empty bellies, shivering in ice-covered boats on Christmas Day.Curtain.Act IV. King George’s RedemptionHe was shaking.He told himself it was a dream. Again and again, as if repetition could make it true. But he was there. The gunpowder. The cold of the Delaware. Washington’s face in the prow of that boat, staring at the far shore.He dressed. Attended Christmas services in the chapel. Spoke to no one. He smiled when required, nodded when expected, returned to his chambers as soon as custom allowed.The dispatches took weeks to arrive.He waited. Every time a messenger arrived, his hands trembled until he saw the seal. When the news finally came of the impossible victory, it matched what he had seen. He read the dispatch three times. Then he locked it in the drawer with the others and sat very still for a long while. He told no one what he had dreamed.The war goes on. Seven years pass. But George cannot escape what he saw. The dispatches kept coming. Princeton. Saratoga. France enters the war. Yorktown.His certainty that Britain would stamp out this American rebellion eroded, year by year. He distrusts his own mind. Did he see the future? Was it just a dream? How did he see the future? Then, redemption. December 23, 1783. Annapolis. The war is over. Then, America shocks him again.Washington resigns his commission.The American people loved him. He was a star. He didn’t have to give up power. He could be king. The night before the ceremony, they threw him a party. Washington “danced in every set, so that the ladies might have the pleasure of dancing with him, or as it has since been handsomely expressed, get a touch of him.”Instead of claiming fame and power, Washington gave it back to the people. America would owe allegiance to no king, and George Washington believed in America.The very thing King George III believed impossible, that a man could choose to be less than he could be, for the sake of an idea larger than himself.There it was. King George’s redemption. He understood, at last, what he was fighting. Not a rebellion. Something new. An idea. Of Washington choosing to give power back to the people, King George said, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”Curtain. Lights.Act V. FinThis story is real. Freezing soldiers. Bloody footprints in the snow. Washington’s resignation. King George’s redemption.The ghosts? They were the only ones who knew how to tell him the truth. The greatest act of power is letting go. My best wishes are with you and yours this Christmas. Two days from now, we celebrate a child born in poverty who overthrew an empire.May God bless you and keep you;May God smile on you and be gracious to you;May God look on you with favor and give you peace.God bless us, every one. Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

2025. The president fires an FTC commissioner before her term is up. The statute says he can’t without cause. He does it anyway. Now the Supreme Court has to decide whether ninety years of precedent was real law, or a bluff. Act I. The Wager[SFX: casino room, cards dealt, chips stacked, ice clinking in glasses]Players stare at each other across a poker table. Four cards are up. One card is face down. The last card decides everything, but nobody gets to see it until somebody commits.You can stare at the felt and pretend time is on your side. But the cost of waiting goes up anyway. You have to put in a bet to keep playing, and that bet keeps getting bigger. The pot grows. The pressure rises. Sooner or later, you have to act with incomplete information.New York City. Late Spring, 1789.George Washington took the oath on April 30. He is the first President of the United States. He has duties. He has no government.No State Department. No Treasury. No War Department. No one to answer a foreign minister or respond to a crisis. The executive branch exists on paper. In reality, it is one man in a rented house with a small staff and a pile of unanswered letters.The Constitution is eight months old. The ink is barely dry. And the world is not waiting.The British still occupy forts on American soil. Forts they agreed to vacate six years ago. Native attacks keep coming from those regions. Plenty of Americans suspect the British, but Washington has no department to respond with.Spain has closed the Mississippi River to American trade. Western settlers are talking about leaving the union. Diplomacy might help. Threats might help. But there is no one to conduct diplomacy. The president cannot do everything himself.American merchant ships are being seized in the Mediterranean. Algiers declared war on the United States four years ago. Sailors are chained in North African prisons, waiting for a ransom that cannot come because we have no Treasury and no Navy.The pot is already enormous. The blinds are rising. And Congress has a problem.The Constitution gives the president the power to appoint officers “by and with the advice and consent of the Senate.”It says nothing about firing them.Nothing.That silence is not calm. It’s cards sliding out. Sideways glances. Men looking across the table, trying to decide what the other man is holding.Sixty-five men crowd into Federal Hall on Wall Street. A repurposed city building that still smells like fresh paint. May turns to June. The weather thickens. No ventilation worth mentioning. Wool coats. Wigs. Windows that don’t open properly. Paper everywhere. Quills scratching. Men sweating through their shirts while arguing about the shape of executive power.They have to build a working government, but the game is already underway. The cards are on the felt. The pot is growing. And they’re still arguing over who gets to deal, who sets the rules, and who can push a man out of his seat.The question before the House is simple to ask and impossible to answer:Who can fire a cabinet secretary?James Madison rises to make a motion.He is thirty-eight years old. A hundred forty pounds soaking wet. He speaks so softly that reporters lean forward to hear him. He is brilliant, but he has never seen combat. He has never led troops. He spent the Revolution in the Virginia legislature, arguing about paper while other men bled.But Madison wrote the Constitution. He wrote most of The Federalist Papers defending it. He has thought more carefully about the structure of American government than anyone alive. When Madison speaks, the room listens.His motion concerns the Department of Foreign Affairs. A department that does not yet exist. A secretary who has not been named. He is writing the job description for a position that is still an idea on paper.Madison proposes one line:He says that the secretary shall be “appointed by the president, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate; and to be removable by the president.”Four words. Nine syllables. “Removable by the president.”The room erupts in disagreement.They can see the future in that sentence. A future president. A future fight. A future Congress trying to bind a president’s hands. They are not arguing about today. They are arguing about every president and every Congress that will ever follow.And they are terrified. But not of the same thing.To understand why the room erupts, you have to understand the ghost in it. That ghost is King George III. Theodorick Bland commanded cavalry in the Revolution. James Jackson of Georgia fought at Cowpens, Augusta, Savannah. Hand to hand when it came to that. Jackson fought twenty-three duels in his lifetime. He settled disagreements with pistols. When he stood up to speak, men listened because they knew what he was capable of.Elbridge Gerry was asleep at the Menotomy Tavern on the night of April 18, 1775. The night Paul Revere rode. British troops marched past his window toward Concord. The weapons they were marching to seize were weapons Gerry had put there. His roommate during the siege of Boston was Joseph Warren. Warren died at Bunker Hill with a British bullet in his skull.On and on. The room was full of men who bled for independence. They sent their sons to bleed. They watched friends die at Brandywine, at Germantown, at the frozen hell of Valley Forge.The Declaration of Independence was thirteen years old. It was a list of crimes committed by a king who answered to no one. These men had signed it. Some had nearly died for it.Now, James Madison, who spent the war arguing about paper, stands before them and proposes giving one man the power to fire anyone in the executive branch.To some of them, it sounds like the first step toward a throne.Underneath that knife’s edge urgency, they are dueling with words while playing this game of American poker. Uncertainty. Ambiguity. They’re all fearful, but not of the same thing. One man hears “removable by the president” and sees a king. Total loyalty. Total control. Every officer knowing he serves at the president’s pleasure. Every officer afraid to disagree. William Loughton Smith of South Carolina places his bet here. He points to the Constitution: the only removal it mentions is impeachment. If you start inventing powers out of silence, you are training future presidents to do the same.Theodorick Bland of Virginia throws in chips next. He hears “removable by the president” and sees the Senate being erased. The Constitution says the president appoints “by and with the advice and consent of the Senate.” The Senate has a role. Would you let a man hire but not fire? Strip the Senate of removal, and you strip the bridle from the horse.Roger Sherman of Connecticut adds to the pot. He hears “removable by the president” and sees chaos. Drift. Officers who answer to no one because no one has clear authority. He says Congress creates these offices, Congress sets the terms, Congress can decide. The Constitution doesn’t give removal power to anyone specifically. So Congress fills the gap.And then there is Madison.Madison has watched legislatures become tyrants.State assemblies under the Articles of Confederation printed worthless money. Exposed private contracts to public violation. Trampled the rights of minorities, religious dissenters, anyone without the votes to protect themselves. In Rhode Island, the legislature printed currency to pay off debts, and the creditors fled the state.Kings were dangerous. Madison knows that. But legislatures were also dangerous. They claimed to speak for the people. They wrapped their tyranny in democratic legitimacy. And they could do it faster than any king because they did not have to pretend to be anything other than the majority.Madison fears Congress more than he fears the president.He could not foresee a Congress that would voluntarily surrender its power. A Congress that would create agencies to avoid making hard choices. A Congress that would build a government designed to answer to no one.He places a large wager. Madison bets on a weak executive fighting a strong legislature. One man against an assembly. The president needs defensive weapons just to survive. If the president cannot remove officers who defy him, you have no accountability. You get paralysis. You get officers who answer to no one. Not to the president, who cannot fire them. Not to the people, who cannot reach them.Madison says it plainly: “If any power whatsoever is in its nature executive, it is the power of appointing, overseeing, and controlling those who execute the laws.”Article II vests the executive power in the president. Not some of it. All of it. The Senate’s role in appointments is an exception, spelled out explicitly. Removal is not spelled out as an exception. Therefore, removal belongs to the president.The room considers the wager. Each man sees a different future. A king. A runaway Senate. A paralyzed executive. A tyrannical Congress. They are reading each other across the table, trying to guess which fear is the right one, knowing they cannot wait for certainty.They look at Madison’s bet. Call, or fold.The British are not leaving those forts. Spain is not opening the Mississippi. American sailors are not freeing themselves from Algiers. Foreign ministers are waiting for someone to talk to. Crises do not pause for constitutional debate.And the pressure. The government has to start. Someone has to be in charge. Someone has to be able to be fired for failing.Then, a breakthrough. A congressman trying to get the room to move on changes the language. The final bill doesn’t say the president “has” the power to remove. It does not say Congress “grants” the power to remove. It says that when a secretary “shall be removed,” certain things happen.The House votes. Madison’s side wins, but there is no consensus. The Senate splits exactly in half. Vice President John Adams casts the tie-breaking vote. The president will have the power to remove officers.They sidestepped the decision. In the end, nobody had to show their cards. The vote passed. The government started. Washington got his departments. The union held. Madison’s big wager was still on the table, waiting for the other players to call the bet.Madison’s wager was a weak executive fighting a strong legislature.He couldn’t imagine a world where Congress would want the president to be strong and unaccountable. Where Congress would lay down and give away power, and presidents would take it. Where the real threat was not a king or a legislature but a machine that ran itself, beyond the reach of elections.The cards stayed down in 1789.But then, one hundred forty-four years later, someone finally called the bet.Act II. The CallOne hundred forty-four years passed. Players left and rejoined the table. The republic grew. The question slept.Then, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called Madison’s wager.Washington, D.C., Summer, 1933. The Great Depression is strangling America. Twenty-five percent unemployment. Thirteen million people are out of work. Banks have failed by the thousands. Farmers watch their land blow away in dust storms. Families lose homes. Children go hungry.Roosevelt has been president for five months. He came to Washington with a mandate. Fix it. Whatever it takes. His New Deal is a whirlwind of agencies, programs, regulations. The federal government is expanding faster than at any time since the Civil War.The president has a problem. His name is William Humphrey.Humphrey is a commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission. He is seventy-one years old. A conservative Republican. A man who believes government should leave business alone.The FTC is supposed to protect consumers from unfair business practices. Under Humphrey, it has become a graveyard for investigations. Cases against mattress companies. Shoe manufacturers. Soap makers. Humphrey votes to dismiss them. One after another. He gives speeches calling the commission an instrument of oppression against American enterprise.Roosevelt needs the FTC to help implement the New Deal. Humphrey is blocking him.In July, Humphrey hears a rumor. The president wants him gone.He writes to Roosevelt directly. A desperate letter. Information comes to me that you are going to ask for my resignation, he writes. For what reason, I do not know. He asks for a meeting. After more than forty years of public service, being forced out would greatly injure his reputation. Humphrey believes he is doing the right thing. Roosevelt waits less than a week. Then he sends his reply.The letter is polite. But it is not subtle. You will, I know, realize that I do not feel that your mind and my mind go along together, Roosevelt writes. On the policies. On the administration of the commission. Frankly, I think it is best for the people of this country that I should have full confidence.He asks for Humphrey’s resignation.Roosevelt. Charming. Ruthless. Certain.Humphrey refuses.For two more months, they exchange letters. Roosevelt asks again. Humphrey declines again. In October, Roosevelt stops asking.Effective as of this date, he writes on October 7, 1933, you are hereby removed from the office of Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission.Twelve words. No cause given. No charges filed. Just removed.Now, on to the law. A commissioner may be removed only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office. Roosevelt did not claim any of these. He simply said their minds did not go along together.Policy disagreement is not neglect of duty. Voting against investigations is not malfeasance. Roosevelt was firing Humphrey because Humphrey was in his way.Humphrey does not go quietly.He writes to his fellow commissioners. He tells them he is still a member of the FTC. Ready and willing to exercise the powers of his office. He shows up at the next meeting. He sends a letter to the man Roosevelt nominated to replace him that there is no vacancy.Humphrey keeps coming to work. Every day. The FTC stops paying him, but he comes anyway.He files a lawsuit. He wants his job back. He wants his salary. And he wants the Supreme Court to decide whether the President of the United States can fire him.Then, on February 14, 1934, five months after his firing, William Humphrey dies. A stroke. He was seventy-one.But the lawsuit doesn’t die with him.Samuel Rathbun, his executor and the person handling his estate, keeps the case alive. He sues for back pay. For the salary the government owed Humphrey between his firing and his death.The real question is bigger than back pay. The real question is whether Roosevelt had the constitutional authority to fire him at all.This is where Madison’s wager returns to the table.Nine years earlier, in 1926, the Supreme Court had seemed to settle the matter. President Woodrow Wilson fired a Portland postmaster. The postmaster sued for his salary. The case went all the way up.Chief Justice William Howard Taft wrote the opinion. Taft was the only man in American history to serve as both president and Chief Justice. He knew something about executive power.Taft ruled overwhelmingly for the president. The Constitution vests all executive power in the president, he wrote. The power to remove is a natural part of the power to appoint. If the president cannot fire his subordinates, he cannot ensure the laws are faithfully executed.The opinion ran over seventy pages. It reached back to Madison. To the Decision of 1789. Taft declared that Madison had won. The president possesses unlimited power to remove executive officers.So when Humphrey’s case reached the Supreme Court in 1935, Roosevelt’s lawyers were confident. The president would win. End of story.Roosevelt had called Madison’s bet. Show your cards.The Court refused to show. They had one play left.Act III. The Bluff The Court heard arguments on May 1, 1935. Twenty-six days later, they announced their decision.May 27, 1935. It would become known as Black Monday. On that single day, the Supreme Court issued three unanimous decisions against Roosevelt. Justice George Sutherland wrote the opinion. Sutherland was one of the Four Horsemen, the conservative bloc trying to dismantle Roosevelt piece by piece. These justices viewed the New Deal as straight-up socialism wrapped in American flags. Sutherland did something clever. He didn’t overturn Taft’s postmaster decision. He changed the rules mid-game.A postmaster, Sutherland wrote, is a purely executive officer. He carries out the president’s orders. He belongs to the president. The president can fire him.But the Federal Trade Commission is different. Congress built it to stand apart. Not partisan. Not an arm of the president. Its commissioners write rules and judge disputes inside their own domain. They do not serve the president. They serve the law.Congress built an agency inside the executive, then tried to keep the president’s hands off its leaders. Sutherland had invented a new category. Officers who work in the executive branch but do not answer to the executive. Creatures of Congress, not creatures of the president.The Constitution, Sutherland wrote, does not give the president unlimited power of removal over such officers. They lead independent agencies.Roosevelt lost. Humphrey’s estate got its back pay. The court said Presidents can fire purely executive officers at will, but that didn’t apply to everyone in the executive branch. So…where does the executive end and these independent positions begin?The Court didn’t say. It never identified which jobs were executive officers and which were not. It left, in its own words, a field of doubt for future cases.Roosevelt was furious. Black Monday felt like a personal attack. The decisions helped trigger his attempt to pack the Supreme Court with additional justices. That plan failed. But the battle between Roosevelt and the Court reshaped American government.As for the wager Madison made in 1789? Still on the table.Humphrey’s case created a new category of government. Independent agencies. Leaders protected from presidential accountability. For ninety years, that rule held.It was a bluff dressed up as constitutional law. The question was never whether the president had the power to fire executive officers. The question was whether Congress could create officers who weren’t executive at all.Madison never imagined such a thing. Neither did his opponents. In 1789, everyone assumed the executive branch belonged to the president. They fought about removal inside the executive branch because they agreed on that much.The Supreme Court’s fight against FDR broke that assumption. A conservative court created the modern independent regulatory state. This decision became the same movement conservatives have been trying to dismantle for fifty years. It wasn’t some master plan; it was a grenade aimed at FDR that backfired spectacularly over time. Conservatives built the administrative state to block liberals. Liberals expanded it for social good. And now everyone’s mad because it’s this unaccountable behemoth.Roosevelt called. The Court bluffed. They changed the rules mid-hand and walked away from the table.It worked. For ninety years, no one challenged the bluff.Act IV. The RiverThe river card is still face down. Four cards up. One card hidden. That last card decides everything. This week, the river card is a Supreme Court case. Trump v. Slaughter.This game has been running for two hundred thirty-seven years.In 1789, Madison placed his wager. The House split. The Senate split. The last card stayed face down.In 1933, Roosevelt called the bet. He fired Humphrey and dared the Court to stop him.Then a new player sat down.The Four Horsemen looked at Madison’s bet, looked at Roosevelt’s call, and said: We’re playing a different game now. It was a bluff. But it was also a new table. And for ninety years, everyone played by the new rules.Until now.The case is Trump v. Slaughter. President Trump fired the leaders of independent agencies and said the Constitution gave him the power to do it. The agencies sued. The lower courts said he couldn’t. The Supreme Court agreed to decide.For the first time in ninety years, someone is calling the bluff. Just like FDR in 1933. But it’s more than that. Someone is saying: We’re going back to the original table. Madison’s table. The one where the cards have been face down since 1789.The river card is about to flip.Here is what we know: The Constitution says nothing about removal. Madison thought the president needed that power to survive. Chief Justice Taft agreed. The Four Horsemen didn’t. Nine decades of precedent rest on a Chief Justice’s attack on FDR.Here is what we don’t know: What the original cards actually say.Madison made his wager in 1789. He bet that Congress was the threat. He may have been right about the Constitution. He may have been wrong about the future. He could not foresee a Congress that would voluntarily surrender its power. A Congress that would build agencies to avoid making hard decisions. A Congress that would create a government that answers to no one.In 1789, the river card stayed down. Two hundred thirty-seven years later, the Supreme Court is going to flip it. Will the Court finally answer Madison’s question? Or will they find another way to leave the cards face down? Whatever they decide, the crux of this matter isn’t Donald Trump. Not Franklin Roosevelt. It’s about every future president. The same Court that just gave presidents near-blanket immunity is about to hand them the power to fire any agency head at will. Arming the next Democratic president with the exact same weapons.One day soon enough, a progressive in the Oval Office will wake up, look at the FTC, the SEC, the Fed, the NLRB, and say, “Your mind and my mind do not go along together.”It comes down to whether the Constitution means what it says. Article II. “Executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”Who can the President fire?Let’s see that river card!May God bless the United States of America.Music from Epidemic SoundArtist: Fabian TellSong: Gilly Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe