The scene: a lavish corner office, at night, high above the sparkling lights of Manhattan. Everybody else has gone home, but one man remains. He is David Remnick, editor-in-chief of the New Yorker. He paces, chews his nails; perhaps he smokes, stubbing out on cigarette after another, filling up the ashtray.
The phone rings. Remnick answers it. “Hello?”
The voice on the other end is digitally altered. “Mr. Remnick.”
“This is he, sir.”
“George Balanchine. You know him?”
“The ballet choreographer? Yes, sir.”
“Start mentioning him in the magazine. A lot.”
Remnick furrows his brow. “But he died in 1983, sir. It might be hard to find plausible reasons to mention a rather minor cultural figure who’s been dead for 24 years.”
The voice laughs. “You’ll find a way.”
Click.
The voice need not issue any warning or threat. Remnick already knows all too well what would happen should he fail to carry out his orders. Everybody remembers what happened to Saddam, to JFK, to Mussolini, Nicholas II, and Ernst Stavro Blofeld when they dared to defy the wishes of the secret masters. Now it was Remnick’s turn to hear the music.
The secret rulers of the world appear in no headlines, no photographs. No one knows their names. But occasionally traces of their presence can be discerned. An individual may rise to power, or fall from grace. Suddenly, pirates sail from the Somali coast or a woman is trampled to death by shoppers at a suburban Long Island Wal-mart the day after Thanksgiving. From these “fingerprints,” we can deduce a portion of their plan. . .
Number of annual mentions of George Balanchine in the New Yorker:
1999: 5
2000: 3
2001: 7
2002: 5
2003: 7
2004: 9
2005: 8
2006: 4
2007: 30
2008: 28
2009: 31
2010: 31
What changed in 2007? Why did the secret masters decide that this long-dead choreographer should forthwith be mentioned so often in the New Yorker? Was it related to the founding of Sikhism, which occurred exactly 500 years before—were the two events symbionts, two stages in one plan? Or was it related to the discovery of Gliese 581 c, a potentially habitable Earth-like planet in orbit around a star in the constellation Libra, which the secret masters intend to colonize as their future home after the Earth is too ecologically devastated to support civilization? Did it have something to do with Britney Spears? We will probably never know the truth, until it’s too late—until the re-animated zombie corpse of Balanchine is elected President! And yet this too is only the first step. . .