Pushkin. Customers come to expect fast delivery of anything on Earth from Amazon, and our jobs continue to make that happen. Other big retailers are also spending a lot to keep up with the fast shipping expectations Amazon has created in a world gone haywire. Sometimes art is the only thing that can make sense of it all. Let me put it this way. We want what we want, and we want it when we want it, and usually we want
it now. That's been Fountain, the award winning author of Billy Flynn's Long Halftime Walk and most recently, Beautiful Country Burn Again, a reported narrative of the twenty sixteen presidential election. And this is the Chronicles of Now, where we ask writers to dream up short stories inspired by the news. I'm Ashley Forward. People's consumer behavior is going through a lot of changes. While some head to the stores to stock up on groceries and household items, others preferred to
stay in the safety of their homes. Amazon seeing a surge in demand as many people turn to online ordering
to get supplies. During this outbreak in the COVID nineteen era, online shopping has accelerated, and that means convoys of vans fed x ups usps have been sneaking through our neighborhoods, leaving packages to pile up on our doorsteps, mirroring our mounting fears over what's coming next, what the country, our lives, our families might look like in the years to come, what sacrifices will be asked to make for would be
autocrats around the world. Any chance to secure evermore iron fisted control of their country is a good thing, and the coronavirus pandemic is quite an opportunity. We feel like we have no control over these things. Corporate decisions, government decisions, these things that affect us on the local level and individual level, They are decided far away about powerful people who do not answer to us. And so this moment of crisis and all those delivery vans gave Bim Fountain
an idea for this week's story. There were as many trucks as ever, but now they took things away FedEx Amazon ups. They all did their part, but more often it was the boxy white Mercedes vans with the high roofs that had started showing up in the latter years of the boom. Plain white, no company name, no snappy logo on the side, which in our hyperbranded times might have briefly struck us as odd, and then they blended into the landscape of everything else. We didn't know how
good we had it, did we? It was so easy, and how quickly we became used to it. The couple of keystrokes that produced the modern miracle of that package on our doorstep in three to five days been two the next day if we were willing to pay for it. And ultimately, how did they do it? Same day packages packages, thousands and millions of packages pouring out from what were once called warehouses but now went by the name Fulfillment Center, a neat sleight of hand that appealed to our higher nature.
Supply chain magic was about so much more than crass materialism, and honestly, that's often how we felt fulfilled. In a not negligible way. I made the NonStop sales job of modern life. We were constantly being admonished not to put our faith in material things, and we tried, most of us, and mostly we succeeded. We were not shallow people. The things in our packages weren't just well things, They were how to put this content, structure, emotion, part of the
necessary human fabric of our lives. Emerging economic crisis in America. The legalities were never made entirely clear to us, but that was true of many things. Life changed so fast, so drastically, that not everything about special measures could be adequately explained in anyway. We were too frazzled and generally panicky to process more than the general drift recovery it was called, or recovery operations. The country was in crisis,
the economy imperiled, historic losses. Doubt somehow the country and the economy had become one and the same. The whole thing was really quite astonishing. The white van would pull up in front of our house at the most inconvenient time, early morning when we were hustling to get the kids off to school, or evening when we were cooking dinner or checking homework, where it's settled in at the kitchen table to grind our teeth over the ever rising stack
of bills. And there they'd be at the front door, two burly recovery techs in their dark uniforms, pants and jackets if it was winter, shorts and short sleeved shirts in summer, and always a third tech standing out by the van, watching unfailingly polite. They were soft spoken, sympathetic, and huge. The entire cadre seemingly recruited from the ranks of former college and professional football players. They had clipboards, reams of fine print paperwork, and boy did they know
their business. It was always quite specific what they'd come for, always one particular thing, a lamp, the gas grill, electronics, cookware. And this was the truly unnerving part. They knew exactly where it was. The cycle logical effect of that should not be underestimated. A giant standing in your doorway describing the color, make and model of an item in your house, and when you'd bought it from whom and for how much,
and its precise location. Shock and awe call it, And naturally we'd be standing there wondering what else they knew about us. Meanwhile, they'd gotten past the door without us really knowing. How well they'd been trained. Obviously, posture, demeanor, tone of voice. They all worked a kind of syncope
or hypnosis on us. No doubt, the great advances in data collection and behavioral science that had been used so deftly to get us to buy were now being deployed for the opposite to get us to relinquish, not covet to want less except less. We quickly learned that calling the cops was futile. They wouldn't come except to detain us as we'd resisted, become hysterical or even physical. There were rumors of occasional shootouts, but look, most of us just wanted to get on with our normal lives as
much as possible. Across the country, already struggling and out of the pain was everywhere those who could least afford it, real hardship, real suffering. The weeks and months ahead. It was there every night on the news, bendered by the government. So was it really so terrible living without those eight hundred threadcount sheets that lovely Danish modern chest of drawers. A few activists kicked up a fuss about consumer rights, but rights, as it turned out, existed only in politics.
As consumers, we were in the realm of commerce and markets, and markets, we were told, had their own immutable laws. At night, lying in bed, they hardly ever took beds, we reflected that we'd done everything that country had asked of us, but it had not been enough. We worked, paid our taxes, obeyed the laws, raised and educated our children the best we knew how, and always paid at least the minimum on our credit cards. All this, and still it had not been enough. Sacrifice and self discipline
were now the order of the day. For how long no one knew we did miss our things. Of course, some we genuinely grieved for, those few precious things that were keyed to our souls, our truest selves. Others we missed for a while, and maybe we'd rage silently at the invasion of our homes and the humiliating injustice of it all. But in time the memories faded and we
forgot them. These minor things, though even these could surface in our minds at random moments, a favorite plaid sweater they'd taken away, a classic cocktail set, and we'd feel a pang, as if these things were parts of ourselves we'd lost, not the main part. Surely weren't we bigger than that? And yet the loss that was Rules of Special Measures by Ben Fountain. The narrator was Eduardo Ballerini. Ben. One of the things that stood out to me the
conspicuously unbranded white van. It's one of those things that's creepy because it's too clean, like a Stepford wife. I like that a lot. The Stepford van, you know, come to think of it, I've never seen a dirty one, and purposely designed not to draw attention to themselves. It's like, oh, don't mind us. We don't even have a flashy logo to draw attention to ourselves. It's so terrifying you don't ask about the white van and just hope the white
van's not coming for your things. So it's almost like Russian roulette. Is the van going to stop at my house? And is it going to take away? Or is it going to deliver? And by the way, that's a great way to divide people. If it was an entire block or an entire city, people might get the notion that, hey, we can stand together and put up some meaningful resistance. But it's when it's just piecemeal that's when we're weak. The spookiest part of the story is that they know
precisely where our stuff is. Like we're talking to each other on zoom right now, and if someone was eavesdropping on this stream, they'll see precisely where some of my stuff is. Are we just stupid to let companies know so much about us? Yes, we've given too much of ourselves away in the pursuit of convenience and pleasure and instant gratification. I grew up when Sears Roebuck was the only place you sent away to get stuff and it took six to eight weeks to arrive at your house.
And talk about delayed gratification. It just seems to me, in my little moral universe, all this convenience will have to be paid for at some point. The narrator of the story is making a concerted effort to just live their life, even though strange people are showing up carting away their things. They're making accommodations to the new normal, which is a phrase we are hearing a lot these days. I feel like every day someone's talking about the new normal.
What is your story telling us about the human propensity for adaptation. Well, in this particular story, the adaptation is, Oh, just don't bother me too much, don't take too much from me, and I won't make a fuss. And I know so many people have it worse than me, you know, just don't be too hard on me, and I'll go along peacefully. And I think American society in the last forty years has become a very obedience oriented society, and it punishes you financially and in all other kinds of
ways if you don't go along. I have to say, one of the things that's really heartened me in the course of the last six weeks is the fact that a lot of people aren't going along. They're kicking up a fuss about, you know, most notably George Floyd's murder, and that is, in a appropriate fuss, an appropriate example of disobedience, and I think we need more of that spirit in our society. I'm inclined to agree with you. One line that really struck me is somehow the country
and the economy had become one and the same. Do you think that that's where we are or closer and closer to where we are in the United States? Oh, I think it's absolutely where we are. Yes, we have government, and we have neighbors who we care for, and there's love and there's altruism and all that, but ultimately it's
really all about economics. You saw this demonstrated when the closing started to happen, and people like my lieutenant governor here in Texas was basically willing to sacrifice human lives on the altar of the economy. You know, we aren't so much a country anymore in the minds of a critical mass of our city. We're an economy that happens to have a country attached, and we are taxpayers and
consumers as opposed to citizens and neighbors. And so there's been a paradigm shift in our collective thinking, and I think it's very dangerous. Do you think we can go back? Yes, I do think we can go back. I think shifting from that paradigm to a more humane and open minded and generous spirited paradigm it will probably take a massive shock to the collective system. Is this not enough? I thought two thousand and eight was going to be it, But it certainly seems like we have the ingredients of
a perfect storm for an existential crisis. That's probably what it would take for us to shake up our thinking. Ben, thank you so much for your time here today. I really really enjoyed this conversation and I've loved your story you, Ashley, has been a pleasure. You can read my full interview with Ben Fountain on our website and Chronicles dot f where you can also read Rules of Special Measures and
other short fiction torn from today's headlines. The sound designer and composer is Art Warshop, The producer is Curtis Box. The associate producer is Emily Rostick. Tyler Cabott is the executive producer and founder of Chronicles of Now for Pushkin Industries. Special thanks to Leeta Mulaud and Jacob Weisberg for the Chronicles of Now podcast. I'm Ashley Ford. Thank you so much for listening. Yeah, I'm I almost wonder if traffic's being,
for some reason rerouted onto my street because it's a lot. Oh, it's a big white van.