Solidly set and running smoothly with an economic and intellectual infrastructure that included millions of American citizens, talents ready, workers inside of the government institutions, an ant hill existed below the fruited plains that arose to save the most powerful country in the world.
All this without a single bureaucrat lifting a finger, without a solitary politician casting a vote.
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This is one chapter to a book I am currently writing. It’s due to be a blockbuster so read it while it is written, and enjoy.
Chapters published linked below, or click on “Clarion Call” under labels on the side bar.
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TO CHAPTER ONE
Chapter 2-Saving a Dying Child
Just as soon as I heard Betty Miller’s stepson by her third husband LeRoy whisper that he planned to murder Betty, I was alarmed. I knew, yon reader must understand, that Betty was not, indeed, dead. And if Joey the stepson planned to murder her BEFORE he thought she died, wouldn’t he murder her for real once he found out Betty was really alive?
I am a bit vague on the details of how Betty planned to “return” to the living, whether by sudden pronouncement at some point during all the funeral doings or surprise at a family event. But Betty very much wanted to live and now I’ve got to tell her about a plot to murder her should she come back from the dead.
Betty’s fake funeral became, as I remember with a bit of mirth, a hilarious episode in things unplanned. For sure I learned how to handle the unexpected with aplomb due to Betty’s fake funeral and my many other experiences with Clarion Call.
Obviously Rita messed up by allowing Betty’s dog to come into the funeral home. Or was it Josie, the mistress of disguise?
Because Betty’s dog sure knew Betty despite her disguise as Wendy Bain. Betty tried to push the dog away so no one would get suspicious as to why this Chihuahua was so enamored to this particular funeral home guest. It was Ellen, smooth as silk, who plopped down a bowl of cole slaw slick as snot on a door knob and whisked the pup off of the floor with the other hand.
“Come on sport,” Ellen said, calming the struggling dog. “No dogs in funeral homes.”
Turns out Betty herself let the dog in as she had it on a chain on the portico. The dog got loose somehow and went looking for Betty. You’d think a person pretending to be a corpse would have enough sense to leave a beloved dog behind that wouldn’t understand silly disguises.
Such as errant dogs were small matter to experienced Clarion Call contractors. There are tales of contractors saving lives, rescuing children, spotting crimes and, in one unverified but famous anecdote, actually witnessing an assassination. Yes, across the fruited plains there were millions of CC contractors that could handle any exigency with aplomb and grace.
“There’s a big problem,” I whispered to Ellen just as soon as I could get her attention. I asked Ellen if she knew how Betty planned to announce the fact that she was alive. Ellen shrugged. That action was not under the purview of Clarion Call and she cared not when or how it happened.
I told Ellen what I heard, that Betty’s stepson had planned on murdering Betty before she died on her own. “If he planned on murdering her then, he’d probably try to murder her again if she came back to life.” At some point I realized how absurd my words sounded referencing dying and coming back to life as if it were a most normal thing.
Ellen stood straight up and arched her back as if removing kinks. “Wow. I mean, well only you heard it, right?” I pointed out to Ellen that myself AND Joe Stepson’s mother heard the murder plan.
“Yeah, I know that,” Ellen shook off my clarification and rubbed her neck to banish more kinks. “But his mother would deny it most likely. Besides, it’s a statement he made, there’s no proof he would have done it? He’s probably joking around. He’d never get arrested for such a thing.”
Well Ellen certainly had a point. I supposed the only thing I could do was tell Betty what I heard as a kind of warning that she should keep a sharp eye on that stepson .
I was pondering just how I should broach Betty on this subject as I organized the many containers in the funeral home fridge. It seemed kind of gruesome to be eating in a funeral home but Rita knew her stuff. Brown’s Mortuary was a class act, a two winged building with a low but sophisticated building profile. I was in the small kitchen area used to store luncheon supplies. Most banquet type events were catered. But baby’s milk and condiments must be stored somewhere so I was busy trying to sort it all when I heard Joe Stepson’s voice. I quick closed the fridge door and slid behind a potted palm plant.
“I was going to shoot her, Ma, pure and simple. I know full well she caused Dad’s death. I found her hiding his medicines, flushing them down the toilet. Dad’s death was a surprise to everyone, including his doctors. “
From behind the plant I heard the thump of something slammed on a table. Then the sound of chairs sliding and I stifled a groan. They were going to sit down and talk. The potted plant wasn’t all that wide and I’m sure my hips stood out from the sides. It was only because the plant was wedged at an awkward angle next to the refrigerator that they didn’t see me.
“Joey,” his mother said with a deprecating drawl, “your father had diabetes really bad and his father died young. Betty’s rich, why would she bother murdering LeRoy?”
I supposed that Joe’s mother had once been married to Betty’s deceased husband LERoy but she could have been da baby mama in modernspeak.
From my hidden perch behind the plant I heard some movement that sounded like paper being shuffled, there was a pause.
“Cause she hated him, Ma. SHE was trying to kill him. She didn’t want getting any money from the divorce, he was a pain….I caught her, Ma! I caught her trying to shoot Dad. She told me she heard noises and thought Dad was asleep and that a burglar gained entry. She had the gun in her hand, Ma! She was right outside his bedroom door with a gun in her hand.”
The shuffling paper I’d heard earlier was evidently trash in that before I could hide more effectively there was Joey the Stepson standing right in front of me, regarding my flimsy hiding place of the potted plant.
“What on earth are you doing there?” Joey asked me.
I did the only thing I could. I pretended to be Mexican.
With an abundance of hand and arm gestures, I began speaking a Hispanic-accented English, explaining about dirt behind refrigerators and how getting caught eavesdropping on funeral home attendees would get me fired.
Joey shrugged and moved aside to allow me exit. He promised not to tell the owners on me and asked how much of what I heard did I understand.
“Nada,” I said, about the only Spanish I know.
My impromptu transformation into someone else is the sort of talent Clarion Call contractors are expected to have.
It was a bit of a tangle, this murder plot then unfolding, with fake funeral corpse Betty Miller supposedly about to murder her third husband LeRoy with his son seeking revenge by murdering her.
I found my friend Ellen and breathlessly told her what I heard, how Betty Miller might be a murderess and when she comes back to life, as was her plan, she would be a possible victim of an angry stepson.
It was not easy. Of course Betty denied ever going after her husband LeRoy with a gun and she could not believe her stepson Joey was out to murder her.
This was not all of the disconcerting information Betty learned of during her stint as a corpse. She learned that her beloved stepdaughter was filled with joy over Betty’s supposed death. Betty’s alter-ego attendee at her funeral overheard her stepdaughter bragging on her cell phone how she would soon be rich, that her stepmother had died, that she was sure to be coming into a lot of her money.
The worst thing that happened was the death of Betty’s mother. Indeed the poor elderly woman suddenly collapsed during a prayer service for Betty that she may go to heaven. Understand that Betty’s mother was very ill and expected to die any day with her massive COPD and diabetes. Indeed the woman ported around a huge oxygen tank and all knew her days were numbered. We all thought Betty should have waited until her mother was gone to her rest with her beloved husband but Betty was planning a trip to Europe right after her funeral and she was anxious to have an excuse to be gone so long. Being dead is a good excuse for not being around much.
With the help of even more grass roots talented contractors from Clarion Call we managed to help Betty escape to a new life, with a new identity. We also got experts in real estate, powers of attorney, finances, and arranged to pack up and sell Betty’s house. It was very astounding how easily all of this got done, from fake funeral for Betty, to real funeral for her mother, to arranging a new identity to caring for personal real estate and wealth.
Neither Betty’s stepdaughter or stepson got a dime from their dead stepmother, mostly because she was still alive. Because Betty’s mother died AFTER Betty, so to speak, the Harper hardware store money was distributed to a local pet rescue organization. Turned out Betty did NOT have power of attorney over her mother’s money like she’d told so many. All Betty got was the proceeds from the sale of the real estate and what money she had accumulated over the years. Betty Miller was not poor by any means, but her fake funeral was not quite the experience she thought it would be. For whatever reason (and I do think Betty tried to kill her third husband) Betty decided to go off on her own with some guy she met over the Internet. She did not “come back to life”, but slunk off quietly, likely regretting that stupid stunt as much as anything she’d ever done.
With the help of Clarion Call Betty managed to get through the disaster of her fake funeral. Clarion Call would probably-if a corporation could have feelings- preferred that Betty’s fake funeral experience had gone better. But when she needed additional services of all kinds, CC once again stepped up and provided solutions.
Betty’s story is just one of millions but it’s a good example of how Clarion Call is used to use the offered (for money, of course) talents of many across these fruited plains, from fake funeral through to fake life.
Many of yon readers might know the story of the little 10 year old, Sherry Morton, who needed a new lung for the cystic fibrosis which was killing her. At age 10, the head of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius at the time, declared, a bit cavalierly, that “some of us die and some of us live.”
Understand that Clarion Call is not a big group of any one occupation. It is not a law office but plenty seek the aid of legal help via CC. It is not a public relations outfit but again, CC is often called should one be needed. Clarion Call is not an event planner organization or a place to hire ghost writers or a place for building contractors to promote their wares. Like Amazon and Google and the big online sites, it’s a large organization filled with people all across the country that will, for the right fee, do whatever is legally requested.
Clarion Call ended up providing public relations experts for the story of a young and dying Sherry Morton. In fact, folks all over the country were chomping at the bit to get involved with the sad human relations story of a young child denied lungs for no other reason but her age. Doctors assured the American public that they can now re-size adult lungs to fit in a child, that the restriction on adult lungs for children was from another era, an era when adjusting the donated tissue to fit a small chest was not possible.
Not that there were not plenty of established PR firms willing to take on the job of providing media exposure for little Sherry Morton. She was a PR expert’s dream case, a child begrudged the very act of living by a dreaded government bureaucrat. It was every American’s secret nightmare, particularly after the passage of Obamacare.
It is appropriate here to stop and wax on about Clarion Call and its political leanings. We stop for a thought pause because, it is important to establish early on, that Clarion Call had NO political leanings of any kind. Clarion Call, a publicly traded stock with a proper Board of Directors, contributed to both Democratic and Republican campaigns, it cared not who was President save laws enacted and the effect on the corporation. Indeed CC’s Board of Directors included many appointees from President Obama himself, as well as many who came on board from the George W. Bush administration.
The awkward honesty of it is that Obamacare was but another opportunity for Clarion Call to fill its coffers for the opportunities presented to those who made themselves experts on the new legislation, not to mention the many who saw opportunities within the law itself, such as advising the common folk on how to work with the IRS.
Yon readers might remember that along about the time that Obamacare was being enacted that the IRS was involved in a big scandal that included giving applicants for 503© corporations a hard time in retaliation for the liberal loss on this issue via the Supreme Court ruling of “Citizens United”.
The IRS scandal and Obamacare came to a head at about the same time and were major in the collapse of the unbearable bureaucracy. This is not my opinion; it’s fact, it’s now history.
At this point, as I ponder being appointed such a weighty non-paying title as “The People’s Scribe”, that it’s time to clarify that bit about Clarion Call not having a political ideology. Of course a corporation tends to have an ideology, a corporate culture of sorts. The leaders of most corporations tend to set these standards as well as hire employees of the same political/ideological bent. Thus Google is peopled with pajama blogger laid back types while Merle Lynch is filled with suits and stylish ties.
Clarion Call was peopled with millions of Americans, Americans of all stripes, of all talents, of all colors, of all descents. Hispanic members of CC were plentiful for there was always a grass roots needs for linguists. This a reflection, perhaps, of the pervasiveness of the immigration issue of the time, another issue that helped with the collapse of the American system.
If ever a human being had a need to be filled, and if ever another human being had a talent to fill that need, these were the human beings contracting with Clarion Call and that includes, frankly, most of the human beings on the planet. For sure it includes Americans, God Blesses Them, a group of people who have large swaths of things in common but for all, they share the life of Americans and they like it that way.
So all of the contractors and sub-contractors of Clarion Call had in common were that they were human beings.
Heh.
Still and so, it was enough because human beings , like all living things, want mostly to, well just to live, we can start there. The collapse of the bureaucracy caused us to fear for our lives. We reacted for that reason, nothing less.
We return to the story of little Sherry Morton, not just because it’s a good story on how Clarion Call works on so many levels, but also because it was Sherry Morton’s story that began to coalesce the restless grass roots of human beings across the country. We stopped to remind, as I (AKA “we”) must do to pound the truth into former mainstream media-mushed brains, the truth as regards Clarion Call. History based on lies is not a good thing.
The inclusion here is to remind reader that Clarion Call only had a political ideology in the more vague terms of the employee-contractors, that events of the era caused a CC reaction so fluidly and smoothly executed because of the commonality of their human-ness.
There was, of course, also that video that rocked with the world as the truth of it all filled the air waves and shocked listening ears.
Truth, unvarnished, all told in one twenty three minute rant, filled the sound waves across the fruited plains and reaction was inevitable and immediate.
There were plenty of lawyer types that approached Sherry Morton’s mother, Marianne Morton. Many are well-known celebrity attorneys that go after any kind of fame. But Marianne Morton wasn’t looking for fame nor was she looking for money. She wanted her daughter to receive one of the many available adult lungs so the child could live. She wanted someone from Clarion Call to help her with the politics, dynamics and social effects of it all.
It was a slam dunk photo opportunity moment and you will all remember that Sherry’s lungs were deteriorating at a rate concurrent with the growth of America’s first attempt at socialized medicine, once called Obamacare.
There was the child, fitted with oxygen tanks and struggling to breathe. Her mother stood alongside her bedside, telling the camera the struggles of a child with Cystic Fibrosis, how adult lungs can now be re-sized to fit a child’s chest cavity, that the restriction of adult lungs only to those over 12 years of age was from an earlier, less-technological medical era.
Marianne Morton was right, of course. The wheels of a bureaucracy turn slow; we were used to these wheels across these fruited plains as local municipalities and counties dealt with land growth and use, building codes, and the million minutiae facts of life that require law or oversight of some kind, mostly on a local level.
But we accepted these local bureaucracies as they were fairly small fiefdoms, we had the ability to befriend the local bureaucrats, we were okay with some government restriction and slowness to have boundaries respected and buildings do not fall down. The concept of a bureaucratic turtle-motioned, unyielding bureaucracy to deal with such urgent matters of life and death was as impracticable as possible. Marianne Morton was the first in an onslaught of examples that scared the hell out of everyone across the fruited plains. Suppose the bureaucracy held back available care for our own sick children, our ageing parents, ourselves?
From the many contributions given for Sherry Morton, her mother was able to hire Clarion Call to handle the entire situation. This created a victory so much more dear than any temporary squalid spotlight on the likes of Gloria Allred.
With all due respect, insert wink here.
Clarion Call found locals near the Mortons who arranged for medical care, chauffeurs to the hospital, caretakers for Sherry’s young brother, public relations experts to handle it all, doctors to handle the public relations, lawyers to take it to court and on and on and on.
With benefit of local expertise the Mortons were helped by their fellow Americans by a low-profile and sophisticated fund-raising campaign ran by an up-and-coming local preacher who just established a major church in the area.
No one could deny it worked. A judge overturned Sebelius’ edict that Sherry be one of the ones “who die”. Story is that money changed hands, that the administration wanted this story out of the headlines. Which is likely true but again, with emphasis, Clarion Call never got involved with anything illegal. The company was great at pointing out paths to such activities but one of the corporate rules is to perform your assignment as if a camera were recording you at all times, both video and audio.
Sherry got an adult lung and several other children too moved up in the line in front of 60-year-old adults with smoked-damaged lungs. They tried so hard to find something wrong with how Clarion Call handled Sherry Morton’s case but no one could. Something had to be done. Clarion Call did it.
Something happened with the Morton case, however. Something besides Clarion Call’s rise to international fame, of course, which did happen as we all know. The Morton case illustrated, on a small but powerful level, just how much a determined and dedicated group of Americans can be to get the job done.
No one was paying much attention at the time. Like Google, “CC” became a common appellation, spawning many smaller businesses trying to do the same sort of thing. Problem was, Clarion Call was effective ONLY because of its national and international level.
The time had come to implement law using the technology available but it took a collapse of major proportions to make it happen.
Sometimes, most times, that’s how major changes come about.
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