Page 26 - Just Deserts

The Decimator

the stacks of campaign material, he went on talking. “By a remarkable
chain of events, I am able to solve both of your problems at once:
what they will do, and what you can do to make it backfire. Why am
I doing this? You may call it a matter of ethnic pride, if you like;
Sunderbar is playing to some of the baser tendencies in our citizenry,
including a very intolerant ethnocentrism. I am not a personal friend
of Kalageros, but it hurts me to see him abused in that way.”
He plugged the outputs from two VCR’s into a switching box and
turned on a compact video monitor to which it was already attached.
“Now I am going to show you two tapes. One is from our
disgruntled ex-Iconoplast media expert. The other I put together
myself; it belongs to me. I own the film from which it is excerpted—
this is an important point, which you may have to defend. Crag
Sunderbar’s attempt at a coup de grâce will be five television
commercials based on clips from his old Decimator movie and its
five sequels. Iconoplast figures the people it is trying to woo away
from their traditional allegiance to your party will identify strongly
with the character he portrayed, and will therefore be extremely
susceptible to accepting associations made between the Decimator of
old and the reborn candidate—who is nothing but a demagogue and
the tool of a shadowy group of investors.”
“Sunderbar has exclusive rights to those films. You could not get
away with using an inch of them for your own purposes without
serious legal and financial consequences. That is a shame: apart from
the carefully edited glimpses the TV audience will see and remember,
those movies were full of gratuitous violence and glorified machismo.
None of that can be thrown back in his face, however. But in my role
at CinemaTech as a buyer of miscellaneous bits and pieces of
celluloid memorabilia, I routinely acquire boxes of film which I
quickly scan and file for future use. Not long ago I came across what
you must agree is a gold mine: outtakes from the Decimator series.
They had been squirreled away by a film editor in his garage for years,
and he finally decided to unload them for a few dollars. Sunderbar
does not know they exist, nor has he any recourse against their being
exhibited by anyone else. When I received the Iconoplast tape, I
simply put two and two together. Here is the result.”

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