Marsden Swope emerged into the December chill in front of his East 125th Street apartment and breathed deeply, trying to rid his lungs of the dead air of his basement studio. Following the protest of the previous afternoon, he felt energized. Ever since — for eighteen hours straight — Swope had been sitting at his old Gateway computer, blogging, tweeting, Facebooking, Instagramming, and emailing. It was astonishing, he thought, how one modest idea could snowball into something so big in such a short period of time. The world was hungry for what he had to offer. How strange this felt — after all his years of laboring in obscurity and poverty.
He took several more deep breaths. He felt light-headed, not just from staring at a computer screen for so long, but also because he hadn’t eaten in two days. He felt no hunger, but he knew he had to eat something to keep going; while his spirit was nourished, his body was running on empty.
Out on the sidewalk, in the bright, cold winter light, cars rushed by, heedless people going about their meaningless business. He walked down to Broadway and crossed it, passing under the elevated tracks as a train rumbled overhead, clacking and thundering on its way northward, then he angled toward the McDonald’s on the corner of 125th and Broadway.
The place was occupied with the usual derelicts trying to escape the cold by nursing a cup of coffee and the inevitable group of Asian guys playing cards. He paused: here were the very invisibles, the poor, who had been trodden upon, crushed, and ground into the dirt by the rich and powerful of this fallen city. Soon, very soon, their lives would change…thanks to him.
But not quite yet. He went to the counter and ordered two dozen Chicken McNuggets and a chocolate milk jug, collected his order, and took it to a table. He might as well have been invisible: nobody knew him, nobody looked at him. And to be sure, there wasn’t much to look at — a small man in his fifties with thinning gray hair, a close-cropped beard, skinny and undernourished, dressed in a brown Salvation Army down jacket, slacks, and secondhand shoes.
Formerly a Jesuit priest, Swope had left the Society of Jesus ten years earlier. This was to avoid being expelled, mostly due to his highly vocal disgust with the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church regarding all the money and property it had accumulated over the centuries, in direct contradiction to Jesus’s teachings on poverty. As a Jesuit he had taken a vow of poverty, but what a contrast that was with the obscene riches of the church. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God” was, in his mind, the clearest statement Jesus ever made in his time on earth, and yet — as he had expressed many times to his superiors, much to their displeasure — it was the one universally ignored by many so-called Christians.
But not now. No longer were the downtrodden going to take this. The answer wasn’t an outer revolution, the kind espoused by so many others who had suddenly begun protesting. Nothing would ever change humanity’s greed. No, what Swope was calling for was an internal revolution. You couldn’t change the greed of the world but you could change yourself, make a commitment to poverty and simplicity and rejecting the vanities.
And so he had left under a cloud and continued his lonely crusade online, railing against money, wealth, and privilege. He had been a voice in the wilderness — until he joined that demonstration, on a whim. And as he talked to folks, and marched, and talked some more, he realized he had finally found his people and his calling.
Only two days ago, while reading about the Decapitator killings in the New York Post, he had an idea. He would organize a bonfire. A symbolic bonfire, like the one put on by the monk Savonarola in the central square of Florence on February 7, 1497. On that date, thousands of Florentine citizens had answered Savonarola’s call to bring into the great piazza items of vanity and greed, pile them up, and burn them in a symbolic cleansing of their souls. And the citizenry had responded with enormous enthusiasm, flinging on cosmetics, mirrors, obscene books, playing cards, rich clothes, frivolous paintings, and other manifestations of worldly greed, then setting them alight in a gigantic “bonfire of the vanities.”
And then, as if on cue, he had heard about the demonstration on social media, joined it, and it had crystallized all his previous thoughts and ideas around that one idea: a twenty-first-century bonfire of the vanities. And what better place to do it than New York City, the Florence of the modern world, the city of billionaires and bums, the richest and the poorest, the midnight playground of the rich and the midnight pit of despair of the poor.
And so the ex-Jesuit, Marsden Swope, had put out a modest appeal on social media to everyone out there fed up with the materialism, narcissism, greed, selfishness, inequality, and spiritual emptiness of our modern society. He had invited them to attend this new bonfire of the vanities, to take place somewhere in New York City. So as to confuse and confound the authorities, the actual place and date of the bonfire, he wrote, would be kept secret until the very last minute. But it would take place in a public arena, a very public area, and it would happen so quickly the authorities would not have time to stop it. His readers, followers, should prepare themselves and await his instructions.
The idea, Swope wrote, came from the brutal killings of the Decapitator. Here was a person who pretended to recognize the evil in our modern world. If you believed in Satan (and there was much evidence to support that belief), you understood that the Decapitator was actually Satan’s servant. He was capitalizing on the predatory evil of the one percenters and their corporate henchmen to spread more evil. The Decapitator had set himself up in judgment as God himself, the ultimate blasphemy. He was an agent that would deflect the faithful from their real duty, which was to ask forgiveness, seek to purify themselves, to take the beam out of their own eye before trying to remove the mote from their brother’s. Those other protestors, the ones calling for the destruction of the rich, were as much Satan’s servants as the rich themselves. No, you don’t destroy the rich — you do as Jesus did, and convert them.
To that end, Swope was offering a bonfire of expiation. He asked everyone who wished to attend to bring something symbolic to be burned, something that represented to them the evil they wished to expunge in themselves. It should be an emblem of the purification each wished to undergo, the atonement they hoped to achieve, the penance they wanted to earn.
His modest postings had hit a nerve. At first, there was almost no response. And then there were a few retweets and a scattering of Facebook shares. Suddenly, like a rocket, it took off. Boy, oh boy, had the message gone viral. For eighteen hours straight, his computer had been pinging nonstop with posts and likes and responses to his appeal: hundreds of thousands. People were captivated. They yearned to purify themselves, to shed the dreck of materialism and greed. Thousands and thousands had posted pictures of the things they’d chosen for his bonfire of the vanities. It was astonishing, truly, how people in the tristate area had responded. They were all awaiting his announcement of where and when.
The last Chicken McNugget disappeared into his mouth and he chewed slowly and thoughtfully, barely tasting it. He drained the chocolate milk jug. His bodily needs taken care of, he cleared his table, dumped the refuse, and headed out the door and into the bitter December cold, back down 125th Street to his basement studio and his ancient PC.
There, he would continue rallying the city to his cause.