A burly, simple, luckier-than-smart man, Mack Fowler, born in 1954, had made a minor fortune in Texas oil during the 1970s and 1980s, and put much of it back into real estate, with a massive ranch intended to be his primary legacy. He and Mae had four daughters in a row (Kayla, Hayley, Molly, Jenna) with Mack getting increasingly desperate after each one, hoping for a son to take over the ranch at some point. He finally had a son, Jerritt, in 1998.
The household went together to church on Sundays, to a rural Baptist congregation that numbered about 200 over the space of 40 square miles. He was as tough and uncompromising a parent as he had been in business. All of them worked to help their daddy with the farming equipment and livestock, but Jerritt was Mack’s pride and joy, and he spared the boy from his fearsome temper, which was borne chiefly by Mae and the girls. But they had opportunities for travel to larger cities, and to other countries, due to Mack’s business efforts.
As the girls aged out of their wide-eyed good-natured conservative upbringing, each girl in turn went to college. The twins Kayla and Hayley ended up shifting to the left sharply when they both went to the University of Texas, and in response Mack forbade his next two girls from going there, stating that Austin was a liberal cesspool. Molly went to Texas State instead, and ended up leading an informal student socialist group. Mack, unable to cope with the mounting family discord, finally coerced Jenna to attend a small, private Christian university where he felt he could keep an eye on her. Through it all, Jerritt remained Mack’s golden boy – he could be counted on to be even more right-wing than his father, he tormented and pranked his older sisters, baited them into arguing with him about politics, and he was all too happy to accompany Jenna to the same private college to continue it. Jenna had become a vegetarian, a card-carrying PETA member, and loathed all the experiences she had had helping with slaughtering livestock and preparing meat at home. As Jerritt was still a hardcore carnivore, he could get under Jenna’s skin very easily.
Jerritt was a middling high school student, and a bit worse than middling as a newly minted college student, but had a talent for brazen self-promotion and weaselly fact-stretching. In his first year, Jerritt had not declared a major and had taken only general core courses, and then met his counselor with little preparation, as though choosing a path that pleased him was a mere formality. The counselor had met with Jerritt before and was not impressed with his skate-by work ethic.
In that meeting, he had started by cockily asking if he was going to be able to do pre-law, as if he was surprised they hadn't asked him already.
The counselor raised both his eyebrows in amused surprise. “Yes, you can do it here, and it’s a very good program – but you’re going to have study a lot harder than you’ve done so far. The GPA does matter for that. If you want to take a few more core courses and nail it with a 4.0, we could maybe get you started on that path next year.”
Jerritt stroked his burgeoning beard hairs as he pondered the suggestion. “OK, what about engineering? What kind takes the least math and least computer stuff?”
“There is not yet an established engineering school, but we offer many technical majors. There are great chemistry and applied mathematics programs here. However, I would urge you to consider if you really want to take that route based on the fact that you don’t like math so much.”
Jerritt had derisively shrugged off the advice. “I’ll think about it.”
Jerritt did not think much about it.
Fortunately for his college career, he had a kindred spirit with Dr. Gower, the econ 101 lecturer, a slow-speaking neo-monetarist whose worldview aligned well with Jerritt’s. After the first office hours session, Jerritt reckoned he wanted to be an economist and tell people how the global financial system worked. A profound inability to understand calculus stood in the way of becoming an economist, he later was told – but he made his way through a business major with some effort.
At 22 years of age, in his final year of university, Jerritt took a position as a marketing intern at Pinnacle Foods, one of the largest vertically integrated food companies in the world, with origins in meat processing, based out of Omaha, Nebraska. He had leaned on his dad’s contacts to get the job, but it was a perfect culture fit.
Pinnacle had looked at the efforts of competitors to develop plant-based meat substitutes and decided that it was a fad doomed to fail. The company was deeply conservative and felt that traditional meat products needed to be defended and rebranded, and they could usefully exaggerate efforts at legislating against meat consumption at the federal level in order to discredit alternatives – perhaps even create a popular groundswell in favor of literal subsidies for meat producers. In the marketing department, Jerritt was tapped to use social media to break down any arguments against beef and pork being made by health experts, climate scientists, and animal rights groups. It was an astonishingly successful effort for Jerritt, whose particularly acerbic Twitter posts became legendary among corporate competitors, and he drove tremendous engagement by Pinnacle’s standards. They wanted him to make meat a political statement and position them to benefit from the polarization, and he was very experienced doing that in his own family.
But even at Pinnacle, Jerritt’s naïve Western chauvinist outlook was starting to chafe on his boss Reggie. On the last workday before he had plunged his truck into the river, there had been a minor argument after he asked for the dozenth time if he could get an India-focused gig.
Jerritt had started to get defensive. “There’s a BILLION people there, and there’s NO beef market! They buy our Harleys, they buy Jack Daniels – but Pinnacle does not sell one pound of beef there! What are you going to do about it? I thought we were a BUSINESS here!”
Reggie grabbed the bridge of his nose in exasperation. “Jerritt, for the last time. We’re not sending you to India! They have a strong belief against eating beef. You go there and try to take down a village cow, you’re going to end up stoned by a mob.”
Jerritt shook his head. “I can convince anyone to eat anything that tastes good. Individualism is sexy. Taking from the Earth what is yours is good for everyone worldwide, it’s just a question of marketing it right!”
“Okay, you’ve got a dog right?”
Jerritt frowned. “What’s that got to do with it?”
Reggie smiled. “So that’s livestock right? Are you going to slaughter and eat it?”
“Hell no!”
Laughing, his boss responded, “They do in parts of Asia – why aren’t Americans eating dog and why aren’t we selling it? Do you see how that works?”
Jerritt did not take the point. Cows and pigs were meat, dogs and horses were companions – it should be that way everywhere, he reasoned. Koreans and Chinese people who slaughtered dogs, Mexicans who slaughtered horses – they were just living wrongly. But he let the argument drop – he couldn’t convince everyone all at once, but he would do it over time. He had plenty of time to get there.
Jerritt left the office that afternoon and headed back home eager for a cold beer and the chance to do some side-trolling on Tiktok and Twitter. Maybe some work on his truck before he took it on a road trip this weekend. It was such a nice summer.