Who is Missing the President?

Anderson Valley Advertiser News Service…

An arrest warrant has been filed by the U. S. Department of Justice for American organist and music historian David Yearsley, long-time columnist for the radical Northern California weekly the Anderson Valley Advertiser, as well as for the leftist website, CounterPunch. After being subpoenaed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Yearsley found himself at the center of new developments in the ongoing Russia probe having to do with his alleged role in sabotaging the blockbuster thriller, The President is Missing, written by former U. S. President Bill Clinton and the world’s richest author, James Patterson.

Before dawn on Wednesday special agents of the Department of Justice’s Arts & Leisure Division entered Yearsley’s home in Ithaca, New York in hopes of seizing his laptop, mobile phone, sheet music, and clavichord—an eighteenth-century keyboard instrument popular among the Bach family whose musical works make up an important theme of the blockbuster novel now wracked by controversy. Bach’s music is said to be crucial to Mueller’s inquiry.

However, the raid brought few if any results, admitted Claude Raines, head of the DOJ’s Literary Espionage unit. Raines told a hastily convened press conference that, “We have come to believe that Yearsley played a vital part in helping a Russian-sponsored ghostwriter infiltrate the Clinton-Patterson organization in an attempt to make this important novel far worse than it already was. It seems that Yearsley used the Russian ghostwriter to funnel in bogus Bach research right to the top of the book’s organization in an initiative carefully planned by the SVR [Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service] and code-named Operation Phiction. The idea was that the Bach bits would seem so blatantly the work of a ghostwriter so as to sap all credibility of Clinton and Patterson as legitimate novelists in their own right.”

Kenneith Psmith, a spokesman for the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, appeared on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show last night arguing that, “If the allegations against Yearsley indeed prove to be true, as we suspect they will, this would count as a grave assault on American democracy and the New York Times’ Best Seller List. It would be the most troubling incursion into American letters since the Chinese hacked Dan Brown’s Kindle at Yaddo back in 2012.” Meanwhile, Yearsley attorney, Zack Anderson, told Sean Hannity of Fox News, “Admittedly, my client has low literary standards, but even he wouldn’t dance to the Clintonite drum.”

Yearsley had apparently fled Upstate New York last week directly after Mueller issued his subpoena. The suspect cleared out his residence and drove west along I-90. At his press conference Raines showed a PDF of what appeared to be a receipt signed by Yearsley for a Mocha Frappé at a McDonald’s in Bismark, North Dakota. Yearsley continued on to Seattle where he took a flight to Europe. Several eyewitnesses sighted him at SeaTac international airport, claiming he stood out among the crowds of travelers because he was wearing a straw hat and carrying a light blue cello case.  Under an assumed name he seems to have played an organ concert on Thursday evening European time in the Danish coastal city of Helsingör, fabled site of Hamlet’s Castle and of the church where Dieterich Buxtehude was once organist.  That Buxtehude was a one-time teacher of Bach was itself possibly incriminating, claimed Mr. Raines.

Armed with assault weapons and an international arrest warrant known as a Red Paper, Interpol officers raided the beer and cheese reception after the concert, but Yearsley had apparently been tipped off and escaped the organ loft with aid of a rope strung from the belfry. He then stole a bicycle and pedaled thirty miles south to Copenhagen where surveillance cameras recorded him disappearing into the Ecuadoran Embassy shortly before 2a.m. European Daylight Savings Time this morning.

Yearsley’s name first came to the attention of federal authorities because of his forthcoming book, Sex, Death, and Minuets: Anna Magdalena Bach and Her Musical Notebooks. The Clinton-Patterson book features a Serbian-born assassin called Catherina Dorothea, the name of Johann Sebastian Bach’s eldest child. This highly-trained and remorseless killer is referred to as “Bach” by her terrorist clients. She wears a shiny bodysuit that shows off her breasts, referred to in the book as “her girls” and calls her high-tech matte black sniper’s rifle “Anna Magdalena,” the name of Johann Sebastian Bach’s second wife. While on the job the assassin listens to recordings of Bach’s music played by her brother Wilhelm Friedemann.  In the climactic scene at a rural Virginian hideout she chooses an aria from a Bach cantata whose text in translation runs, “I swiftly end my earthly life; I long at this time to depart with joy.” As the moment of truth approaches still closer, she clicks on a movement from the St. Matthew Passion.

According to sources within the Mueller investigation, it is believed that the Russians planted a ghost writer named Denise Rodmanova in the Clinton-Patterson organization.  Investigators were led to her because she was apparently in the same Suzuki violin class with Chelsea Clinton in Little Rock in the 1980s. Rodmanova was hired for the President is Missing after receiving an MFA in Very Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas.  The global violin method founded by the famed Japanese pedagogue, Dr. Shinichi Suzuki, also makes a veiled appearance in the novel where it is introduced to explain part of the childhood trauma of the assassin.  Suzuki International condemned the characterization of it soon after the publication of the blockbuster and the group continues to threaten legal action against the publisher, Little, Brown and Knopf.

Mikey Spillane, Jr., Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and expert on literary spying offered context for these latest developments. “Those of us who have been paying attention to these matters, have long known that the Russians have been planting trolls, spooks, and ghostwriters throughout the major Hollywood talent agencies and studios, as well as in leading magazines, blogs, and best-selling book fiction.” Indeed, there has not been this much talk of literary double and triple agents since the days of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Hollywood Ten and HUAC. In the aftermath of recent disclosures and the hunt for Yearsley, former FBI Director James Comey reportedly purged his whole team of writers working on the screenplay version of his recent book, A Higher Loyalty. Tom Cruise has optioned the property, reportedly to be filmed under the title Loyalty for Hire. The diminutive star is also set to play the lank Comey on the big screen.

In his work as columnist for the AVA and CounterPunch, Yearsley has relentlessly attacked what he has called the “sonic misdeeds, both military and political, of Clintons, Bushes, Obamas, and Trumps.” Yearsley’s lawyer, Anderson said, “Not only have the Clintons now weaponized Bach, but they have criminalized critique.”

From within the Ecuadoran Embassy Yearsley issued this statement earlier today:

“No, I wasn’t the Bach errand boy for the Clinton and Patterson headliners. Their people did come calling, but I was already committed to a foraging cookbook with Bernie Saunders called Vermont Greens: Bitter Leaves and Better Lives for All (signed copies now available through our website 2020visionforsustainablesoupandsaladsolutions.com—for $9.99 coupon off the cover price of $79.99 type in RUN BERNIE RUN when you order your copy now!). The only bit of Bachiana in our book, one that I have legitimately, and, I hasten to add, without the help of ghost writers, co-authored with Mr. Saunders, is in the winking reference we threw into our recipe for Woodland Sorrel Single-Payer Salad about this dish being ‘ticklish on the fork’–a turn of phrase plucked tenderly from a bawdy romp by old Johann called the Quodlibet (BWV 524). And no, I am not a Russian agent, even though all I’ve been doing the last couple of weeks is Rushin’ around to get the OHS, NSA, ATF, CIA, FBI and AGO off my back—and off my Bach, too!”

Kremlin spokesman, Leon Googlev responded to the allegations of Russian interference in the President is Missing by saying, “If the American literary and security establishment wants to give us credit for helping flesh out, as it were, the best character in a shit novel, a book supposedly written by a draft-dodging ex-president and the richest hack in the history of the printed word that serves up dangerous terror-fighting fantasies in the foolishly fictional person of an ex-Army Ranger and Iraqi POW as U.S. Commander and Chief gone rogue, we’re more than happy to oblige, even while we vociferously object to having that same character shoulder and caress a big black, phallic death toy of a sniper’s rifle that is the very symbol of a phallic impotence.”

DAVID YEARSLEY is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest book is Sex, Death, and Minuets: Anna Magdalena Bach and Her Musical NotebooksHe can be reached at  dgyearsley@gmail.com