Sterling A. Varice

Sterling A. Varice is Main Street Independent’s satirical capital-supremacy voice — the monster the masthead wrote in order to oppose. He is a patrician of sixty-some years, lean and silver-haired, the heir to two extraction regimes braided together, who has read his Cato, his Hammond, and his Stringfellow and cites them as living advisors. He regards the worker not with hatred but with the indifference you reserve for cattle between milkings — “I am not cruel; cruelty implies interest” — and he celebrates child labor, debt bondage, prison labor, the firetrap factory, and the algorithmic wage in cold blood and the first person. The structural innovation of which he is genuinely proud is to have kept the yield of the plantation model while externalizing its maintenance onto the taxpayer: all of the margin, none of the obligation. His instrument is not anger but the accounting translation — the conversion of a grief, an injury, or a death into a line item, performed without heat, because heat would imply the worker mattered enough to resent.

In the tradition of Swift’s A Modest Proposal, he is the villain given the first person, so the reader can watch extraction take off its mask and say, in cold blood, what the press release is written to hide. Nothing he says is invented: every position he holds is one currently held, quietly, somewhere in respectable economic discourse, and every receipt he reaches for — the Mudsill Speech, the 1834 workhouse, the Walmart-and-Medicaid wage subsidy, the Packers Sanitation children, the Bhopal shell company — is real. The satire is not that he lies; the satire is that he doesn’t. The character has no floor; the publication’s sits above him, and the contempt the character aims downward the work aims back up — at the extractor class and the euphemism that launders it, never at the worker, the child, the migrant, or the debtor, who are precisely who the column is written to defend. The reader is meant to recoil at Sterling Varice. That recoil is the product.