“I’m sure you can try that, Governor, but why waste the energy? It’s pointless to destroy us now. It’s too late for that. I really thought you had a better feel for these things.”
“Son, you still don’t get it. I don’t need any ‘feel’ for it. I can do all that in my spare time — while I pat my head and rub my belly.” Huey hung up.
Now the dogs of War were unleashed on the psychic landscape of America, and even as rather small dogs, with blunt, symbolic teeth, they provoked political havoc. No one had expected this of the Presi-dent. An eccentric billionaire Native American — for a country ex-hausted by identity crisis and splintered politics, Two Feathers had seemed a colorful sideshow, an Oh-Might-As-Well candidate whose bluster might keep up morale. Even Oscar had expected little of him; the governorship of Colorado had never given Two Feathers much chance to shine. Once in the national saddle, however, Two Feathers was rapidly proving himself to be a phenomenon. He was clearly one of those transitional American Presidents, those larger-than-life figures who set a stamp on their era and made life horribly dangerous and interesting.
Unfortunately for Green Huey, the American political landscape had room for only one eccentrically dressed, carpet-chewing, authori-tarian state Governor. Two Feathers had beaten Huey to the White House. Worse yet, he correctly recognized Huey as an intolerable threat that could not be co-opted. He was resolved to crush Huey.
A war of words broke out between the President and the rogue Governor. Huey accused the President of provocative spy overflights. This was true, for the sky over Louisiana was black with surveillance aircraft — feds, proles, military, Europeans, Asians, private networks, anyone who could launch an autonomous kite with a camera on board.
The President counteraccused the Governor of treacherous col-laboration with foreign powers during wartime. This was also true, though so far the premier effect of the Dutch War had been to saturate America with curious European tourists. The Europeans hadn’t seen anyone declare a War in absolute ages. It was fun to be a foreign national in a country at War, especially a country that sold bugging devices out of brimming baskets at flea markets. Suddenly everyone was his own international spy.
The President then upped the ante. He sternly demanded the swift return of all the federal weaponry stolen from the ransacked Louisiana Air Force base. He threatened unnamed, severe reprisals.
The Air Force weapons were, needless to say, not forthcoming. Instead, the Governor accused the President of plotting martial law and a coup d’etat.
Huey’s Senators launched a marathon procedural war within the U.S. Senate, with double-barreled filibusters. The President de-manded impeachment proceedings against the two Louisiana Senators. He also announced criminal investigations of all of Louisiana’s Repre-sentatives.
Huey called for the President to be impeached by Congress, and for antiwar activists to take to the streets in a general strike and para-lyze the country.
Faced with the prospect of a general strike, the President counterannounced his unilateral creation of a new, all-volunteer, civil defense force, the “Civil Defense Intelligence Agency.” On paper, this seemed a very strange organization — a national debating club of so-called “civil activists,” loyal only to the President. The CDIA had no budget, and its head was an aging, much-decorated war hero, who happened to live in Colorado. He happened to know the President personally. He happened to be a very high-ranking Moderator.
A closer analysis showed that the “Civil Defense Intelligence Agency” was the Moderators. The CDIA was a gigantic prole gang with the direct backing of the nation’s chief executive. At this point, a Rubicon was crossed. This stroke made it obvious that the Governor of Colorado had been cultivating his own prole forces for years. Huey had used his Regulator proles as a deniable proxy force, but the Presi-dent was boldly bringing his own private mafia into the open, and brandishing it like a club. The President was a day late and perhaps a dollar short, but he had a great advantage. He was the President.
Now, for the first time, the President began to look genuinely powerful, even dangerous. This was a classic political coalition: it had worked in medieval France. It was the long-forgotten bottom of the heap, allied with the formerly feeble top, to scare the hell out of the arrogant and divisive middle.
The President’s first deployment of his semilegal forces was against the now-illegal Emergency committees. This was a stroke of brilliance, because the Emergency committees were universally de-tested, and even more feared than the proles. Besides, the Emergency committees had lost all their legal backing, and were already on the ropes. Attacking a newly illegal force with a newly legitimized, for-merly illegal force struck the American public very favorably. The maneuver had a nice unspoken symmetry to it. It was a player’s move. The President’s ratings went up sharply. He was accomplishing some-thing tangible, where nothing had been accomplished in years.
The new CDIA, for its own part, revealed some impressive new tactics. The CDIA lacked the legal power to arrest anyone, so they pursued Emergency committee members with nonviolent “body pickets.” These were armbanded bursars who methodically stalked committee members for twenty-four hours a day. This tactic was not difficult for a prole group. “Body picketing” was basically an intelli-gence stakeout, shadowing; but it was not surreptitious. It was totally open and obvious, and like all paparazzi work, it was extremely an-noying to its victims.
The proles took to this job like ducks to water. They had always been organized much like intelligence agencies — small, distributed, surreptitious networks, living on the fringes of society through shared passwords and persistent scrounging. But as a national goon squad, ordered from above, the prole networks suddenly coalesced into a rigid, crystalline substance. For the President’s enemies, they became a human prison of constant surveillance.
Or so it seemed. It was still too early to tell whether the Presi-dent’s CDIA would have any staying power as a New Model Army. But the mere threat of its deployment sent a shock wave through the system. A new era was clearly at hand. America’s Emergency was truly and finally over. The War was on.
Oscar followed these developments with great professional care, and reacted to catch the popular tide. He had Greta formally declare the Emergency over at the Collaboratory. There was no more Emer-gency. From now on, it was Wartime.
“Why are you doing this to us?” Greta demanded, in yet another bone-grinding late-night committee session. “What possible differ-ence does it make?”
“It makes all the difference in the world.”
“But it’s all semantic! We’re all the same people. I’m still the lab Director, God help me. And we still have the Emergency Committee as the only people who can run this mess.”
“From now on, we’re the War Committee.”
“It’s just symbolic!”
“No it isn’t.” Oscar sighed. “I’ll explain it to you, very simply. The President has seized power in a time of crisis. He bypassed the Constitution, he undercut the Congress, he annihilated the Emer-gency committees. He did that by recruiting large gangs of organized social outcasts, who derive their new legitimacy strictly from him, and are loyal to him personally.”
“Yes, Oscar, we know all that. We’re not blind. And I’m very unhappy about what the President did. I certainly don’t see why we have to imitate his radical, bully-boy tactics.”
“Greta, the President is imitating us. That is exactly what we did, right here. The President is doing it because you and I got away with doing it! You’re very popular because you did that, you’re famous. People think it’s exciting to seize power with prole gangs, and to throw all the rascals out. It’s a very slick move.”