“They’d never let San Francisco stay sunk. They’d cut down all the redwoods and raise the city up on a pier first.”
“I suppose that would keep the inland people out.”
With more than a half a pint of whiskey in him now, Dad started to get sloppy in a way I had never seen from him before. Up to that point he had been so stiff and composed; it was strange to see him roll his eyes back while he was thinking, or run his tongue over his mustache to mop up the stray liquor and grease. He said, “Don’t misunderstand me. It was hard times waiting on the economy to recover, but disbandment was still the best thing that ever happened to California. We have our own independent country now. We have the sixth largest economy in the world, and we get to keep all the profits for ourselves. Not like how it was under the US.”
I hadn’t expected to wind up talking politics with Dad, to say nothing of hearing him express views that were the polar opposite of everything I had been raised to believe. Mom was a staunch Unionist who had marched against disbandment in the streets of Palo Alto and even voted against the California Constitution as a matter of principle. Growing up, ours was one of only a few houses in the development that still celebrated the fourth of July every year by filling the summertime air with the savoriness of barbecued hotdogs and the sulphurous stench of Chinese fireworks. I tried to imagine the circumstances by which they would have moved past their differences, but I couldn’t picture either of them being that tolerant and accommodating. Dad must have changed his views since the divorce, or kept his real opinions to himself the entire time they were married.
I said, “We were a whole lot richer before disbandment, though. Or at least America was. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just nostalgia, but I’ve always wondered what it would have been like to live back then. To have a whole huge country to see and explore.”
Dad pointed at me with his fork. “It was already rotten long before disbandment. That’s what happens with great nations, they rot away from the inside. But ask any botanist or farmer and he’ll tell you the same thing, that rotting flesh can be used as fertilizer to help new life get its start. Sometime after the fall of Rome, you can bet there were boys like you, longing for the dream of an empire that had collapsed before they were born. At the same time, though, men of talent and ambition looked around and saw that there was fresh opportunity all around them. They worked hard and became medieval lords while the nostalgic ones sat around waiting to be turned into serfs. You think about that.”
I thought about it. I thought about what he had said and wondered how much of it was from the heart and how much was the product of the whiskey and his own grandiose self-image. “In school they taught us that the centuries after the fall of Rome were a bad time for everyone. Isn’t that why they call them the Dark Ages?”
Dad sneered and wiped his damp mustache on the back of his hand. He said, “That’s a myth, a revisionist smear campaign launched by later historians with radical agendas. No one who was alive at the time would have called the medieval period an age of darkness. It’s true, the hardships of life were greater in those days, but then so were the pleasures.”
I watched Dad’s eyes flicker in the diminishing evening light. Outside the big bay windows at the back of the room, the sun had gone down enough that the oppressive heat and brightness of the valley were reduced to far more tolerable levels. And yet Dad seemed more tired and disoriented than he had all day. Even as he carried on with issues of political and historical importance, there was an almost perverse intensity to the way he was behaving, and suddenly I was grateful for the vodka, and for the sleepy-sick feeling it had brought over me.
“Men had real honor in the medieval period. And women knew what it meant to be real women. Each king and each lord ruled like the pure manifestation of God on Earth. That’s why, pound for pound, medieval lords were the greatest rulers in history. They didn’t just rule well, they ruled totally. Think about it. I mean really think about it. Each lord had total dominion over his land, but his land was nothing without the people who cared for it. He had to rule over his serfs, his servants, his squires, and his knights, as well as his daughters, his sons, the rest of his family, and his wife. Can you even imagine it? There’s no way to skate by in that situation. You’re either a leader, with talent and responsibility, or you’re nothing. Now think about all the sad bastards today who can’t even manage to take care of themselves. And then try to tell me the medieval period was a dark time to be alive.”
I looked down at my plate and said, “They still had more things to worry about back then. Like bubonic plague. The Black Death.”
“Of course you’d bring that up. You’re a negative person, you always have been. That’s your mother’s side coming out in you, depressives and pessimists all through their bloodlines.” Dad raised his glass and drained the last ounce of bourbon and swirling grease from the bottom. His food was getting cold as he continued to eulogize. “You know what really happened during the Black Death? The lords and noblemen, basically everyone who was educated and worth a damn, they all fled to their estates in the country, while the peasants in the cities and the hicks in the fields stayed behind and perished. I know what you’re thinking. Oh, what a tragedy, oh, what a shame, half the world gone in the blink of an eye. But do you know what happened after things returned to normal, when suddenly the world was only half as crowded as it used to be? The Renaissance happened. The Age of Discovery happened. Suddenly the exceptional men were able to raise themselves up without a whole host of human parasites weighing them down. And now here we sit, in a fine restaurant with steak and whiskey in front of us, indebted to a deadly pathogen from seven hundred years in the past.”
Dad exhaled slowly and ran a napkin over his glossy, sweat-covered forehead. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. As a kid, I had known him to say some pretty harsh things about the unemployed, but he never carried it to such an extreme until now. I kept waiting for him to burst out laughing, or to notice the stunned look on my face and admit that he had been exaggerating. When no admission came, I cleared my throat and tried to find my own words.
I said, “If I understand you correctly, you’re saying that a huge catastrophe like a plague, or the disbandment of an entire country, is actually beneficial because it weeds out the undesirable parts of the population and leaves behind the strong and innovative people. But that can’t really be what you’re saying.”
Dad huffed irritably like a much older man. The meal before him had barely been touched, but still he folded his napkin over and tossed it onto the plate. He stuck his finger in my face and said, “You weren’t there. You don’t know what it was like then.”
“Right. I wonder how many fathers have said that to their sons throughout history.”
“Keep talking, smartass. You only reveal your own ignorance. You’ve been spoiled by the Republic, the same as the rest of your generation. But you’d sing a different tune if you saw what San Francisco was like in the old days, if you could smell the hot stink of open sewer rising up from the gutters of China Town and Hyde Street. All you’ve ever known are clean streets and productive people, computer programmers sipping espressos in wicker chairs on Market Street. But what would you do if suddenly there was a bum on every corner? How would you react if you couldn’t walk home from school without being mobbed by panhandlers, without smelling the piss and diarrhea on their clothes and the stench of their blackened feet? That’s what the city was before disbandment. Bums, addicts, hippies, whores. They practically ran the place before the government changed and the police drove them out. The productive members of society, the business class, they’re the ones who saved the city—and the entire country, too, for that matter—when the US fell apart. You look at the rest of the former American states and see how they’re doing now. The Plains are in chaos. The South has a GDP lower than Uganda. You believe it was lack of faith that brought them to it? I don’t think so. If you can’t see the connection between the success of ambitious men and the success of the whole, then you’re blind, pure and simple. Or perhaps you think we should have done the Christian thing and built the bums an ark.”