After I boarded at the Dunsany Towers stop, a little nervous at carrying out this imposture, I dug out that issue of Global Heritage that I had been reading when PJ first showed up.
Once in the Oval Office, President Hearst quickly assembled an official cabinet—and a semi-secret cabal of assistants and advisors—who could help him carry out his radical disarmament and re-education program. The list leaned heavily towards scientists and reformers and what passed for media people in those days, deliberately excluding the tired old politicians. Hearst hired Havelock Ellis and Thomas Edison. Mrs. Frank Leslie and Nikola Tesla. Edward Stratemeyer and Margaret Sanger. Frank Munsey and Percival Lowell. Lee de Forest and even old rival Joseph Pulitzer.
(Cabinets during Hearst’s subsequent six terms as President would include a new generation of younger luminaries such as Buckminster Fuller, Huck Gernsback, Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, Robert Goddard, B. F. Skinner, Thomas Merton, Vannevar Bush, David Ogilvy, Marshall McLuhan, Claude Shannon, Dorothy Day and A. A. Wyn. Service in the Hearst administration became a badge of honour, and produced a catalogue of America’s greatest names.)
These men and women set about dismantling the cultural foundations of belligerence, both domestic and international, substituting a philosophy of intellectual passions, encouraged by education and new laws.
And one of their prime weapons in this initially subliminal war was the same yellow journalism that had once fomented violence.
Specifically, the Funnypaper Boys.
Hearst wanted to reach the largest percentage of the population with his message of reform. But there was no radio then, no spy-rays or ansible-net or ether-vision or movies. Mass media as we know it today, in 1975, was rudimentary, save for zines and newspapers.
And most importantly, the newspaper comics.
The funny pages. Already immensely popular, comprehensible even by the nation’s many semi-literate citizens, able to deliver concealed subtextual messages behind entertaining facades.
Thus were born the Funnypaper Boys, artists who were really secret agents for Hearst’s program.
Outcault, Herriman, Dirks, McManus, McCay, King, Opper, Schultze, Fisher, Swinnerton, Kahle, Briggs, and a dozen others. They were motivated by Hearst’s grandiose humanistic dreams to create a Golden Age of activist art, full of humourous fantastical conceits.
No one could deny the power and influence of such other eventual Hearst allies as pulpzines and Hollywood. But the Funnypaper Boys were first, the Founding Fathers of a republic soon informally dubbed Geektopia. (“Geek” became the in-term for the fanatics who followed the Funnypaper Boys due to Winsor McCay’s association with carnival culture, where the word had a rather different meaning.) Their utopian artwork swept the nation—and the globe. American comics proved to be potent exports, with or without translation, and were adopted wholeheartedly by other cultures, carrying their reformist messages intact and sparking similar native movements.
(America’s oldest and staunchest ally, Britain, was the first to fully join the Hearst movement. The Fabians, Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Wells, Stapledon, Haldane, the many brilliant Huxleys, publisher Alfred Harmsworth, Edward Linley Sambourne and his fellow cartoonists at Punch— They soon had complete control of the reins of governmental power.)
Reprint books of newspaper strips began to appear in America. And then the original pictonovel was born. That’s when the tipping point was reached—
And my trolley had reached its destination as well, as the conductor announced over clanging bell.
I left my GH magazine behind on the seat and climbed down the stairs to join the costumed crowds surging into the Frank Reade Playing Fields.
Past fragrant food carts and knickknack booths and bookstalls, costume-repair tents and armouries, taverns and daycare corrals, I strolled, heading toward the fields assigned to the Children of Cimmeria. (My Mom’s business had a hand in running all this, of course.)
I decided to take a shortcut down a dusty path that angled across the vast acreage, and there I encountered a startling sight.
In a tiny lot mostly concealed by a tall untrimmed privet hedge, a few people were playing what I think was a game once called “football.” They wore shabby looking leather helmets and padding, obviously homemade. The object of their contention was a lopsided, ill-stuffed pigskin.
I chanced upon the game when it was temporarily suspended, and I spoke to one of the players.
“Are you guys seriously into this antique ‘sports’ stuff?”
The player made a typically Geekish noise indicative of derisive exasperation. “Of course not! This is a simulation of sports, not real sports! Frank Merriwell stuff. We’re just trying to recreate a vanished era like everyone else. But it gets harder and harder to find re-enactors. This sports stuff never really made much sense to begin with, even when it wasn’t dead media.”
I left the football players behind and soon arrived at the dusty turf allotted to the Conan recreators. I registered with the gamemasters and quickly inserted myself into the action.
For the next several hours I ministered in my priestly role to the dead and dying on the mock battlefield, liberally bestowing prayers and invocations I had learned off the a-net on their hauberked torsos and helmeted heads. For a big he-man guy, Conan’s creator Thomas Wolfe sure had a way with the frilly, jaw-wrenching poetry.
It was hot and sweaty work, and I was grateful at last to hit the nearby grog tent for some shade and mead. While listening to a gal in a chainmail bikini sing some geeksongs about the joint adventures of Birdalone and the Grey Mouser, I spotted the Pigeons from Hell crowd, recognizable from their a-net profiles. One of them was Ted Harmon, an anesthesiologist compatriot of Hornbine. As he wasn’t engaged in conversation, I went up to him.
“Hey, Ted—I mean, Volacante. Neat ruckus. I saw you get in some wicked sword thrusts.”
Ted looked at me for a moment as if to say, Do I know you? But his weariness and the mead and my compliments and the congenial setting disarmed any suspicions.
“Thanks. Been practicing a lot.”
“I just wish old Balkpraetore could’ve been here to see your display of talent. Shame about his death.”
We clinked flagons in honour of Dr. Hornbine. Then Ted said, “Yeah, a damn shame. You know, when I first heard about him kicking it, I thought—”
“Thought what?”
“Oh, nothing…”
“C’mon, now you got me curious.”
Ted leaned in closer. “Well, he was just so nervous the last time I saw him. Something was obviously bothering him. It was almost as if he expected something bad to happen to him.”
“Oh, he was always like that.”
“Are you serious? You never saw Balkpraetore without a grin and a joke. It was only after he had that visit at the hospital—”
“Visit?”
“Yeah, from a drug rep. Guy named, uh, Greenstock. From MetamorPharma. I remember the rep’s name because it reminded me of the Green Man. The Green Man’s always been a minor passion of mine. You see, it all started with a Henry Treece novel when I was twelve—”
I cut Ted off in a practiced Geek manner. I couldn’t indulge him in a passion-rant now. “Queue it up. Back to Greenstock. What do you think he proposed? Something shady?”
“I don’t know, but it freaked Hornbine out.”