Chapter 19
Pride and Prejudice
My sons looked at each other again but did not laugh at this more etymologically fundamental question. They were caring children, their mother’s sons.
“The same,” said Quincy. “Ben told me his political science courses teach the same management principles I told him I’ve learned, and you know how much attention most politicians pay to them. I’m sure they haven’t changed since you were flying.”
“I found,” I said, in keeping with their tone, “that the military accorded more with our training when we were in combat. But tell me more about what you’re calling fundamentals, and tell me how the students scoffed when they weren’t in class. I’m thinking that all of this might be fundamental.”
I don’t know how the language of this conversation turned so alien, to semantics so precisely cautious. I was thinking of the importance of the office, but I don’t know how my sons fell in that line, into such basic lines of pretension. Neither’d shown so much constraint in school.
“One,” said Ben, “is span of control. You know, recognition that one person’s attention can’t be broad enough to supervise all the other persons in the world. Attention and time are limited, and not recognizing that screws everything up. It’s why kings have councils and presidents cabinets.”
“How did your fellow students have a problem with that?” I asked, now wondering at Ben’s mix of diction here.
“The face of it,” said Ben. “They said that anyone who doesn’t know everything about what everyone under him is supposed to be doing shouldn’t be a manager. Simple stupid arrogance, I guess.”
“I get a lot of that,” I said, remembering Fits Jr. and Jimmy Huffa, and Hitler and Stalin and Joshua and Saul of Tarsus, and David and Goliath, and myself. “What else?”
“The bottom of that coin,” said Quincy, “is unity of command. You know, recognition that trying to serve two masters screws everything up. If one boss tells you to do one thing, and another boss tells you to do something else, you have to be your own boss to choose which boss you’d rather have chew you out.”
“How was that a problem for your school chums?” I asked, happy he was lightening a little also.
“The same face,” said Quincy. “They thought that being a manager meant you should be able to boss around anyone under you. And, worse, they thought organization charts should be secret.”
“I can see their point,” I said. “If you delegate authority or take advice, you’re not God. It’s a good thing people like them usually either learn better or get stuck in middle-management, but it’s a bad thing how much damage middle-managers can do. And another bad thing is how much damage people have to do to their own integrity to get around such arrogant ignorant jerks, or often just to do some decent work.
“And you’re right. Both of those principles are from military tradition. Generals ordinarily directly supervise a staff of four or five, and chain of command requires that they don’t give orders to corporals or privates, and also that privates complain to the corporal supervising them first, not run screaming straight to a sergeant or a general. And the organization of each United States military service is posted on walls of common hallways in the lowest-level headquarters, with pictures of commanders. I wonder if your classmates knew that. But I’m talking too much. I should be listening.”
“No problem, Dad” said Ben. “You’re just telling us what we told you. It’s good for you to think out loud, and thanks for agreeing. And the answer is that my classmates didn’t know it. I didn’t know it until Quincy told me.”
“They think patriotism is stupid,” said Quincy.
I now felt like I was preaching, and I was pleased my sons were lightening, but I kept the tone to see what they would say, in their mood against these loads of crap.
“So they fight for nothing but their own success,” I said. “I see such Machiavellian crap in high-level politics also, but not without pretension of being otherwise, and that takes a lot of cleverness. Being actually otherwise is easier and more powerful, besides more decent. Cleverness can be stupid sometimes.”
My sons of Earth now bailed me out again, from my alienation.
“And that’s the most fundamental of the fundamentals, I think,” said Ben. “Setting the example. That’s why your position, as what much of Earth calls the leader of the free world, is the most important on Earth. That’s even cliché for American parents, or they wish it be. It’s an ideal that shouldn’t be compromised.”
“Wish it be!” I thought. “Who talks like that?” I wondered.
“That’s right,” agreed Quincy. “If you don’t set a standard of excellence, parents won’t be able in good conscience to wish that their children grow up to be president of the United States, and adults might follow you into the dust, with hope for posterity.”
“Exactly,” added Ben. “Most Americans think all politicians are corrupt, and my fellow students followed that example, taught it to themselves out of class. They laughed about it, saying they should pretend to set a good example, but didn’t much need to.”
“That’s right,” agreed Quincy. “An extracurricular activity of mine was reading the book In Search of Excellence, which says that nothing is more fundamental to business than knowing in what business one is, knowing one’s primary mission.”
“And,” added Ben, “what my fellows thought was funny was their extracurricular idea that everyone is in the business of buffaloing people for money, that everyone’s primary mission is to fill their own pockets, to staff beach-houses with harems, e.g.”
“It’s like saying that money can buy you love,” agreed Quincy. “That’s the example our fellow political-science and business-administration students said we can set to lead the world, because they think it’s what parents wish for their children.”
“They just need to look at Norma Jean,” said Ben. “An extracurricular activity of mine was reading a book about her. If people wish to know whether money can buy you love, all they have to do is look at her. But even Californians ignore that.”
“Yeah,” said Quincy. “I don’t get it, but I know that people pay a lot more attention to what they want than to what they need for their happiness, and so they wish to be like greedy miserable politicians and business-executives.”
“And they set that example for their children,” Ben concluded.
“I miss our little house in Midland,” offered Quincy for us all.
Well, for now, I was content with them, and so I stopped my talk. I considered mentioning the pedophiles in the priesthood and the rapists at the Air Force Academy. Maybe hypocrisy and the drive toward oppressing others by one’s wishes can carry anything one thinks one wants, all the way from the military to theology. “Onward Christian Soldiers” seemed to me a song to sing, but what my sons had said was sad enough for then. Yet Quincy had another thing to say.
“Smugness,” he said. “The leader trait that they most sought was smugness. My fellow students wished most to be able to care about nothing at all for anyone else. They wished to be able to stick their fingers in their noses and ears and eyes and show everyone around them that ces autres are out of the question, that no one not a manager has a mind or heart worth considering. They wish to indicate that they’re in charge.”
“Amen,” said Ben. “I call it callousness. But there was something that I liked a lot in school. The poor kids, the ones there on scholarships, not because of their parents’ money but because of their own brains, bought the textbook principals and studied hard. And we haven’t mentioned the most important principal, communication.
“I know you were director of central intelligence and that that’s about secrecy. But the best way to get something done is to let people know what needs to be done and to let them know what they need to know to do it. Lies, secrecy, are for people who have something to hide, something of which they’re rightly ashamed.
“Dishonesty is for people who have nothing right in themselves to offer, people who can’t compete on an open plain. It’s for people who ignore all, except what serves their private greed. It’s for stupid people”
“I know,” I said. “Intelligence needs to be shared.”
“I know,” said Quincy. “I remember Mom reading The Jungle Books to us.
“I know,” said Ben. “I remember the Master-Words.”
“We be of one blood,” at least we three said in unison. “Ye and I.”
What an accomplishment, that culmination in my presidency. The Soviet Union gone, and the Cold War done, with no shots fired. The wall was down in Berlin, and Solidarity was solidly up and in charge in Poland, and we got a few other little things done while we were at it. Theresa’s dear friend Nelson was out of jail and well on his way to his own presidency in South Africa, and Noriega was in jail beneath the Miami federal courthouse, for example. Least of all, fat cat Idi Amin was in exile in Saudi Arabia. My OPEC friends at last gave him a place to wait to die.
Meanwhile, fans of Fits and ralliers for Ronny said it was all a coincidence that all that happened in those four years. They said that such changes occurred no more quickly than the building of Rome, that events of one presidency were at best momentum from previous presidencies. Well, they were right in saying that such missions take more than four or eight years, but they were wrong in not looking to see how it happened, through all the currents not called presidential.
We could have failed. When the Soviet hardliners kidnapped Mikhail, we could do nothing but rally our few powerful and reasonable friends in Russia to point out to the hardliners that their country had progressed to the point of no return, to the point where the only alternative to going forward was total political and economic chaos that would bring all the people and all the leaders into the dust there together.
Passing that crisis surprised us all, and delighted us profoundly. It delighted me to the depth of my soul, not only because it was key to my team’s political mission this time here, but also because it showed that reason sometimes can prevail on Earth, that sometimes humans can find and make some reasonable sense. I made a special trip to Detroit while that was going on, just to hold Theresa’s Earthly hands.
But other glitches didn’t fare so well. Charlie did well in turning Afghanistan into the Soviet Union’s Vietnam, but it became Russia’s Vietnam. I had overreached in Kuwait, setting up Saddam Hussein to overween and give us a reason to get rid of him, a Soviet client. The Soviet hardliners had pointed to that situation as an excuse to get rid of Mikhail, calling it American imperialism, from his weakness.
Then, while the American public of the United States was screaming for Saddam Hussein’s blood, I had to stop that effort upon the reclamation of Kuwait. The alternative to stopping there would have been the Soviet hardliners turning the Balkan resistance into another Prague Spring or Tiananmen Square. They might have argued to the United Nations that defending imperialism is better than initiating it.
Had that happened, I’d have had to be dead of Earthly old age without the Cold War won. I set forth some initiatives in the CIA to pick up the pieces in Afghanistan and Iraq peacefully, but the glitches had already cost me my presidency, leaving the next presidency to follow through, or not. Presidents can’t totally control the CIA, but they can throw some monkey-wrenches into the works. Jimmy’s admiral did little damage, but a president might do more, if acting directly, like Fits Jr. So I expected Quincy’d have a lot of messes to clean. So, as a lame duck, I gave him a call.
“Come here, my son,” I said. “We have to talk.”
And we split seats as I and Gerald had. I sat behind the desk where Fits Jr. had sat as his son Little Fits peered from beneath it, for the cameras. My son Quincy sat in the chair in which I had sat accepting Gerald’s view and his doughnuts.
“It would have been nice,” I said, “if we hadn’t had to let that sadist Saddam Hussein slide as far as we let him, in order to save Mikhail and the Balkans from overthrow and invasion. And it would have been nice to have done it all without hurting the United States economy. And it might have been nice to serve a second term. But nothing’s perfect, I am told. And you’ll now have a mess to clean. How’s Laura?”
“She’s beautiful,” said Quincy.
“Is she afraid?” I asked.
“A little,” he answered.
“Are you afraid,” I asked.
“I’m more afraid than Laura is,” he said.
“Good,” I said. “You need to be. You don’t need it to keep you honest. You’ve always had the right compulsion in that direction. But it’ll keep you hard at work, and you have a lot of hard work to do. I haven’t done nearly enough.”
“You’ve done miracles,” said Quincy. “My generation rose with the Cold War as an ordinary fact of life. I don’t think anyone ever told me it might end before or without something like Armageddon. But here we are, and by no war.”
“I’m glad someone noticed,” I said, laughing.
“So, Dad, what can I do?” Quincy asked, not laughing.
“Alright, my son,” I said. “I’ll make a speech.
“First, Ben is going to be governor of California, and you are going to be governor of Florida, and the two of you will earn some stature there, a piece of cake. Next, after that clingon serves two terms as president of the united front of hypocrisy in this nation, you’ll succeed him. We’ll steal the election, if we have to.”
“I hope we don’t have to,” said Quincy. “But it would be better than waking up in the morning to find that the president of the United States of America thinks he invented the Internet. Plainly that guy doesn’t know what the World Wide Web is. Next he’ll grow a beard to look like Lincoln. Or maybe sing Barbra Streisand songs.”
“So you’re already working, paying attention and looking ahead.”
“It beats driving around drunk,” he said, scrunching into the chair.
He laughed about the Gore guy, but I didn’t. My oil experience told me that Earth needed to find other energy sources, and that one was goring corn from the mouths of babes, and Gore was talking about that, calling it cleaning air. No one needed Watergate burglars or flights from outer space to know he was hoping to recruit such as Ben's and Quincy's school chums to do such as promote such while ignoring the undercurrents, the infrastructure of politics, human life on Earth. I hoped the earth would find a better option, and so I did not laugh but suborned a means.
“That Internet business is important. It’ll become the foundation of democracy, whether Clingon and his cohorts like it or not. The one thing they can’t afford is free flow of information, and I expect them to try to stop that flow by trying to stop the company that did invent the World Wide Web for the common people, by making it more accessible and less expensively than anyone else could or would. That effort may trigger a slump in the stock market, but you can just ride that out. No one can stop an offering essentially of truth. So think of Laura again, you for her.
“You remember the Republican National convention in New Orleans, where I accepted the nomination for the presidency. Do you remember what my vice presidential nominee did on the Riverwalk, when I announced his part in the ticket?”
“Yes,” said Quincy. “He patted you on the back as though you and he were old school-chums, and he took off his jacket. His shirt was short-sleeved, and you didn’t look at him. You just grimaced. I remember.”
“You remember when that wacko shot Ronny,” I continued. “Did you know that the wacko’s parents were close enough to my vice presidential nominee to have had dinner at his home?”
“No,” offered Quincy. “I didn’t know that, but I told you I’m afraid, and I know you don’t tell me everything, but I know you had nothing to do with it.”
“I knew he was,” I answered. “So, considering all that, do you have a notion why I picked short-sleeve as my running-mate?”
“His parents controlled the media in Indiana, and he had no other ambitions?”
“And I didn’t need a vice president,” I added.
“And you could keep an eye on him.”
“I could do that, anyway.”
“I see.”
I waited for Quincy to ask the most important question in this, and he did.
“He figured that, if Ronny were dead, you’d be president and required to find a vice president. Then he’d come and tell you what he’d done, thinking you’d be grateful and banking on your being like Linden and Dicky. Someone who knows about you and Fits Jr. put him up to it, without telling him why. Someone figured it out as I did. Not everyone’s ignorant. Am I right?”
“Oh what a wicked web we weave,” I answered.
“I’ll be as honest as Ronny,” he offered.
“Be as honest as Jimmy,” I said.
“How do I try?” he asked.
“Do your best to build habitats for humanity,” I answered. “If you do that, everything else will fall into place. Don’t be like the people who’ve voted me and Jimmy out of office for fear of their temporary level of pocket change. That’s the fundament.
“But, as for honesty itself, remember what I said about taxes and reading my lips. The fact that I don’t have any lips is no excuse for the misrepresentation, but what is an excuse for it is that everyone should have known how silly the promise was, that presidents can slow tax legislation, but never stop it. At least not in our democracy.
“Still it was an offensive thing to say, like Clingon’s saying he’d smoked pot but hadn’t inhaled. Anyone who smokes pot knows that was a lie, while many people who don’t smoke pot believed it. So, Clingon, by that lie, solicited votes from two classes of people who can’t deal with the truth. The first of those classes is people who are simply stupid. The second is people who are afraid of the truth they find.
“A handbook to literature I had to read for freshman composition at Yale says that the ability to recognize irony is one of the surest signs of intelligence and sophistication. Anyone who thought I meant what I said about taxes lacks intelligence and sophistication, and so anyone trying to hold it against me is showing either their foolishness or their hypocrisy, not mine. Or partisan bigotry, or all of the above.
“But, then, partisanship is nothing but a form of bigotry. So is feminism and male chauvinism, and so is any religion not ecumenical. Did you know that the French word for bigotry is sectarisme? That’s as in the words ‘sect’ and ‘sex’. But I’m rambling, in Latin. I’d better get to the point. And the line forward.
“I’m leaving the presidency because my job in this life is mostly done. I’m letting Clingon succeed me because he isn’t as overweening as Fits Jr. and so will listen to his advisors well enough not to screw up the world much, and will screw up his own image enough to let you defeat his party next time. The economy will rebound under Clingon as it did under Ronny, and for one of the two main geopolitical reasons it did under Ronny: relative stability in the Middle East because of Camp David then and Kuwait now. Of course, the main reason then was the power of women, and the main reason now is the new world order that ending the Cold War has created.
“As for screwing up the world, the worst thing I expect Clingon might do is to screw up the operation I’ve initiated in the CIA to get Saddam Hussein out of Iraq without more war. You know I had to let him slide for a while, because the alternative was to delay winning the Cold War until long after I’m dead. Soviet hardliners would have used our invading Iraq as an excuse to take a Tiananmen Square approach in the Balkans. Then, besides what that would do to the Balkan people, it would end Mikhail’s influence. Then no more horseshoes with him here.
“But he won’t play with Clingon anyway. Here’s how I expect things:
“Charlie’s Mujahedin will win in Afghanistan, with the Russian realization of the futility of imperialism. Not even the United Nations or that vodka-swilling Yeltsen who’s fallen into the void Mikhail had to leave for democracy will support invading Iraq, since Iraq isn’t invading anyone outside its land-space now. And you’ll have to do some exaggerating to get the support of our forgetful compatriots.
“Reminding them of Saddam Hussein’s record and pointing out to them his atrocities won’t be enough to convince them that you should spend their money to oust him. He’s never posed an imminent threat to their lives, and now he’s hardly a threat to their gasoline prices, and the majority of United States citizens don’t care about discomfort not theirs. If they did, slavery wouldn’t have existed in this nation, and the movement your aunt Theresa launched mid-century wouldn’t have been necessary, and affirmative action wouldn’t be necessary now.
“So you may have to bamboozle your compatriots into thinking Saddam Hussein and the Taliban pose an imminent threat to them. Then, if you’re caught exaggerating, and your voters reject the fundamentals after you point them out, you’ll lose reelection. You’ll be a one-term president, like me and Jimmy and John Quincy Adams. But still you’ll have to do it to be right, compassionate, democratic.
“Few citizens care about any citizen not them. Your Aunt Theresa’s movement depended on dogs and fire hoses loosed against praying children in the face of Fits Jr. Your reelection may depend on people buried with their hands tied behind their backs in the face of the me-generation Clingon will foster here.
“Yes, I know, I’m recommending subterfuge, and I’m ashamed of it. But what else can you do in the face of a nation of ignorant lazy liars?”
“Chess,” said Quincy. “In chess you have to plan so far ahead.”
“Not so far,” I replied. “And never with so much at stake for all.”
“Too bad,” said Quincy. “Too bad some think their life is less than that.”
“Yes, and I have one last thing to say. Remember that a happy soldier is a bitching soldier. That is, the First Amendment is the main thing making the citizens of the United States the happiest citizens of this world. I’m sorry the temporary-pocketbook people replaced Mikhail with that vodka-slurping Yeltsin, but I’m glad Shevardnadze is president of Georgia. He was a great help to us, and is a genuine gentleman, and Georgia is his home. But I’m rambling again, reminiscing. And so I think it time for me to go.
“It’s time for me to go and spend more time with Beatrice, and I hope you see that the way to protect Laura’s life is the same as the way to protect yours and all of ours. Remember that Jimmy builds habitats for humanity, and no one has tried to kill him.”
“Alright, Dad,” said Quincy, nodding. “But what about Clingon’s wife?”
“What about her?” I asked. “What’s her maiden name? Rhododendron? Rockefeller? Rothschild? Rubble? Rocky? Rock? Rah?”
“Is that free association?” asked Quincy, “Reality check, please, Pop!”
“It’s rude to answer a question with a question, too,” I answered. “Did you know that rhododendrons are named for Cecil Rhodes, who was no colossus? I know you know that Clingon was a Rhodes scholar. Alright, here’s the answer:
“If Heather Rhododendron, who teamed with Rhodes-scholar Clingon to win the presidency eventually for each of them, eventually owns up and dumps Clingon after his philandering gets him impeached, I’ll support her to preside. If she keeps pretending but does well in some lesser elected office before running for the presidency, I’ll stay out of the contest and let her wile and demeanor prevail, if those qualities can. If she presents herself as a soap-opera wronged-woman, I’ll make sure she never again sits down behind this desk. Certainly she knows what Clingon has done and what he will do. She’s been married to him for more than a score of years. She’s lived with him. She knows him.
“No more lies. Don’t read my lips. Hear my voice. No more lies.
“That’s what I think. Women want a woman in the presidency, and they need a good strong woman as a role-model for their daughters, not someone weak enough to need to depend on lies and the votes of women silly enough to think soap-operas represent Earth in general. Such clingonism is what I live to stop.”
“Ben says he likes her,” said Quincy.
“Ben said Fits Jr. really was King Arthur.”
“He’ll do well in California,” said Quincy.
“I’ll have to find him a diplomatic staff.”
By that I launched my boys in their careers. I talked basics to Quincy and superficialities to Ben, and I stirred up dust in the minds of both and left them to settle their dust in their own ways. If they asked advice beyond my rambling, I usually told them to ask their mother. No one could settle dust as well as she. I took a vacation.
Jimmy’s presidency had been just in time for Theresa, for her mother and Raymond. Her mother and Raymond, maybe feeling the world was in good hands with Jimmy, died of cancer during his presidency. Soon after them, her brother died of it also, leaving Theresa quite alone in the huge motor-city. But not very alone for long.
She began quietly spawning a new generation of friends, another family of her choosing. She formed an institute in her name and the name of her quiet husband, to raise the children they had never had, to understand the things that they had built. The institute showed children their own worth and inspired them to respond to their worthiness worthily, with knowledge of their race’s past and faith and understanding of its future. Her focus for that Michigan congressman soon transferred to that.
She began that spawning by making one firebrand friend to help her in the infirmity of her aging on Earth. Elaine had worked with her in a sewing-shop, after she moved to Detroit and before she received the recognition she'd deserved, and now Elaine was helping her receive that recognition. She helped Theresa rise far above pine level, literally and physically to heights above the river strait
For herself, for Theresa’s self, for our self. For the children.