Bruce Sterling - Distraction

“You know that I’m going to out you big-time for this, don’t you? ‘Colombian Clone Freak in Seaside Love Nest with Nobel Scientist.’ ”

“Etienne, I’m not just a Colombian clone freak. I am also a professional campaign adviser. Let me give you some very sincere campaign advice, right now. Give up. Go away. Just get yourself some cash out of the slush fund, and get your lovely wife if she really wants to come along, and go into exile. Go into self-imposed exile. You know? Leave the country. It happens. It’s traditional. It’s a legitimate political maneuver.”

“I’m not gonna run away. Huey don’t do that.”

“Of course ‘Huey do that,’ dammit! Go aboard a nice French submarine — I know you got a dozen of ’em lurking offshore. Have ’em take you to a nice villa, on Elba, or St. Helena or something. Take a few pet bodyguards. It’s doable! You eat well, you write the mem-oirs, you’re tanned, rested, and ready. Maybe… maybe even, someday… if somehow things get much, much worse here in America… maybe you’ll even look good. It sounds insane, but I’m not sure I can even judge anymore. Maybe, someday, deliberately im-posing schizoid states of mind on unsuspecting human beings will become politically fashionable. But it sure as hell isn’t now. Read to-morrow’s opinion polls. You’re toast.”

“Kid, I’m Huey. You’re toast. I can destroy you, and your un-grateful bitch girlfriend, and your entire research facility, which, in point of fact, is, and always will be, my research facility.”

“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 — whil e 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.