Neal Stephenson - Interface

"He's a dead man," was the only comment Tip McLane would make.

"Jesus, the man is worth billions," Drasher said. "He can afford to hire the best. And what do they do? They sent him to Disneyland. And they let Goofy shake his hand!"

"This has got to be Cy Ogle's work. Ogle has a Goofy fetish. It's a known fact," Zorn said suspiciously.

"Are you crazy?" Tip McLane said.

Zeke Zorn was a high-intensity sort of guy. He was an Elvis - he reacted but he didn't think much. For all this, he has a basically sunny, open, California personality, and it was unusual to hear this kind of paranoia coming from him. This was the third time he had brought up the subject of Cy Ogle, apropos of nothing, in the last week.

"I would bet you money," Zorn said glaring suspiciously at the screen, "that the man in that Goofy suit is none other than Cy Ogle himself. It's just what he would do."

"You're off your rocker," McLane said.

"Well, let me just say that if this campaign ever went to Disneyland - which it never would - I would have half a dozen snipers following you around with orders to blow Goofy's head off if he came within half a mile. Because this is just the kind of thing that Ogle would cook up."

Drasher watched this startling performance and then burst out laughing. Drasher was a Purvis. Like McLane, he had grown up poor and become a highly educated conservative. He was black and had grown up in Mississippi; but he and McLane had much more in common with each other than they did with Zeke Zorn, a man who dressed so finely that they did not even know the names of many of the articles of clothing that Zorn wore every single day.

"You're serious," Drasher said in wonderment. "You think that Cy Ogle sent Goofy in to do a political hit on Fowler."

"It's just too perfect," Zorn said. "When these perfect things happen, you have to look for a guiding hand somewhere. It's like Dukakis and the tank helmet in '88. I suppose you think that just happened." Zorn said these words almost contemptuously. "Someone noticed that Dukakis looked like Snoopy. Someone put the Snoopy helmet in his hands. Mark my words - somewhere out there is a cartoon character with your name on it, Nimrod McLane."

"Yosemite Sam," Drasher suggested.

"Sounds paranoid to me," McLane said.

"Hey," Zorn said, throwing up his hands, "once Norman Fowler has shaken hands with Goofy, no force in the universe can stop us. But" - he shook his finger accusingly at the television, "once the presidential campaign gets underway, this is the kind of thing that we have to look out for."

"Let's not get cocky," Drasher said. "There is still one force in the universe that can keep us from the nomination."

"What's that?" McLane said.

Drasher suddenly raised his voice into a polished baritone with a white southern accent, rendering a flawless imitation of the Reverend Doctor William Joseph Sweigel. "The power of JEEEEE - zuss!" he said.

"Good point," Zorn said. "Let's get our butts over to that damn picnic."

"I was spreading some of this fancy gourmet mustard on my frankfurter just now," the Reverend Doctor Billy Joe Sweigel said, holding a jar of the savory condiment up so that all the people at the luncheon could see it, "when I noticed that there were some small flecks of material mixed in with the mustard. Now, in the part of the country where I come from, mustard is bright yellow and perfectly smooth and homogeneous in its composition. But since I have come to California ..." Having telegraphed the joke, he paused briefly to allow laughter to build, and then subside. Then, as only a politician could, he went ahead and delivered it anyway. "Let's just say that I have spread some things on my frankfurters here in Southern California that were labeled as mustard, but in my part of the country probably would have been confiscated and analyzed in a police laboratory." The crowd laughed dutifully, for the second time, but Rev. Sweigel would not let go of the theme. "I engaged one of my staff in a lighthearted conversation about this mustard, or MOO-tard as it says on the jar, and he informed me that these flecks of material that I had alluded to were, in fact, actual seeds of the mustard plant. Mustard seeds."

The crowd went dead silent, like Sunday school children who know that they are about to be told that they stand a high chance of burning in Hell. All of the people here at the Southern California Rightist Coalition who had been brought up Christian (which was most of them) knew what was coming. The non-Christians were already so alienated by the heavily pork-oriented meal that they weren't talking much anyway.

Sweigel continued. "Now our lord JEEE-zuss once spoke of mustard seeds. He said that all one needed in order to perform miracles was to have faith the size of a mustard seed.

"This is a piece of Scripture that I have known since I was just a little boy. But I never really understood what it meant until today. You see, in all of my life, this is the first time that I have ever actually seen a mustard seed. My mustard has always been the bright yellow substance to which I earlier alluded. So I did not know, frankly, whether a mustard seed was a very small thing, like a poppy seed, or a very large thing, like a coconut. So when I read these words of our lord JEEE-zuss, I did not know whether he was saying that we needed just a tiny little bit of faith, or a whole lot of faith. "But today the LORD has seen fit to educate me in these matters and I have had my first taste of expensive Southern California MOO-tard, and I have seen actual mustard seeds. And I can report to you that they are neither extremely small, as seeds go, nor are they extremely large."

Ten feet away from the lectern, Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane was sitting with his hands folded in his lap, trying to resist the temptation to order another hot dog. He knew exactly where this was going and he had to keep his wits about him.

The Reverend Doctor Sweigel was an Odessa. He did things out of pure, dumb principle, and for that reason he was about to go upside Tip McLane's head with a little bit of JEEE-zuss, as he had been doing for about the last couple of weeks - ever since William A. Cozzano had begun to make television appearances.

The media had given Sweigel a free ride all the way through Super Tuesday. They liked having a goofball in the campaign; it put variety in their tedious, ink-stained lives. When he had done well on Super Tuesday, they had turned on him in Illinois.

McLane had turned on him too. As part of their Illinois campaigns, all of the candidates had made ritual visits to the bedside of William A. Cozzano, who was still hospitalized at that point. McLane, like the others, had been shocked to see how bad Cozzano looked.

Billy Joe Sweigel had become a wealthy and powerful TV evangelist by claiming to heal people through the power of faith.

He would heal anyone of any disease in return for a ten-dollar contribution. So the question had naturally arisen: as long as he'd been in the room, why hadn't he just healed William A. Cozzano? It seemed like a fair enough question to Tip McLane and he had repeatedly raised the issue in public, and during debates. It seemed safe as anything, like asking Sweigel to heal the craters on the moon.

Then Cozzano had put on a miraculous recovery.

Sweigel continued, "So what our lord JEEE-zuss was saying was that in order to move mountains, one need not have a great deal of faith - one need not be some kind of a paragon - but a teeny little bit of faith won't do it either. We have to have a reasonable amount of faith. A sort of in-between amount of faith.

"Now, some people have more faith than others. I don't think that it's unfair to say that. And I can remember a night a couple of months ago, in an auditorium in Illinois, when one of my opponents didn't seem to have very much faith at all."