Neal Stephenson - Interface

It was almost possible to see the wheels turning in McLane's head. The look of surprise gradually faded, until he looked impassive, then calm and almost coldly defiant. "It wouldn't be the first time I had settled an argument that way," McLane said.

"Ouch," Ogle said.

"But one of the first things a president has to learn is to separate his personal feelings from the affairs of the nation, and-'

Colors shifted all over the Eye. "Damage control!" Ogle said, and slammed one of the buttons on the armrest.

"-as for the issue of the auto industry," Cozzano said, continuing his own sentence as if McLane had never opened his mouth, and blithely running him off the road, "it is simply wrong to say that people get jobs first and then feel good about themselves. That is a shallow view of human nature. Dignity can't be bought with a paycheck. Your student deferments kept you out of Vietnam, Tip, so you never saw what I saw: stooped peasants in the rice paddies who never made a dime in their lives but who had more dignity in the last joint of their little finger than a lot of highly paid lawyers and chief executives I can name. It goes the other way: if you have dignity, if you respect yourself, you will find a job. I don't care how bad the economy is. When my great-grandfather came to this part of the country, there weren't any jobs. So he came up with his own job. He had only been in America for a few weeks, but in that time he had become thoroughly American. He had come to believe that he could change his own life. That he could take charge of his own destiny."

"Very inspiring. But when my family came to California-" McLane began.

"Some think that unemployment hurts because of money," Cozzano said. "Because you can't afford to buy Nintendo games and fancy sneakers. That is shallow and cheap. Americans are not pure, money-grubbing materialists. Unemployment hurts people's feelings far more than their pocketbooks."

In the past few seconds all the graphs had veered downward, the colors turned bluish. "I fucked that up!" Ogle said, whacking keys and sliding joysticks furiously. "Bad move!"

Suddenly Tip McLane was on the screen. It was too late for Cozzano to dig himself out.

"Shit!" Ogle hissed. "Where does he get off saying that Americans are not shallow materialists?"

McLane was amused. He knew he had Cozzano. "Apparently the Governor of Illinois thinks that we'd all be happier being fully employed ... in rice paddies!"

The audience laughed. The Eye warmed suddenly to Tip McLane.

"Damn!" Ogle said. "Why'd he have to get profound on us?" He scratched his chin nervously, thinking hard, and fussed with the controls. "We have to suppress that urge to philosophize."

"Maybe the Governor hasn't been seeing a full cross section of the American public from his backyard in Tuscola," McLane said. "But I have, because I've visited all fifty states during the long primary campaign - even smaller states that my campaign manager begged me not to visit because he said they weren't important. I have talked to a lot of people. And over and over again, I get the impression that the people of America don't like being talked down to by politicians."

"That's for damn sure," Ogle said, punching a key that caused a hallucinatory bullet to whiz past Cozzano's head.

"They know what they want: jobs. Good jobs," McLane said. "What they don't need is vague talk about how to feel more dignified."

Ogle groaned. The PIPER 100 were showing strong support for McLane now. "They're killing us," he said, and slammed a big red button that said, simply, FLIP FLOP.

"When the forces of freedom and democracy stormed Hitler's Fortress Europe on D day," Cozzano said, "the elite spearhead of that invasion rained down out of the sky on parachutes. Parachutes made of nylon that was manufactured about half a mile away from my house in Tuscola, by my family. The nervous paratroopers, standing in the open doorways of those airplanes, looking down at the landscape of France thousands of feet below them, were putting a lot of trust in those folds of nylon."

"What does this have to do with anything?" Aaron said, mirroring the feelings displayed on the Eye of Cy: a state of chaotic flux.

"Shut up," Ogle mumbled. "This is good material. Reaganesque in its cloying nostalgia - with the metaphorical punch of Ross Perot before he went batshit."

"When you jump out of an airplane flying over a war zone, you need more than self-esteem to get you safely to the ground," Cozzano said. "You need a solid, well-made parachute. Young people leaving high school and college within the last few weeks have a lot in common with those troopers jumping out of that airplane. And if you think that William A. Cozzano intends to send them out that door with nothing more than some feel-good talk, you're dead wrong."

"But that's the opposite of what he just said," Aaron said.

"Just shut up," Ogle said. "I think he's got them going." As Cozzano's analogy started to become clearer, the monitor screens had stopped fluctuating and begun settling down into a dim greenish pattern. "We need to get Anecdote Development working on that D day thing."

Cozzano continued. "Just as nylon replaced silk in parachutes, new technologies have to replace the old ones in our job market. And I can promise you that no country in the world is better than America when it comes to inventing new technologies."

McLane interrupted him. "And no country is better capitalizing on those inventions than Japan," he said, "which is why I'm going to make sure that America, not Japan, reaps the benefit of her creative powers, unique among all the nations of the world."

Ogle slapped his face and groaned. "That McLane son of a bitch is a vampire. Give me a projection."

Aaron worked at his computer for a minute, running some statistical routines. "Based on the reactions of the PIPER 100, allowing for a typical seventy-two-hour debate bounce, correcting for their likelihood to actually cast a ballot, we get 27 electoral votes for the President, 206 for Cozzano, and 302 for Tip McLane."

"We have a long way to go," Ogle said.

"Seems pretty good to me," Aaron said, "considering he's not even running for president."

"Details!" Ogle scoffed.

It took William A. Cozzano nearly an hour to fight his way from the dressing room, where his TV makeup had been sponged off, to his car in the parking lot of the Decatur Civic Center. Along the way he had to shake what seemed like every hand in downstate Illinois, and kiss a fair percentage of the babies. His car, a four-wheel-drive sport-utility vehicle with every luxury feature and antenna known to science, showed up regularly on downstate television (every time he changed the oil in his driveway) and so everyone knew where he was going. Meanwhile, Tip McLane skulked from an obscure fire exit into his waiting Secret Service motorcade.

The Decatur Civic Center was equipped with loading docks and ramps that would have enabled Cozzano's driver to pull straight into the building and pick him up, but it looked a lot better for him to fight his way through a crowd of supporters. Ogle's men had set up a double rope line to hold them back, providing a clear corridor across the asphalt from the building to Cozzano's car. Cy Ogle had personally walked the length of this corridor with a tape measure, making sure it was just narrow enough to allow the crowd to nearly surge in on Cozzano as they bent over the ropes and waved babies and pens and papers in his face. Banks of lights had been erected on mobile jackstands, illuminating the scene like a high-school football field on a Friday night, and network camera crews gladly availed themselves of the platforms Ogle had set up for their use.

"It was not half-bad," Cozzano said. He was sitting in the backseat of his car, next to Zeldo. His driver and an Illinois State Patrolman were in the front. They were driving down a two-lane blacktop road at eighty miles an hour, accompanied by one of Ogle's vehicles, a Secret Service car, and a few Highway Patrol cruisers. It had taken them several hours to get to Decatur this morning because they'd taken a circuitous route through Champaign and Springfield. But on the direct route, at this speed, Tuscola was minutes away.