Грэм Мастертон - Famine

At eleven-thirty a.m., after consultation with the governors of the worst-affected states, the President declared ‘a temporary state of National Emergency.’ He ordered special legal provisions for punishing looters, and immediately put into effect an aid-and-recovery programme out of federal funds. The New York Times was to call his actions ‘shutting the larder door after the food was bolted.’

But the national sense of shock was one of the strangest of Monday’s phenomena. It was expressed almost entirely on television, since very few people were prepared to confess to their friends that they, too, had been out looting the night before (in spite of the number of heavily-laden station wagons that had returned to the suburbs at dawn). In any case, most of the looters were law-abiding people who had acted completely out of character, and as Monday brightened, they began to feel ashamed and bewildered, and to look over the odd selection of food they had managed to scavenge, and ask themselves if it had been worth the hair-raising fright of smashing windows and burning stores and trying to elude the police.

Dr William Abrahams, of the Seattle Institute of Motivational Research, expressed his conviction on television that Americans had reached ‘that inevitable moment when their psychological model of themselves has been projected into reality – with disastrous consequences. Americans have always seen themselves as possessed of a divine right to affluence; blessed with a heavenly dispensation to go out and get whatever they want regardless of law, ethics, or basic humanity. Now they’ve put that vision into practice, and may God preserve us.’

At one p.m., the President appeared briefly on television again, and pleaded for ‘calm, constructive thinking, and prayer.’ He announced a forty-eight-hour amnesty for looters, ‘in the sure knowledge that most of you have repented of your actions’, and he asked that all stolen foodstuffs and goods should be returned to designated ‘loot points’ throughout the United States. The loot would be sold at clearance prices, and the money used to compensate city administrations, storekeepers, police departments, and supermarket chains.

By eleven o’clock that evening in the Central Time Zone, Busch Stadium in St Louis, Missouri, which had been signposted as a ‘Loot Amnesty Centre’, had been visited by only five uncomfortable-looking citizens, who returned between them two cases of corned beef, a leatherette swivel armchair, a broken portable television, sixty cans of petits pois, and a box of half-thawed soya-burgers.

By seven o’clock Pacific time, die Hollywood Bowl was stacked with 250 boxes of taco chips, bags of smashed cookies, and a truckload of garden hose.

The President later admitted that he may have made a ‘motivational misjudgement’ in announcing that the goods would be sold to compensate police and supermarket chains. Most people thought of the police as more felonious than the average man in the street; and most people believed that supermarket chains could easily sustain their losses. Apart from that, the supermarkets’ help-yourself technique of selling had convinced most people that the goods on the shelves were pretty much theirs already.

A special NBC film report at mid-afternoon showed a small country store in Forty Four, Arkansas. Looters had ransacked it during the morning, and had beheaded the proprietor with an axe as he tried to stop them. The whole store was splattered with blood, even the light fitting that hung from the ceiling. In an outraged interview, the President’s adviser on National Security said that the United States no longer had any normal right to condemn the barbaric practices of any other country, because the Americans who had committed this crime were ‘Neanderthals.’

Strangely, though, as the sun went down over the eastern seaboard, and the nation settled down for another night, the first shock and the panic began to subside, and were almost immediately replaced by boredom with the subject of looting, and irritation. Viewers began to call the major TV networks to complain that the extended evenings news bulletins were interrupting their regular viewing. A re-run of The Sting had been promised for Monday night’s NBC movie, and many television viewers were afraid they were going to miss it.

So by eight o’clock, most channels returned to normal schedules, except PBS, which doggedly kept on with interviews and analyses of the Sunday night riots. For most people’s attention-span, however, it was probably more than time to change over to something fresh. By eight o’clock, almost every available political commentator had been able to put in his ten-cents’ worth, and the news programmes were reduced to interviewing Naderites, John Birchites, and disaffected evangelists.

Only one major protagonist in the events of the previous night had yet to speak. Senator Shearson Jones, the senior senator from Kansas. He had been unreachable all day, even to Presidential aides. They had tried to telephone him from the White House sixteen times on Monday morning, but each time they had been told that he was ‘still en route to Washington.’ A message was left that the President wanted to speak to him the minute he stepped through his office door.

In fact, Shearson Jones was making no attempt to return to Washington. He judged that, politically, now was not the time. He told his security people to lock the gates of Lake Vista to keep newspapermen and curiosity seekers at bay, and then he closeted himself in his suite of rooms with Peter Kaiser. They had more urgent work to attend to than making excuses to a confused and angry President. In the panic of the night, nobody in the administration had thought to freeze the Blight Crisis Appeal, and Peter Kaiser was arranging for as much money as possible to be transferred to a charitable holding trust. It was difficult and complicated work, and it needed all of Peter Kaiser’s skill and all of Shearson Jones’s bludgeoning. By three o’clock that afternoon, however, they had extracted more than three million dollars extra out of the fund, and Peter was busy dispersing it from the holding trust to scores of ready-prepared subsidiaries. It would take the IRS years to discover that 250,000 dollars which had been invested in Roseville Hearing Aids, St Paul, had come from Kansas Charitable Investments, Inc., of Kansas City, and that when Roseville Hearing Aids had gone out of business, with no protesting creditors, the money had then been paid directly into the account of Ernest Thompson, of San Diego, California, who was really Senator Shearson Jones.

Shearson had been infuriated by Ed’s revelations, and mortified by the savagery and looting that had followed. But he was flexible enough to adapt himself to a changed situation, and not to cry over spoilt opportunities. The Blight Crisis Appeal had done famously well, considering the few days that it had been open, and Shearson wasn’t going to complain about twelve million dollars or more. He had lost the contribution from Michigan Tractors, and he was sore about that, but twenty or thirty lesser donations had cleared the bank during the Monday morning, before any of the companies involved had thought to act, and these payments had more than compensated Shearson for what he had lost. They could ask for their money back now until they were black in the face. It was too late, because the money had vanished.

Shearson had said nothing at all to Ed after his first angry outburst, but as Monday wore on it became clear that Ed was not going to be permitted to leave Lake Vista until Shearson decided to let him go. Ed was also kept incommunicado. Every time he picked up a telephone and tried to place a call, the house operator told him gently but firmly that ‘all outside lines are busy right now, Mr Hardesty.’