David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

‘Doing your own thing.’

‘That’s your bag.’

‘Shaking off the shackles of authority and conformity, of authoritarian conformity.’

‘I’m going to need to use the head very soon, I’m afraid.’

‘That’s more the sixties than the French Revolution, man, then.’

‘But if I’m getting DeWitt’s thrust, the fulcrum was the moment in the sixties when rebellion against conformity became fashionable, a pose, a way to look cool to the others in your generation you wanted to impress and get accepted by.’

‘Not to mention laid.’

‘Because the minute it became not just an attitude but a fashionable one, that’s when the corporations and their advertisers can step in and start reinforcing it and seducing people with it into buying the things the corporations are producing.’

‘The first time was 7 Up with its Sgt. Pepper psychedelia and kids in sideburns and saying “the Uncola.”’

‘But wait. The sixties rebellion in lots of ways opposed the corporation and the military-industrial complex.’

‘The man in the gray flannel.’

‘What is gray flannel anyway? Has anybody ever seen anybody ever in gray flannel?’

‘The only flannel I’ve got is PJs, man.’

‘Is Mr. Glendenning even awake?’

‘He looks awful pale.’

‘Everybody looks pale in the dark, man.’

‘I mean is there any more total symbol of conformity and marching in lockstep than the corporation? Assembly lines and punching the clock and climbing the ladder to the corner office? You’ve done field audits at Rayburn-Thrapp, Gaines. Those guys can’t wipe their ass without a policy memo.’

‘But we’re not talking about the interior reality of the corporation. We’re talking about the face and voice the corporate advertisers start using in the late sixties to talk the customer into thinking he needs all this stuff. It starts talking about the customer’s psyche being in bondage to conformity and the way to break out of the conformity is not to do certain things but to buy certain things. You make buying a certain brand of clothes or pop or car or necktie into a gesture of the same level of ideological significance as wearing a beard or protesting the war.’

‘Virginia Slims and women’s libbers.’

‘Alka-Seltzer.’

‘I think the I’m-going-to-die connection slipped by me at some point here.’

‘I think Stuart’s tracing the move from the production-model of American democracy to something more like a consumption-model, where corporate production depends on a team approach whereas being a customer is a solo venture. That we’re turning into consuming citizens instead of producing citizens.’

‘Just wait sixteen quarters till ’84. Just wait for the tidal wave of ads and PR that promote this or that corporate product as the way to escape the gray 1984 totalitarianisms of the Orwellian present.’

‘How does buying one kind of typewriter instead of another help subvert government control?’

‘It won’t be government in a couple years, don’t you see?’

‘There won’t be typewriters, either. Everyone’ll have keyboards cabled into some sort of central VAX, and things won’t even have to be on paper anymore.’

‘The paperless office.’

‘Rendering Stu here obsolete.’

‘No, you’re missing the genius of it. It’ll all be played out in the world of images. There’ll be this incredible political consensus that we need to escape the confinement and rigidity of conforming, of the dead fluorescent world of the office and the balance sheet, of having to wear a tie and listen to Muzak, but the corporations will be able to represent consumption-patterns as the way to break out — use this type of calculator, listen to this type of music, wear this type of shoe because everyone else is wearing conformist shoes. It’ll be this era of incredible prosperity and conformity and mass-demographics in which all the symbols and rhetoric will involve revolution and crisis and bold forward-looking individuals who dare to march to their own drummer by allying themselves with brands that invest heavily in the image of rebellion. This mass PR campaign extolling the individual will solidify enormous markets of people whose innate conviction that they are solitary, peerless, non-communal, will be massaged at every turn.’

‘But what role will government play in this 1984 scenario?’

‘Just as DeWitt said — the government will be the parent, with all the ambivalent love-hate-need-defy charges that surround the parent-figure in the mind of the adolescent, which in this case I’m respectfully disagreeing with DeWitt in the sense that I don’t think the American nation today is infantile so much as adolescent — that is, ambivalent in its twin desire for both authoritarian structure and the end of parental hegemony.’

‘We’ll be the cops they call when the party gets out of hand.’

‘You can see where it’s going. The extraordinary political apathy that followed Watergate and Vietnam and the institutionalization of grass-roots rebellion among minorities will only deepen. Politics is about consensus, and the advertising legacy of the sixties is that consensus is repression. Voting’ll be unhip: Americans now vote with their wallets. Government’s only cultural role will be as the tyrannical parent we both hate and need. Look for us to elect someone who can cast himself as a Rebel, maybe even a cowboy, but who deep down we’ll know is a bureaucratic creature who’ll operate inside the government mechanism instead of naively bang his head against it the way we’ve watched poor Jimmy do for four years.’

‘Carter represents the last gasp of true New Frontier sixties idealism, then. His obvious decency and his political impotence have been conjoined in the voter’s psyche.’

‘Look for a candidate who can do to the electorate what corporations are learning to do, so Government — or, better, Big Government, Big Brother, Intrusive Government — becomes the image against which this candidate defines himself. Though paradoxically for this persona, to have weight the candidate’ll also have to be a creature of government, an Insider, with a flinty-eyed entourage of bureaucrats and implementers who we’ll be able to see can actually run the machine. Plus of course a massive campaign budget courtesy of guess who.’

‘We’re now very very very far afield from what I started out trying to describe as my thinking about taxpayers’ relation to government.’

‘This describes Reagan even better than Bush.’

‘The Reagan symbolism’s just too bold. This is just my opinion. Of course the marvelous thing for the Service about a possible Reagan presidency is that he’s already anti-tax on the record. Flat-out, no hedging. No rise in the tax rates — in fact in New Hampshire he went on record as wanting to lower marginal rates.’

‘This is good for the Service? Another politician trying to score points by trashing the tax system?’

‘My own view: I see a Bush-Reagan ticket. Reagan for symbolism, the Cowboy, Bush the quiet insider, doing the unsexy work of actual management.’

‘Not to mention his hike-defense-spending rhetoric. How are you going to lower marginal rates and increase defense spending?’

‘Even a child could see the contradiction in that.’

‘Stuart’s saying it’s good for the Service because lowering marginal rates but increasing spending can happen only if collection of tax is made more efficient.’

‘Meaning the reins are off. Meaning the Service’s quotas go up.’

‘But also meaning a quiet reduction in the constraints on our auditing and collection mechanisms. Reagan’ll set us up as the black-hatted rapacious Big Brother he secretly needs. We — the stitch-mouthed accountants in dull suits and thick specs, punching the keys on our adding machines— become the Government: the authority everyone gets to hate. Meanwhile Reagan triples the Service budget and makes technology and efficiency serious objectives. It’ll be the best era the Service has had since ’45.’