Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

“Now out of all this, in spite of it, because of it, we developed Uncle Sam, the celebrated chiseling factor. And Uncle Sam developed the first leisured, literate masses — to the horror of all civilized men. All civilized men — fascists and leftist intellectuals alike — recoiled and still recoil at Uncle Sam’s bizarre creation, working masses with the money and the time to command the resources of their culture, who would not be instructed and who had no idea of their place. Because Uncle Sam thought of nothing but the almighty dollar he then created the machine-made popular culture to pander to them. To reinforce, if you like, their base instincts. He didn’t think it was his job to improve them and neither did they. This debasement of polite society is what we are now selling you.”

Again Holliwell paused. Voices were being raised but he was not being shouted down. He could make himself heard.

“I have the honor to bring you hope, ladies and gentlemen and esteemed colleagues. Here I speak particularly to the enemies of my country and their representatives present tonight. Underneath it all, our secret culture, the non-exportable one, is dying. It’s going sour and we’re going to die of it. We’ll die of it quietly around our own hearths while our children laugh at us. So, no more Mickey Mouse, amigos. The world is free for Latinate ideologies and German ismusisms … temples of reason, the Dialectic, you name it …”

He became aware of a more substantial disturbance and was compelled to face the room. At the rear, across the heads of those remaining, stood a young man in dark glasses wearing a black shirt and a Richard III haircut. The young man had risen to confront him.

“Is not this facile nihilism, Mr. Holliwell, a screen for Communistic theory?”

A guerrilla of Christ the King, Holliwell thought. The White Hand. He had an instant’s inward vision of his corpse rolling from a speeding car onto the lawn of the Panamerican.

“Isn’t nihilism, sir, a way of discrediting our Western Christian culture which the Communists seek to displace?”

“You can’t be serious,” Holliwell said.

“Oh, yes, sir,” the young man said, with a hint of unpleasant laughter. “Quite serious.”

Stricken by the recklessness of his conduct and reminded of where he was, Holliwell lamely sought a route back toward pedantic convention.

“Do you think that as a replacement for anything lost, I’m proposing Marxism? Do you think that despair leads me to cast envious eyes on Latvia or Kirghizstan?”

“Perhaps you feel for our people,” the young man suggested. “Perhaps you feel that we should look to Latvia or Kirghizstan.”

“What I feel is that I’ve offended you and you’re getting me back. I regard Marxism as analogous to a cargo cult. It’s a naïve invocation of a verbal machine.”

“But heroic? Perhaps inevitable?”

Idiotic as their exchange was, Holliwell considered, he had had it coming. It would teach him. But he was still drunk enough to be angry.

“Sure,” he said. “Perhaps. It’s a funny world, son.”

Now a middle-aged American was on his feet, encouraged by the young fanatic. Faced with revolt, Holliwell increasingly regretted his folly.

“I’d like to apologize to all the Compostelans here,” the American said. “And I want to ask you a question, Holliwell. Did the United States government pay for the display of bad manners you’ve just treated us to?”

“That’s correct,” Holliwell said.

“Well, I’m tired of apologizing for all the so-called experts who come down here on the taxpayers’ money and give the States a bad name. The only time I hear this kind of garbage is when I come to an event like this.”

“Once upon a time,” Holliwell told the man, “there was a chartered aircraft carrying American businessmen and their wives over Japan. The businessmen were insulation dealers from the northern Midwest. They were on a cultural tour of the Orient.”

“What do you bet,” the American asked someone who was with him, “that this little story has an anti-business moral?”

“How can I give you your money’s worth,” Holliwell said, “if you won’t listen to me?” The man sat down in disgust.

“Well, sir,” Holliwell continued, “these folks were being rewarded with this trip for having sold great quantities of insulation. But just as their plane flew over Mount Fuji it broke apart and all the dealers and their wives fell out. They and their plastic cups and their Kodachrome slides and their wallets full of pictures of the folks back home fell onto Mount Fuji. On the slopes, their bodies were collected by Buddhist monks and the monks laid them out and burned incense over them and that was how their cultural tour of the Far East ended. Now,” Holliwell said to the American, “is there a lesson in that or not?”

Dr. Nicolay was approaching him.

“I see no point in continuing,” Nicolay said. “I think you should go and rest, eh?”

Before Holliwell could respond, a red-haired woman with broad shoulders and a sad smile rose in the center of the diminished audience. “What about God?” she demanded in an Australian quaver. “Is there a place for God in all this?” Holliwell realized gratefully that she must be as drunk as he.

“There’s always a place for God, senora. There is some question as to whether He’s in it.”

Dr. Nicolay glowed with a smiling revulsion that Holliwell imagined must be Central European. He was at the point of allowing the doctor to supervise his removal when he saw that a honey-haired Compostelan lady had come down along the side aisle and was poised to address him. The lady was striking and her aspect amiable. He waited.

“I could be forgiven, Dr. Holliwell, could I not, if I inferred from your manner and the tone of your remarks that your attitude toward my country is ambiguous?” Her smile was demure, conventual and unthreatening. Holliwell blushed.

“My attitude is friendly,” he said. “I’m sincere.” He had already set in motion the processes by which he hoped in time to forget utterly the evening behind him. It was not pleasant to be compelled to a defense. “I thought I would improvise. I was after a deeper seriousness that I may not have … If my countryman hadn’t already done so I’d consider apologizing.”

“No need for that, sir,” said the smiling young woman. “But isn’t this stylized despair an excuse for immorality? Doesn’t it explain away all duty? Don’t you think your attitude reflects the decadence of your own society?”

“Shall I answer in any particular order?” Holliwell asked.

“The libertine and the Communist are the one hand washing the other!”

It was the young blackshirt, who was lounging by the door in a pistolero ’s crouch. There were several men with him who also favored dark shirts and tinted glasses.

“I’ve tried to answer your political objections,” Holliwell said evenly. “I’m not a political man.”

The politiques left looking unhappy. A whiff of Spanish menace, like cordite and jasmine, hung in the air. Holliwell, sobering up, was more and more driven into confrontation with the heedlessness of his demonstration.

The beautiful Compostelan lady in the aisle continued to smile on him.

“You were saying, Doctor?”

Holliwell looked at her blankly for a moment.

“The answer to all your questions is probably yes. Everything that’s known is someone’s excuse for something.”

The woman sat down in a chair that had been vacated. Holliwell was completely taken with her. He permitted himself to wonder if the debacle might not be turned around, if instead of waking up hung over and humiliated in his overpriced hotel room … it might be otherwise. Not a chance, he thought. Not this woman, not in this country. And not with him. He became once again aware of Nicolay, who was still beside him.