THE OVERTON WINDOW (28 page)

Most people missed the meaning of this peculiarity. It wasn’t simply the quiet that was important to Arthur Gardner. His own sounds were probably music to his ears. It was the noise of other human beings—the reminders of their existence—that was what he wanted to avoid. He’d
said it more than once: if he stepped out of the house one morning and by some miracle all the people were gone, that would be his fondest wish come true. That’s how much he loved to be alone.

The two of them had been sitting for over a minute in that dead, cottony silence when Noah finally mustered the courage to speak.

“I’m sorry, Dad.”

“There’s no need to apologize to me.”

“Really, I’m sorry—”

“No need, I said.” His father set his pipe in its rest and leaned back in his chair. “It was more an insult than an injury, the idea that they managed to use you in an attempt to damage our company and our clients. We’ve known of these people, of course, and we’d thought we were adequately prepared, but they surprised all of us, didn’t they? And I must say”—now there was a strange little smile on his face—“this avenue they chose, the seductive infiltration by this girl, it shows a great deal more ingenuity than I would have expected, given the source. It was inspired, really. Ruthless though it was.”

“I should have known better.”

“Nonsense. Wiser men than you have fallen, and to far less able enemies. Monarchs, captains of industry, senators, sitting presidents, very nearly.” He picked up his pipe, tapped it on the desk, and set about the ritual motions of lighting it again. “Let’s put it behind us. I’m afraid we have other pressing matters to discuss.”

In a quick look back over the years Noah was certain he could have counted the number of actual, heart-to-heart conversations with his father on the digits of a single hand. Now it looked like another one was coming, and frankly, he wasn’t in the mood. The shock of it all was fading and now he was angry, and hurt, and sick, and in dire need of a meal and a long rest to try to wash this giant mess away.

“I’m not a hundred percent right now, Dad. What is it that we need to discuss?” His father had made threats of retirement many times in the past, but somehow this didn’t feel like one of those.

“Something is going to happen tomorrow morning, Noah. Something that will be the beginning of quite a change in the way things are. This weekend’s developments, this theft and the accompanying threat of exposure, have served only to further convince the parties involved that now is the time for this—this course correction.”

“What’s going to happen?”

For a few seconds the old man seemed uncharacteristically at a loss for words.

“This young woman—this Molly Ross and her people. Do you understand the difference between the world as they see it and the world as it really is?”

“I’m not sure I understand very much right now.”

“If they spoke with you at all then I’m sure you received the full picture from their warped point of view. Their proud ethos is generally the first thing to pop out of their mouths, or some variation on the theme.” The following words were delivered in a deep tone of mocking reverence. “‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal—that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights—life, liberty,’ and so on. That is the rallying cry of the modern-day American armchair patriot, and it’s a stirring turn of phrase, I must admit.

“But I came to understand at an early age that Thomas Jefferson himself couldn’t really have believed what he’d written in his Declaration. No slave owner could. Nor could any man with his intelligence, and his great knowledge of history, believe himself to be equal in any way to the ignorant masses of his time. He was preparing to do battle with an empire, making his case against the divine right of kings, so he brazenly invoked the Creator on his own behalf. He proposed that God was the source of these inborn rights of man, and that, contrary to the popular mythology of the times, the Almighty would not be on the side of the British royalty if the conflict came to war.

“That these rights were granted by God, it wasn’t the truth, you see,
it was what Jefferson needed to say to give his revolution the moral authority to proceed. But he also must have known he was putting far more faith in the common people than they’ve ever shown the courage to deserve.”

Noah was trying to imagine what possible urgency this subject could have right now, though he didn’t see a choice but to sit there and stay with it. “You think Jefferson was wrong, then.”

“Oh, I think he was right to try. There’s a tale from those days, at the close of the Constitutional Convention, in which someone asked Benjamin Franklin what form of government the people would be given, a republic or a monarchy. Do you remember what Franklin replied?”

“ ‘A republic,’” Noah said, “‘if you can keep it.’”

The old man nodded. “If they could keep it, yes. Such a thing had never been attempted before, not on the scale these men proposed. It was a bold experiment whose outcome was far from certain, and it could have worked. But its founding premise was also its great weakness: that these common people of the United States, for the first time among all the people in recorded history, could somehow prove capable of ruling themselves—to hold on to the fragile gift they’d been given. And time and again they’ve proven they’re not equal to the task.”

“So what are you telling me, Dad?”

“Let me ask you, Noah. Put their complete incompetence in self-government aside for the moment. Do you believe that people, human beings, are basically good? That—as your loyal friend Molly would no doubt preach to us—all they must do is awaken and embrace liberty and the highest potentials of mankind will be realized?”

“I want to believe that.”

“I didn’t ask you what you wanted,” the old man said, his words carrying a sharp enunciation that made it clear he would accept no such avoidance. “I asked what you believe.”

“Then yes. I do believe that people are basically good.”

“Easy enough to say, though history sadly proves otherwise. In the face of the worldwide collapse that’s soon to be upon us, we’ll be lost if we place our faith in wishes and hopes for the best.” He picked up a folded newspaper near his hand and passed it across the desk. “This is the essence of human nature, left to its own devices.”

Noah took the newspaper, expecting to see a run-of-the-mill story of a faraway genocide or massacre, widespread child abuse by some august religious institution, or maybe a retrospective of Nazi atrocities or the horrors of the killing fields. But it’s too easy to indict a powerful regime and its leaders while giving a pass to the followers themselves—they, the people who took the orders without question or stood by, silent, and watched the nightmare come to pass. The example his father had chosen was smaller, and cut deeper, and was a much harder thing to simply chalk up to some vague blanket notion of man’s inhumanity to man.

The headline of the story was
TURKISH GIRL, 16, BURIED ALIVE FOR TALKING TO BOYS
.

The text below went on to explain that a young girl had been the victim of an honor killing, not an uncommon thing in many cultures, allegedly at the hands of her own father and grandfather. They’d buried her alive under a chicken pen in the backyard behind the house. And this was no crime of passion; it takes a long, thoughtful time to do such a thing. In fact, a family council meeting had determined what her punishment should be for the crime of hanging out with her friends.

Noah put the paper down. “This doesn’t mean that all of humanity is evil,” he said. “There are always extremists.”

“I was a social anthropologist, you’ll recall, before I became a pitchman, so with all due respect let me assure you that it’s much closer to everyone than you might be willing to believe. People are made of the same stuff around the world. If that girl had been born in South Africa she’d have been as likely to be raped by the time she was sixteen as to learn how to read. Slavery in one form or another is more widespread
today than ever before in history. The fact that one in a million of us may have evolved beyond those lower instincts is of no great comfort to me.

“It’s getting worse, Noah, not better. There have always been only four kinds of people in the world: the visionaries who choose the course, and we are the fewest; the greedy and corruptible—they’re useful, because they’ll do anything for a short-term gain; the revolutionaries, a handful of violent, backward thinkers whose only mission is to stand in the way of progress—we’ll deal with them in short order; and then there are the masses, the lemmings who can scarcely muster the intelligence to blindly follow along.

“There are far more of them than there are of us, and more are coming every day. When I was born there were two billion people in the world; now that number has more than tripled, all in a single lifetime. And it isn’t the Mozarts, or the Einsteins, or the Pascals, or Salks, or Shakespeares, or the George Washingtons who are swelling the population beyond the breaking point. It’s the useless eaters on the savage side of the bell curve who are outbreeding the planet’s ability to support them.

“A billion people around the world are slowly starving to death right now. Twenty thousand children will die of hunger today. That’s the decaying state of the human condition. And when the real hard times come—and they’re coming soon—you can multiply all the horrors by a thousand. In the vacuum created by fear and ignorance and hunger and want, it’s evil, not good, that rushes in to fill the void.”

It sounded like there was no answer, but he knew his father too well for that to be the case. You didn’t have to like it, but the old man always had a solution.

“What we’ve finally come to understand, Noah, is that the people can’t be trusted to control themselves. Even the brightest of them are still barbarians at heart. We’ve only just bailed out my friends on Wall
Street from under the devastation of the last financial bubble they created, and I guarantee they’re already hard at work pumping up the next one, even as they know full well that it will be fatal. It’s like a death wish of the species: it’s in our genes, this appetite for destruction. And if we’re to survive, those urges must be brought under control.

“The riddle today is the same one faced by the Founding Fathers when they began their experiment. Societies need government. Governments elevate men into power, and men who seek power are prone to corruption. It spreads like a disease, then, corruption on corruption, and sooner or later the end result is always a slide into tyranny. That’s the way it’s always been. And so this government of the United States was brilliantly designed to keep that weakness of human nature in check, but it required the people to participate daily, to be vigilant, and they have not. It demanded that they behave as though their government was their servant, but they have not. In their silence the people of the United States have spoken. While they slept the servant has become their master.

“The American experiment has failed, and now it’s time for the next one to begin. One world, one government—not of the people this time, but of the
right
people: the competent, the wise, and the strong.”

The dope-induced haze was still hanging there before Noah’s eyes, and his stomach had begun to churn. Between the remains of the opiates swirling through his brain and the drugs he’d been given to counter those effects, he could feel himself starting to lose the metabolic tug-of-war. All these words his father was saying, all the things he’d seen in that presentation, what he’d learned from Molly in the hours they were together, and what he’d learned of her since—something was trying to come together in his mind but he wasn’t fit to think it all the way through.

“You’re saying there’s no hope for this country,” Noah said.

“I’m saying, Noah, that my clients came to me with a problem,” the old man said, “and I gave them a solution. We start tomorrow
morning. I’ve stood by and watched the glacial pace of this decline for too many years. Now the remnants of the past will be swept away in a single stroke, and I’ll see my vision realized before I die. Order from chaos, control, and pacification of the flawed human spirit. Call that hope if you like, but it’s coming regardless. The experiment that begins tomorrow will not fail.”

PART
THREE
 

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

—E
DWARD
B
ERNAYS, AUTHOR OF
Propaganda

CHAPTER 32