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01 June 2008
Sun, 01 Jun 2008 21:05:47 GMTInterface
Neal Stephenson is awesome. His brand of
special, pure, joyful absurdity
shines through in this one as well as any of his others. It’s from back in 1994, a thriller dealing with a shadowy power structure and its exertion of power upon a presidential election. Brilliant, and yes you should read it. A few things that got me to tick the pages:“In the 1700s, politics was all about ideas. But Jefferson came up with all the good ideas. In the 1800s, it was all about character. But no one will ever have as mch character as Lincoln and Lee. For much of the 1900s it was about charisma. But we no longer trust charisma because Hitler used it to kill Jews and JFK used it to get laid and send us to Vietnam.”
Ogle had broken a six-pack out of a junky old refrigerator behind the “Oval Office” and set up the cans on the presidential desk. Aaron had pulled up another chair and now both of them had their feet up on the desk and beers in their hands.
“So what’s it about now?” Aaron said.
“Scrutiny. We are in the age of Scrutiny. A public figure must withstand the scrutiny of the media,” Ogle said. “The President is the ultimate public figure and must stand up under ultimate scrutiny; he is like a man stretched out on a rack in the public square in some medieval shithole of a town, undergoing the rigors of the inquisition. Like the medieval trial by ordeal, the Age of Scrutiny sneers at rational inquiry and debate, and presumes that mere oaths and protestations are deceptions and lies. The only way to discover the real truth is by the rite of the ordeal, which exposes the subject to such inhuman strain that any defect in his character will cause him to crack wide open, like a flawed diamond. It is a mystical procedure that skirts rationality, which is seen as the work of the Devil, instead drawing down a higher, ineffable power. Like the Roman haruspex who foretold the outcome of a battle, not by analyzing the strengths of the opposing forces but by groping through the steaming guts of a slaughtered, we seek to establish a candidate’s fitness for office by pinning him under the lights of a television studio and counting the number of times he blinks his eyes in a minute, deconstructing his use of eye contact, monitoring his gesticulations—whether his hands are open or closed, toward or away from the camera, spread open forthcomingly or clenched like grasping claws.
“I paint a depressing picture here. Be we, you and I, are like the literate monks who nurtured the flickering flame of Greek rationality through the Dark Ages, remaining underground, knowing each other by secret signs and code words, meeting in cellars and thickets to exchange our dangerous and subversive ideas. We do not have the strength to change the minds of the illiterate multitude. But we do have the wit to exploit their foolishness, to familiarize ourselves with their stunted thought patterns, and to use that knowledge to manipulate them toward the goals that we all know are, quote, right and true, unquote.” 92-92
Anyone who adhered, at least nominally, to any religion that was invented millennia ago by people who ran around in burlap and believed that the Earth was built on the back of a turtle—that is, any of the major religions—ran into little dilemmas like this on a regular basis. 141
“Positions change. People don’t. Earl Strong may or may not always be a so–called conservative populist. But he will definitely always be a pencil–neck Hitler wannabe with a face from Wal–Mart, as you pegged him.” 237
Now there’s a political insult.
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Also somewhat recently
