The Philatelist

by Tito Perdue

  “You’ll want to insure that,” he iterated, touching my stamp with the tip of one of his longer fingers.

  “Yes, I will,” said I. “But I worry about the time I’ll need to get to my insurer. I might get robbed.”

  “Very possible. We have some crazy stamp collectors in this city.”

  “Philatelists, you mean.”

  “Of course.”

  “I stopped being a ‘stamp collector’ when I was nine years old.”

  “To be sure. I apologize.”

  “Some people play golf, while others are golfers.”

  “Don’t you just know it. Likewise some people have cars while others have . . .”

  “Yes. Strange world out there.” He pointed to it.

  I paid for the purchase, making use of a traveler’s check. The bozo then provided me with an empty tin box that once had held a pricy brand of foreign cigarettes, and after inserting my stamp inside it, accompanied me the first two blocks of my trip to the insurance place. It was a noble building, where that man did business, and bore a Latin inscription above the door that had only the subtlest connection to the activities going on inside. The man with whom I was accustomed to deal was engrossed in tide tables or actuarial tables or something of the kind. I showed him my stamp.

  “Nice! What am I supposed to do with it?”

  “I need to insure it.”

  “Ah. Have to get an appraisal, of course. Worth about nineteen cents, would you say?”

  “I paid $2,200!”

  We looked at each other. Finally he made a remark. His mouth was full of a bright blue tongue and snagged teeth pointing off in all directions. His voice was certainly a New Yorker’s.

  “$2,200. See this here pencil? Sell it to you for ten thousand. It’s got an eraser on it.”

  I strode hurriedly to work, in my vest pocket a reluctantly-allowed insurance policy granted purely in consideration of our prior arrangements. The sidewalk was crowded, of course, and I relied upon that to hinder burglars and the usual collectors. Arriving at my place, I smiled in turn at everyone, and then slipped the stamp between pages 100 and 101 of the Antonescu memoirs in my top drawer. There remain to me just four days of eight hours each before I am to be turned out into a twenty-first-century world full of stamps and former wives and a third-class airline ticket to ------ in -------.

  Twenty-Six

  I’m not going to write any more of these memoires; I’m tired and have a great many other things in mind just now. I will say there is to be an auction the day after tomorrow, and I refuse to leave town before having a chance at it. And then, too, I am one of the small number to have been invited to the bidding for the Himmler Collection.

  Finally, I will say that I had a dream last night in which my true wife had come back and was bending over me, her eyes sparkling with the love that I had thrown away. It was wrong, I confess it, to have done what I did merely on account of her confusion between the Arabic and Persian scripts. But I was young in those days. Give her back to me—this time I’m begging—give her back and . . .

  Ah no, not a chance. I have long ago zipped past the fail-safe point on my path to oblivion and must be satisfied with the joys, if there are any, of a perhaps somewhat elevated form of non-existence among the arts.

  GOOD THINGS IN

  TINY PLACES1

  Yesterday, on my way to this meeting place, I stopped at a traffic light and fell suddenly into a burning ring of fire and began to imagine that our purpose here was not merely to discuss the probable future of white people in Western societies, but rather to take real action in an attempt to salvage at least some residue of the Caucasian demographic, Caucasian habits, and the Western high culture. For although we don’t judge Caucasians by their present-day behavior, we do know that in the past, unlike most other races, white people have sometimes created admirable societies and might do so again. We thought of those cosmologists who search for exoplanets that might be made habitable after our own planet has ceased to exist; likewise, in that same vein, we began to discuss places on Earth that might offer sanctuary for Caucasians who wish to give Western civilization, even if just in miniature scale, another century or two of continued existence.

  With that in mind, we voted to send one of our members to sniff out the possibilities in Canada, a large territory to the immediate north of our own country where a fair number of awakened people have already drawn off into the corners of that politically correct domain and have begun to resist the summons of ethnic suicide. That emissary of ours, who happens to be here with us today, remained four months, and having at last recuperated from a really very serious case of frostbite, reported back that the Canadians had invested so thoroughly in the theory of universal human equality that no realistic hope remained there for a recrudescence of our traditional culture.

  I imagined then that we had assigned yet another agent to the country of Argentina, a South American organization said to have been settled primarily by emigrants from Italy and Spain. A not unpleasant locale, topographically speaking, our representative nevertheless found there a debased and very heterogeneous population only slightly superior to that of Honduras or Haiti, or invertebrate Mexico. At that point we opted to ignore that country, and indeed the entire hemisphere thereto attached.

  We tried Australia, but not for very long. From having once enjoyed the best immigration policy in the world, that island has recently discovered a need for ever larger numbers of hard-working but unsmiling Chinese. With a white fertility ratio now in negative territory, the Australians are looking even further afield for new citizens, including especially in such locales as American Indian reservations, Lapland, Detroit, Kirgizstan, and the Central African Republic. On the bright side, they have abrogated some of the rules and regulations directed against English speakers.

  In the wake of these disappointments, we met again eighteen months later in an inconspicuous town (not named here) in southwest Nebraska, a place rarely visited by the national media. It is true that a bitter debate broke out on the second day, and that our former fellowship was damaged by a much-too-vehement debate in which four of the members spoke for remaining in America and continuing the struggle here at home for the resumption of racial inequality. The motion was voted down, however, whereupon one of the attendees got suddenly to his feet, made a hissing noise, departed, and never came back again.

  It wasn’t until the third week of our conference that the delegate from New York, a certain Chris Martin, mentioned the name of a place called New Zealand as a possibility. His suggestion was at first received with silence. Known mostly for America’s remoteness from that place, and its strange fauna, we needed time to absorb the suggestion. Comprised mostly of two large islands with a gap between them, the country was known to have been settled in 1840 by British people who without great effort were able to impose themselves on the aboriginal people, who quickly learned to get the hell out of the way. Dismayed by the quality of the natives, the fair-minded British nevertheless refrained from what they could so easily have done, even allowing those people to marry and own property, and to sustain themselves as a certain percentage of the population.

  Despite that, the culture of those islands was said to be distinctly European, more European indeed than most parts of modern Europe itself. As for the topography, the lakes and rivers, woods and fields, the mountains and their requisite valleys, these features have come together just about perfectly in this most inviting of all locations. Especially the South Island is regarded by connoisseurs as among the most gorgeous acreages in the whole wide world. Our delegate needed very little time to verify this description and then come running back to us with his eyes all aglow.

  And so as I continued dreaming, I imagined that by October five of us, together with our families, had made the long journey by sea to New Zealand’s South Island, where we wasted the first several days accustoming ourselves to the southern sky, with its odd-looking constellations. But this was nothing as compared to
the upside-down seasons, which became more and more abnormal the further south we traveled. It was late September by this time, a propitious season more or less equal in quality to early April in more northerly parts. Never will I forget it, the supernal views that offered themselves as we squeezed our way through the channel that divides the two main islands. I thought I saw a flight of kiwi birds overhead, which is to say until I was informed that those creatures had long ago lost their penchant for flying.

  We wasted two further weeks behaving like tourists, but by October we had found homes for ourselves in a picturesque village in the island’s southeasternmost quadrant. The views were excellent, and the water not as frigid as has all too unthinkingly been imputed to the Pacific Ocean. The schools were good, too, most of them, and the citizenry spoke a better grade of English than did us interlopers. The price of real estate wasn’t greatly unlike what prevailed in the United States, and for the most part the national diet was not altogether unacceptable. As you can see, we were already thinking of applying for citizenship, and except for the presence of some 22,000 Maori aborigines, would probably have done so before the first two months were out. You must remember, too, that we were retired people with sufficient income or, in the case of the Albercrombie family, wealthy enough to offer non-assumable five- and ten-year loans at a rate only slightly more than twice that of prevailing Treasury Notes. Opportunities for employment were limited, it is true, and yet we had no hesitation in summoning our friends and relatives to come and join us.

  At this point I will admit that it needed some courage to denounce our American citizenship and to become authentic New Zealanders with all the responsibilities and benefits thereunto attached. We had to adjust to a new social code that allowed us to speak to neighbors, or even strangers, without being chided for our genetic identity. Slowly and slowly, we became aware that our island was not dropping bombs on any other country, no matter how weak and small. And I can honestly testify that I have seen twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys and girls enjoying each other’s company even in the absence of full penetration.

  Friends and relatives—they came slowly at first, reluctant to leave behind a country that had produced the Antebellum South and had once given promise of developing into something like ancient Greece, or Florence, or London in Elizabeth’s day. Instead of that, the United States had merely gotten rich and powerful, and more and more detestable with each succeeding election. Particularly it was the election of 2024 that drove more than four hundred American Caucasian families to our little island and made possible the election of some of our own people to local offices. Truth is, we had already become an identifiable demographic despised by some and applauded by others. Evidence of hostility had quickly broken out in the township of Riverton, a widely reported event that revealed what sort of people were these American newcomers who not only spoke with an accent, but also had refused to surrender their guns at the border. Month by month, the island’s young people came to us, demanding to be given a role in the rioting and the electioneering that followed in our wake.

  We were bolstered by the people of Invercargill, a largish town of some fifty thousand souls, the first to rally to our cause. Came next Dunedin, where the town council agreed to hear us out. By this time we numbered better than two thousand, and had won the support, or anyway the tolerance of an appreciable minority of the island’s voters. Polls showed that no less than thirty-one percent of the people were glad for our presence on the island, or at least were not overtly hostile to our project of prolonging Western civilization for another century or more.

  We were a Faustian race, we tried to explain, who had come to fulfill and then to supersede itself. Thus we recommended ourselves, boasting that we were of the same race as had given more to life than all the others added up together. Our own country, we explained, had surrendered to the imperial temptation and had by now become so heterogeneous that a coherent culture was no longer feasible. Life in America, we went on, now required a degree of cultural toleration indistinguishable from nihilism.

  But what we mostly understood was that the notion of across-the-board universal wall-to-wall categorical human equality was, as Alex Kurtagić has shown, the most immoral and most suicidal concept ever to find acceptance in an educated, or anyway a semi-educated, nation. He saw, did Alex, that equality and quality hate each other, and that an equal society is perforce a lowest-common-denominator society that will always be finding new ways to slough off standards and to marginalize its own best people. And finally we understood that an equal society will soon become unequal again, except that this time it will be the worst who are considered the best, and the best the worst.

  We understood, too, that in post-modern times television has the authority to nudge people in any direction the producers want, while at the same undermining even the most instinctual and time-honored traditions. We understood, too, that we had in our midst a man so very rich that he could take control, if he so wished, of the island’s most important television network.

  By this time, our numbers had increased to just more than eight and a half thousand, good persons, most of them, and venturesome enough to bring their savings, their relatives, and their experience in starting businesses and commercial operations. Some were merely opportunists of course, ordinary folk fleeing conditions in the U.S. and in Europe, where the demographics were turning more and more decidedly against white people and their standards. Which is not to say that those standards weren’t also in a state of advanced decay. Indeed, it had become difficult to say whether it were the immigrants who were degrading the United States, or the United States that was degrading the immigrants. Because decadence, feeding on the applause of the masses, had become irreversible by now.

  Timaru, a maritime city that overlooks the sea, was the first place in New Zealand to fall under our sway. Having elected a majority of the town council, we summoned together the some 158 Maori aborigines who lived in the vicinity and offered each man and women of them a full 1,500 New Zealand dollars to emigrate and not come back again. Those willing to undergo sterilization were offered twice that amount, a promise that nearly bankrupted the city treasury. It is hard to describe the anger directed at us by the island’s good-thinking people, not to mention the reaction in the international press. The United Nations had involved itself, and we were summoned to appear before the International Court. On the other hand, the town’s expatriate population more than doubled in the following seven months with people from nearby towns beginning to cluster around the three villages we now controlled. We were in some danger of comprising a city, until the authorities, just in the nick of time, made that impossible.

  The rest of the story is well-known to you, how by 2028, we had managed to gain a permanent electoral majority over the entire island and could begin at last to put into effect the policies that had inspired us from the start. Determined to evade the banality of democracy, we wanted to accomplish that which never before had ever been tried, namely to put in place a governing elite composed of people who were able to think, recognizing as we did that the overwhelming majority of human beings are capable merely of taking into account half a dozen prevailing orthodoxies and then choosing the one or two that promise to be the least demanding. For our part, we wanted to build a community prepared to give no better than ten per-cent of its energies to economics and the remaining part to matters of importance, the exact reverse of established practice up until that point. In short, we wanted to break through the glass ceiling of human nature and begin the process of obsolescing ourselves. We wanted to organize our own evolution and become a new species.

  Of course it was dangerous. Of course there were China and the United States to contend with. The United Nations, NATO, the EU, bilateral trade agreements, the Kansas City Flower Club—all these organizations and institutions would want to put us out of business as promptly as possible and sink our little island beneath the waves. And who could blame them? If our experiment were successful,
it would prove the whole world had been hideously mistaken over the most recent five thousand years.

  In the event, it happened that we had a certain famous toxicologist in our town, a man as devoted to our adventure as anyone well could be. He it was who gave us the safety we desired. Too small and too poor to develop nuclear weapons, far less the needed delivery systems, our man “cooked up,” so to speak, two tons of a certain highly contagious virus that must not be mentioned here by actual name. Thereafter it was an easy matter for our agents to stow vacuum-sealed containers of this material in the major cities of the several countries that might pose a threat.

  For our further defense, we listened to the island’s foremost Classical scholar, who described for us how some of the veterans of Alexander had formed themselves into an army called “The Silver Shields,” a force of septuagenarians who were to prove the most terrifying fighting force of the age. Widowers, most of them, whose children had grown up and become independent, these were people who had little to live for, and who cared not at all for their own survival. With effort, we were able to identify some 1,626 such people from among our own population, 70 and 75 and yes, even some 80-year-olds trained to bench press their own weight and run five miles in under an hour. Posted at intervals along our shores, they defended us most adequately from tourists, immigrants, refugees, and photo-journalists from the New York Times. Even better, they defeated all attempts by the North Island, now only ninety-two percent white, to force us to reunite.