ACCELERATE/INCREASE SUPPLIES AND MATERIEL 42 14
Are America’s allies doing all they can to assist this nation to recover?
- 1993 1992
AGREE 39% 34%
DISAGREE 57 61
NO OPINION 4 5
As in 1992, there were significant regional differences in response to this question:
- East/War Zone West
AGREE 17% 39%
DISAGREE 79 57
NO OPINION 4 4
Does the continued use of the U.S. Armed Forces to control the War Zones (approximately .7 million servicemen) pose a long-term threat to the return of constitutional authority to state and local governments in these areas?
- 1993 1992 1991
AGREE 23% 21% 26%
DISAGREE 68 69 67
NO OPINION 9 10 7
Significant differences again appeared between regions:
- East/War Zones West
AGREE 22% 35%
DISAGREE 71 55
NO OPINION 7 10
Should the center of the national government once again be reestablished on the East Coast, that is, moved from Los Angeles?
- 1993 1992
AGREE 38% 39%
DISAGREE 45 42
NO OPINION 17 19
Do you support the recent demands made by some groups for dividing the United States into two permanent regions, e.g., West and East?
- 1993 1992
AGREE 47% 47%
DISAGREE 50 48
NO OPINION 3 5
Los Angeles
It is the greatest city in the United States. In size, San Francisco isn’t even close.
Jim and I found it nostalgically complex, a vast mechanical toy full of buses and clanging trolleys and more cars than either of us have seen in one place in years.
It looks like fun, and the tension in the air reminds me a little of New York.
As much as there are things that are here from the past, there is something from the present that is missing. It is the sense of having suffered—the subtle tension that hangs between friends and strangers alike, everywhere else we have been so far. California didn’t suffer too much from the famine, and few people here were weak enough to be killed by the Cincinnati Flu. Radiation sickness is almost unknown, except among refugees.
On our first night in the bright streets of Los Angeles, I found myself returning to my old metropolitan habits, moving with quick anonymity and never meeting anybody else’s eyes.
There is a much stronger Japanese influence than ever before.
The streets are packed not only with Japanese businessmen but also with clerks and factory workers and children with American nannies. And there are cars: new Nissans that whistle when they accelerate and get 130 miles to a gallon of gas, sporty Toyota Z-90s, Isuzus and Mitsubishis and the occasional Mercedes-Benz.
There are also a few Fords, big and beautifully made at the new plant in Fullerton, and a great improvement over the notorious Consensus with the plastic windows. Despite its size, the new Thunderbird gets sixty miles per gallon. It also has a sensor that sounds an alarm if any radioactive particles should be taken into the air-conditioning system.
More, though, than its prosperity, L.A. has the feeling of prewar America, the cheer, the confidence, the cheek that one associates with former days.
I indulged myself shamelessly. In Little Tokyo there are dozens of open-air fruit and vegetable stands where melons and tomatoes and lettuce and carrots and squash and dozens of other things are stacked in abundance. Little Tokyo, by the way, now extends all the way to Sixth Street. It must be four times its prewar size. In Little Tokyo I bought an enormous vine-ripened tomato for two cents and ate it like an apple. I have not eaten such a thing in years. It was rich beyond belief, dense with a flavor that swept through my nostrils, heavy with juice. If I could design hydroponics that would grow tomatoes that flavorful, I’d get rich.
For fifteen cents we spent half an hour at an open-air sushi bar, sampling the catch and burning our nostrils with Japanese horse-radish. Then we strolled on, satiated, only to be tempted a few minutes later into a beautiful ice cream store, which sold a new brand called Sweet Sue. I had a double-dip cone of cherry vanilla and, in honor of my son, pistachio.
I wish that my family could enjoy the life here. No wonder the P.O.E. is so strict. If immigration was free, California would be drowned in people.
As illegals, we were faced with a number of very serious problems. The first was transportation. There are ten long-distance trolley lines and many more buses than there were before the war, but a car is still a terrific convenience in L.A. We did not have one and couldn’t rent one without revealing that our IDs were bogus.
So we were condemned to trying to figure out the intricate system of buses, minibuses, trolleys, and Aztlan-like pesetas.
Beyond transportation, we had the difficulty of finding a place to stay. I have enjoyed some extraordinary hotels in Los Angeles: the Beverly Hills, the Chateau Marmont, the Bonaventure.
But you can’t register in a hotel without an ID that will pass the computer. In every bus and trolley, posted in stores and in post offices and pasted on every available public bulletin board, of which there must be thousands, is the following sign:
MARTIAL LAW ORDER 106: IMMIGRATION ORDER
PENALTIES
Illegal immigrants are liable to arrest and imprisonment for up to three years for the first offense, imprisonment for no less than ten years, without possibility of parole, for the second.
WARNING! There are severe penalties for failing to report an illegal! You may be imprisoned for no less than twenty years for this offense. So don’t take chances, report!
REWARD
California will pay you for information leading to the capture of an illegal immigrant! You can make five gold dollars just for picking up the phone and dialing the Illegals Hot Line, 900-404-9999. So, if you get a bad ID or just see somebody who looks road-weary, give us a call. You never know when your suspicions might be worth their weight in gold!
We decided to assume a hostile population and made a few basic rules. First, we had to keep moving. Second, we had to sleep under the stars. We couldn’t even risk a rooming house—assuming we could find one with a room to rent. Housing is a nightmare in L.A. I saw ads in the Times offering small homes in the Valley for eight hundred in gold, no paper accepted and no mortgages given.
Dallas has whole neighborhoods where all you have to do is move in, bring your new house up to code, and it’s yours.
Our third rule was that we had to look as happy and well fed as the rest of the Angelinos. Considering our other rules, this one was damned hard to keep. But we dared not look “road-weary.” Angelinos know that overpopulation will strangle their prosperity, and they are generally avid to turn in illegals. We couldn’t risk arousing suspicion, especially not among our interviewees and in the offices Jim was visiting to get government documents.
We spent our first night in a carport at the La Mirada apartments. Immediately after dawn the next day, we had our second taste of conflict between government and members of the Destrueturalist movement. Shouting began echoing up and down La Mirada Avenue from the direction of El Centro. Then there were people running frantically through the carport, breathing hard, followed by battle-dressed officers on black mopeds.
One of the escapees dove under a car just beside us. Her gasping was so loud that we could hear it over the buzz of the passing mopeds.
One of the cops waved his pistol at us. “You don’t see this,” he called. Then he sped off.
“Halt,” echoed an amplified voice from the far end of the alley, “you’re all under arrest!”
Then there came the dismal mutter of capture, the gear-grinding approach of a small black schoolbus with bars welded across the windows, the quick disappearance of the little band of the desperate.
Then silence. Not a window opened in any of the houses that lined the alley, not a curious face appeare
d. We kept to the dim interior of the carport, listening to the breathing of the person under the car. We stayed like that for some little time. Once somebody came out of the La Mirada, got into a gleaming blue Consensus, and drove away.
“It’s quiet,” Jim said at last. “You can come out now.”
We then had our only contact with the Conspiracy of Angels, and learned a little more about the nature of Destructuralism.
A Statement by an Anonymous Member of the Conspiracy of Angels
People cannot continue to hide from the fact that this civilization is totally bankrupt. Society needs a whole new way of doing and being if we are not going to build up all over again and wind up with an even worse war.
That is where the Destructuralist Movement comes in, and the Angels are militant Destructuralists.
What is Destructuralism, you might ask, and what’s in it for me and my family? First off, Destructuralism says that your person and those you make your family are the only valid social unit, and the maintenance of that family is the only valid economic activity.
We say that the whole social edifice, from the Boy Scouts right up to the Army, is essentially an addiction, that it is more than unnecessary, it is dangerous. Social structures are the breeding ground of ideology, greed, and territorialism. Agricultural communities are peaceful communities, and families bound together by need and love do not go to war.
No matter how benign a given structure seems, it will inevitably lead to the same consequences all social structures lead to, namely, war and death. Real social harmony comes not from law-books but from the human heart.
If that is too high an ideal, then it is perfectly obvious that we are eternally condemned to the slavery of warfare, and probably also to extinction.
Government is institutionalized dehumanization. People who deal with paper instead of other people lose the all-important thread of contact from heart to heart. Here’s a story about a social structure that all of America loves, the British Relief. A man who joined our movement got eye cancer and the Relief did triage on him and sent him home. People wait in line for days, only to be told by some English nanny that they can’t even get an aspirin. And if you go black market for medicine and get caught, it is not a jury of your peers that tries you, it is the Relief. And they forced you onto the black market in the first place. This man with eye cancer bought black-market chemotherapy, got caught, and had to pay a fine, even though he was dying.
He became an Angel a month before he took henbane from a witch. He did not die of cancer, he died of structure, or at least suffered from it. There is no shortage of painkillers, for example. The Relief could have given him Brompton Mixture on an outpatient basis, but the rules reserve it for inpatients only, and he couldn’t be an inpatient because he was triaged!
So the structure—simply because it was there—at the very least condemned him to unnecessary agony. If his family had been in control of his fate, instead of some bureaucrat in the Relief office down at the civic center, he would have been spared the torment and indignity of the pain.
People say thank God Europe didn’t get in the war, what would we do without them, but the Angels say we are just suffering more because of the structures that are now being imposed on us from the outside. When Washington was destroyed, we had a golden, historic opportunity to free ourselves from the age-old slavery of government. Instead, we are having both economic and political structure imposed on us from the outside—colonial exploitation, as a matter of fact, very similar to what the Europeans practiced on the Chinese in the last century. The foreign presence on our shores is nothing more than a prescription for more structural enslavement, with the added problem that we don’t even control the structure.
Also, they take crops from the few viable growing areas and allocate them not only to North America but also to themselves. Remember, if we weren’t feeding Europe too, we wouldn’t be starving ourselves. The story is that they have gone into Argentina and taken it over to make sure the crops are not held up for high prices. Argentina is no longer even a country. If you read the English papers, they always call it “the Argentine” or some such thing. We believe that most of the population south of the border is dead of starvation, and the Europeans caused it by taking the only food our Latin sisters and brothers could get their hands on, the Argentine wheat. That is hundreds of millions of deaths.
We call ourselves Angels because we help people in need and because we remember the dishonored dead of the world, those who died on Warday in the United States and the USSR, and the billions who have died since. We represent the living, the ordinary men and women and children who see that, in order to survive, mankind needs a whole new way of being.
There is inherent in Destructuralism the concept that people can remake their own hearts to include a new valuation of their fellow human beings. By refocusing our energies on our families we can learn never to forget for an instant how it feels to be the other person. For example, the American President and the Russian Premier could not have done what they did to the rest of us on Warday if they had been trained from birth never to forget for an instant that all human beings are partners in life and that everybody is as important to himself or herself as they were to themselves—that the death of the average Joe was going to be as much of a catastrophe for him and his family as the death of the great leader would be to his own precious self and his relatives. Instead, they sat in their command posts and talked numbers. To Destructuralists there are no numbers, there are only names and faces and hearts.
Only in a truly destructured, rehumanized social milieu can the kind of maturing growth that people need take place, because only if there are no distancing structures can the individual come to realize, through his identification with his own family, that every other life on earth is as precious and valuable as his own.
You might argue that Destructuralism is old-style anarchy all over again, but it isn’t. Destructuralism is based on the caring of mature human souls for one another and for the planetary body, too. It is government by putting yourself in the other man’s shoes.
The bible said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
That is all the government the world needs.
Remember this: If you love life and think that big government is big poison, and you are willing to stand hand in hand with your brothers and sisters on this earth, do not scorn the Angels, for you are one.
Fugitives
As soon as she finished her statement, our friendly Angel got into the nearest American-made car, reached under the dashboard, and hotwired it.
“You want a ride?”
We didn’t. We just wanted to disappear. She backed out into the alley and was soon off down La Mirada. Not ten seconds after the car had disappeared, there came a roar from about thirty feet overhead and an ultralight aircraft darted past in the direction she had gone. There are large numbers of these planes in Los Angeles skies, used by police and fire departments to keep detailed tabs on rooftops and backyards. Soon, more of the moped cops shot past on La Mirada.
We were scared. The penalties for being an illegal immigrant in California are severe. Capture could mean years in a work camp.
Maybe all the years I have left.
“Let’s get out of here,” Jim said. “Half the police department’s in the neighborhood this morning.”
I did not reply. I was thinking of Anne and Andrew, wondering what they were doing. It was a quarter to six in Dallas. I could imagine my family out in the henhouse, Anne collecting eggs while Andrew did the cleaning. I could hear the hens clucking and smell thick henhouse odors mixing with the aroma of morning coffee floating across from the kitchen.
Another ultralight appeared and began circling us as we walked along La Mirada. It was all I could do not to break and run as the damned thing soared round and round overhead, its engine whining like an angry wasp. Jim stopped and looked up, shielding his eyes from the sun.
“Don’t do that!”
“It’s more suspicious to ignore him.”
The policeman’s amplified voice crackled down: “IDs, please!”
We held up our red plastic cards. He peered down as he made another sweep, then flew off, talking into his radio.
“Do you think that did it, Jim?”
“No.”
“Neither do I.” We walked on, heading for the Santa Ana Freeway. If we could catch an interregional bus there, it just might take us all the way to Burbank.
Suddenly a black car pulled up, and behind the wheel was an unexpected but welcome sight: a priest in a Roman collar. “Get in,” he said.
The thought crossed my mind that he might be a police agent.
Then a siren began wailing. I could see the lights of a squad car far down La Mirada. “Get in,” the priest repeated. “Hurry up about it!”
We got into the old Buick. “Down, down, you darned fools!” As the squad car roared past, we dropped to the floor of the back seat.
“They’re on foot,” a voice rattled from the front seat I was astonished to realize that the priest had a police radio. “Two-four-two to Air Six. We do not, repeat, do not have them in our sight.”
The priest started his car. “That’s a relief, anyway.”
“Father—”
“Keep down!”
He drove us to his rectory, where we got a shave, a shower, and a much-needed change of clothing. He never referred to the Destructuralists, or why he had been in that particular neighborhood at that time, or why he had so mercifully helped us.
He believed strongly in the value of human freedom, though, and in the old Bill of Rights. You can read that between the lines of the interview he gave us.
INTERVIEW
Reverend Michael Dougherty, Catholic Priest
I was afraid we wouldn’t have time to do this, but I think you’re probably safe here for another half hour or so. I’m glad to get the chance to speak for publication. We’ve forgotten a few basic human freedoms out here in sunny California. We need to rediscover ourselves as Americans—as people, really. As children of God.
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