by Paul Dueweke
CHAPTER TWENTY
Triumph of Arrogance
“Yes, Sherwood, what is it now?”
“It still does not make sense to me. People will not suddenly begin mass participation in elections just because it is fun and certainly not because the politicians are better quality. There must be more to it than that.”
“We’ve discussed this, and it’s not even properly a part of this class. Last quarter you covered all that with Professor Newton.”
Sherwood arrogantly endured the glare of his teacher and the uncomfortable tension in the classroom. He wondered if the staff here at the Institute was merely promulgating the party line or if they really believed that the dramatic revolution in American politics was really that simple.
Maybe I should try Newton one more time, he thought. She seems different than the others. Maybe she just could not depart from the party line during class. He knocked on the door that read “Dr. I. Newton.” Her attitude was very scholarly, which juxtaposed her surfer-girl exterior.
Sherwood went right to the point. “I cannot understand why participation has climbed to over ninety percent since TV voting was introduced. And TV was only part of the change, and not even the most important part. The candidates were lawyers in the old days, and they at least paid lip service to the more popular issues. Now the candidates are media celebrities, elected on game shows. How can you rationalize such a dramatic change in such a short time?”
“Sherwood. Yeah, I remember. Sat in the back, didn’t say much. Just scared the hell out of everyone with your weird stares.” She stood up and walked to a ROM-card file and opened it, continuing to speak. “Remember Ms. Snell? Sat a little up from you. I know you noticed her … noticed probably isn’t the right word. Wonder if you took the same notice of me when my back was turned.” She rummaged through the file as she spoke.
Sherwood stared at her back—through her toward his goal. “People elect politicians based on their knowledge of trivia, and hype, and sex appeal,” he said, fondling his pipe in his jacket pocket and his lighter in his other hand. “You seem to be the only professor at the Institute not totally constrained by the COPE ethic. I wondered if you might put this into some perspective for me.”
Dr. Newton pulled out a ROM-card, the size of a credit card, and handed it to Sherwood. “This is very illuminating, although a bit iconoclastic, but probably no more than you.”
Sherwood released his pipe and accepted the ROM-card.
“Come back after you read it, and we can talk about it.” She finally released the ROM-card from her grasp. “Maybe get together over a beer.”
Sherwood placed the ROM-card in his pocket and mated again with his pipe. “Thank you, Professor Newton.” They shook hands, and Professor Newton’s eyes captured Sherwood’s until he aborted the spell.
Sherwood began reading as soon as he got home. The book was entitled The Evolution of Media Politics by Lisa J. Rutherford. In Chapter Seven, the following paragraphs caught his attention:
The political process began to be a burden on the electorate during the last half of the century. People became disenchanted because they always had to choose between two unacceptable candidates. No matter what the promises or who was chosen, the economic and social climate slowly deteriorated.
Vietnam was a turning point. Before Vietnam, the standard of living of the middle class rose noticeably each year. People felt that the political process was, at least, not working against them. After Vietnam, the standard of living slipped into neutral. Advancing productivity was matched by advancing taxes and inflation.
The electorate felt their choices were less meaningful than they used to be. The party platforms converged on the politically safe territory of government growth, and the social and government debt situations never seemed to improve no matter whom they voted for.
The revolution in politics over the last thirty years has relieved much of the stress of voting. Modern voters are assured that future events are totally decoupled from their votes. Thus, they can vote for trivia, hype, or sex with no effect on the future. The modern political process has taken the risk, and thus the responsibility, out of voting. Voters can now choose the most whimsical candidates with no social impact and thus no guilt. We have developed a stress-free paradise for irresponsibility, and voters are participating as never before in history.
Finally, Sherwood thought he’d found an attempt at truth that, at least, veered refreshingly from the standard answers. For this, he and his cynicism were grateful.
He applied every ounce of his intelligence, his rigor, his skepticism, and even his paranoia to the course work at the COPE Institute. He unexpectedly found this latest phase of his education to be even more exciting than the wonders of servo control theory had been in engineering school. It even compared with the lessons he’d learned in his endless excursions through Detective’s Life and Double Agent, although that early exposure to the world of espionage could never be supplanted by engineering or politics, or even money or sex. His attachment to the world of spooks and counter spooks nurtured his paranoia.
“What would COPE do,” he asked one day in class, “if a candidate for Congress were to file a suit against COPE seeking relief from the requirement to submit to a full personal and financial investigation before he could campaign?”
“That’s quite easy,” came the quick reply. “The Supreme Court has already ruled that candidates for political office are in violation of the public trust by refusing to cooperate with COPE. We would discontinue funding his campaign.”
“But suppose he funded his own campaign or just continued to speak out against COPE?”
“We couldn’t allow that,” the professor continued.
“But what would COPE do?” Sherwood pressed.
“COPE has a history of tolerance for opposing viewpoints, however we’re also dedicated to the elimination of anarchy for the good of our citizens. We have a legal office that handles these matters on a case-by-case basis. I’m not concerned with such operational details. I’m a strategist. Now let’s continue our discussion of the organization of modern political parties.”
It seemed to him that the professors had spent so many years in the cloister of the COPE Institute that they didn’t care about many of the real world issues that Sherwood aired.
The research resources available through The Institute were, however, outstanding. One class that each student took was Individual Research, which culminated in a research paper. All the students were COPE employees so most papers related to the position of the student in the organization. Most of them dealt with financial practices and accounting standards, candidate disclosures, voter preferences, multi-media technology, and legal issues.
Sherwood devoured the few COPE reports dealing with clandestine activities. These reports were old and discussed such things as the early requirements for covert data to assure COPE’s published information. One report outlined covert data requirements and the creation of an in-house staff to collect the data. He concluded that COPE no longer wrote about its clandestine activities in unclassified reports.
He knew there must be a sea of highly classified documents. He’d been involved in such a program and knew there were others, but his lack of a “need-to-know” precluded classified investigation.
He turned to a more accessible research area—the twentieth century political climate that encouraged the transformation that had occurred. Contemporary politics was neither a natural nor a predictable consequence of the twentieth century, but he began to see the elements mandating change and the influences directing that change. The specific direction the change took might not have been predictable, but it was understandable in retrospect. The evolution gave Sherwood a frightening insight into the mind of the American citizen and the motivations behind political coalitions, past and present.
He drew some innovative conclusions about the roles of political empires, government spending and de
bt, and Washington arrogance in the development of a hype-class electorate. He appreciated the modern explicit role of entertainment in politics compared to its similar, but veiled, role a century earlier. The political heroes of the twenty-first century were a direct consequence of the flourishing infotainment industry of that era. He began to understand why voters embraced the glitter of the new politics, why it satisfied basic needs, and that it provided relief to no longer have to pretend to make political decisions based on substance. Voters could now indulge in political fantasies as they had always desired to do. The difference was that now it was totally guilt free with no troublesome consequences for fanciful choices.
He entitled his research paper “The Triumph of Arrogance over Apathy—an analysis of the evolution of political parties from the Great Society to the Great Collapse.” He received a C for the effort, which was better than he’d expected.
Whether a C or an A, he was now one step closer to his field assignment.