The Media Candidate – politics and power in 2048

by Paul Dueweke

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Sherwood Lays it Out

  Guinda hung up the phone, turned to her visitor, and said, “They tried to kill Townsend this morning. Did you have anything to do with that?”

  Her visitor stared unwaveringly at her.

  “You at least knew about it, didn’t you?” Guinda continued. “You just told me he’d be safe if he didn’t make waves.”

  Sherwood walked directly away from Guinda, his face a chalky void. His movements were unwilling but precise. It was as though there were demands being made on his body by competing masters. He stood before the window staring in the direction of a nearby clump of pampas grass with several wrens riding the plumes like marionettes guided by invisible strings. But he was conscious only of the ashen background swallowing the scene.

  A slinking cat approached the grass, forcing Sherwood’s dormant sense of a world beyond his present mission to spring to life. Following the cat’s eyes toward its prey reawakened the voyeur and the predator within him. The wrens waved complacently, unaware of the approaching menace. His eyes grew intense, as did his need to share this moment. His hand probed a jacket pocket where the pipe waited faithfully.

  “May I smoke, Burns?” Sherwood asked liturgically.

  “I’d prefer you wouldn’t.”

  Sherwood filled his pipe, his whole being now riveted to the outdoor drama. Practiced teeth lovingly embraced the loaded pipe. He rolled a gold-plated lighter in his right hand, exposing a microscopic amount of the underlying brass with every tumble. The cat stalked, its tail cocked beneath it like a catapult. It finally sprang at the wrens, its claws defining a killing arc, an arc it envisioned intersecting with the less lucky of the wrens as they fled. But the cat shredded only lifeless pampas stalks and landed beyond the grass with nothing but a shadow of sedge clutching at its fur.

  Sherwood flicked the lighter, presented it to the pipe, and studied the glow of tobacco as smoke billowed around his face, chastising the unworthy cat. He turned toward Guinda, exhaling a sweet cloud that convolved into fractals. Guinda met his gaze through the cloud just as another was born. She attempted to play his waiting game in non-committed silence, but her skills were not properly polished.

  “What do you want?” she asked in defeat, folding, then unfolding her arms.

  Sherwood grinned faintly and sat down. A new cloud began to evolve about him, through the suburbs of which he watched Guinda. Her youth betrayed her as she read this message and slowly seated herself across the room, still within range. The two sat in silence for a while, Guinda studying the shrouded figure before her, Sherwood seeming to study the clouds.

  “Why did you come here this morning, Sherwood?” Guinda punctuated the silence.

  Sherwood crossed his legs and held his pipe in front of him. He examined the bottom of the bowl, holding it at various angles, rubbing it gently, fondling it, then bringing its stem to his lips once more. His attention then strayed from the pipe to a layer of smoke suspended motionless near one corner of the room. No hint of thought or emotion crossed his face as he studied this nothingness. Behind those eyes, the conscious mind was dormant. But the instinct was responding, conjecturing, playing the bishop against the pawn.

  “Answer me, Sherwood!”

  The outburst awakened his consciousness, but not to the extinction of his instinct. Instinct always functioned at a hundred percent, even though consciousness may have regained control of motor and verbal skills. He had no control of his instinct, although instinct always had priority over consciousness.

  “How long have you been with the Party, Burns?”

  She crossed her legs and fidgeted with her hands. Her body didn’t give her an edge here as with the other men in the Party. “Just over two years, but I’ve had—”

  “I purchased this pipe from a very respected tobacconist last week. With his endorsement and its obvious qualities as being made of the finest briar, I had great expectations that this would become my most treasured pipe. But now, having shared a few reflective times together, I have concluded that there must be some subtle flaw in the material, some imperfection that would only manifest itself under the stress of several glowing bowls. It might simply be a void or a crack in the wood that prevents the uniform distribution of heat. On the other hand, it could be so subtle as an excessively wet spring a hundred years ago that produced a lower than usual density in one ring of the tree whence the bowl was drawn. It is difficult to understand how these imponderables can have such dramatic effects on the performance of highly prized objects. Have you ever experienced such a disappointment, Burns?”

  Could he possibly know about the secret files I read, she thought. How could he? But why else would he be here? Her mind fogged over like the smoke that fled from Sherwood. “I guess I have. … I remember once—”

  “You, of course, do not smoke a pipe, Burns, but you may have had such an experience with a tennis racket or some such object from which you demand high performance. But an even more curious thing about a pipe is that, despite its early disappointments, it might yet turn out to be a treasure. Sometimes a pipe is of such quality that it can actually temper itself under the stress of heat. Maybe the low-density layer of wood carbonizes so that the pipe actually turns out to be much finer than one that might not have undergone the extra stress. The self healing process under stress can be extraordinarily effective at producing quality that might be unachievable any other way.”

  A couple unresponsive draws made Sherwood aware that his pipe had gone out. He shook his head and reached for his tobacco pouch, then continued his slow discourse. “You have some legitimate concerns about your party. Let me try to put these things in perspective.

  “Businesses are successful when they are operated with careful consideration and analysis rather than with emotion and hype. Our political process seems to have an abundance of emotion and hype. Let me assure you that nothing could be farther from the truth. The gimmicks and the hype are only on the surface.

  “Do you know who understands the thousands of new laws passed every year, Burns? Not the masses; they have time for only a few grabbers that the politicians throw them like the zookeeper at feeding time. One might think the politicians understand what they have created. Sound reasonable, Burns? … Wrong. The average law has so many amendments, modifications, and exceptions that it is a rare politician who knows anything of substance about the document they make the law of the land, binding everywhere and for all time. So who understands these laws? It is a select group called lobbyists. Only they care enough to wade through the piles to see what the law means to their employers. They support or oppose laws based on careful analysis, as inscrutable as the laws might be.

  “It is a strange situation. Lobbyists and politicians write the bills to satisfy the special interest groups. But there are so many groups, and each bill has to have something for each of them. The beauty for the politicians is that the bills are so complex, it is easy to tell their constituents what they think they would like to hear. The whole idea is for the politicians to appear to be doing something, anything, to solve the perceived problems of the day.”

  This was allowed to settle in while he tended to his pipe. Guinda thought of herself as astute, but this soliloquy revealed the raw edges of a system that she thought she understood. This was nothing like the explanations that graced the textbooks in her office. Is this really the way it is? she thought. But how can I believe anything this creep says?

  Sherwood completed the relighting ceremony and settled back in his chair. “The Party has made remarkable progress with holographic virtual reality with the promise of such realism that it may someday become impossible to tell the difference between it and the real person. The objective is to make politician-to-human interactions so realistic that the human will forget he is talking to a hologram, not to the real politician.

  “The next step is to totally replace the politician person with a 3-D
image and program its responses so that all errors previously made by politicians can be eliminated. The Party has sometimes been embarrassed by the antics of poorly chosen politicians. Some of them do not have sufficient intelligence to even be politicians. Those kinds of embarrassments will be avoided in the future.

  “Our final improvement will be the joint agreement between the two major parties to work together in a more cooperative way to preclude the dysfunctional environment of head-to-head campaigns. COPE, of course, will continue to protect the rights of the electorate, no matter what the environment.”

  Guinda responded with disbelief, staring into the carpet, searching it for answers while Sherwood tamped the glowing ashes in his pipe. “You mean what Townsend said was right. They’re going to get rid of the real politicians and replace them with … ?” She sank back into her chair, intent on some code woven into the carpet.

  “Politics is following the evolution of other parts of society. In previous eras, the quality of products was so undependable that products had to be visually inspected before purchase. With the advent of mass production and corporate images, consumers could be assured that a quality bar of soap, not a piece of chalk, lay within the package. Producers soon realized that the package was what the consumer bought, not the product inside.

  “Politicians also began to understand packaging. As the candidates became more efficiently and attractively packaged, they also seemed to become mass-produced—commoditized, as the MBAs call it. Each one subscribed to the same basic collectivism but with subtle differences tuned to the array of special interests that supported them. All this focus on marketing made doing your civic duty more fun, like shopping.

  “Now we are engaged in a great transition that will alter the form and function of politics. We have homogenized the product by replacing its human variability with a machine protocol. No longer will the package be marred by the iniquity that human packages proffer. The total product is now so agreeable that it will not even matter if the consumers wake up to the charade. They have transmuted, and their future is our history.”

  He allowed the smoke to clear between them. Guinda’s eyes rose to meet his.

  “And now there is the death of Halvorsen and how that might relate to COPE. I can only tell you that COPE takes a very serious view of anarchy. In COPE’s view, anyone advocating the overthrow of our form of government with romanticism such as that of the last century, is an anarchist. We will not allow the progress we have made to be compromised.

  “When we spoke Friday morning in your office, I commented that you had great potential in the Party. Your performance reports have been quite favorable, the highest ratings. I believe you have the internal qualities to temper yourself, to make yourself better than you were.

  “I am rarely wrong in such judgments. I expect this pipe to become my favorite because I am confident in my ability to make such considered selections, in spite of its initial failings. But if it ultimately disappoints me, it will become just another ember in my fireplace, just a glow that flickers out with the passage of time and is disposed with the residue of other common wood.”

  Sherwood rose and retreated from his cloud toward the bay window. He didn’t notice that the wrens were gone; he didn’t notice that the gray cat was asleep under a bush. His consciousness had once more gone dormant. His instinct was now concentrating on Elliott. The cat suddenly raised its head. Sherwood’s instinct prepared to arouse his consciousness. The cat lowered its head, embedding its nose further into the fur of its belly. Sherwood’s instinct canceled its message.

  Meanwhile Guinda turned over the mass of new data, processing the events of the last two days, picturing how her nipples might look on TV and how lighting might accent her feminine subtleties, wondering if Halvorsen really was an anarchist and if she herself would now be labeled one, picturing herself in a bright TV studio, her teeth shining, her golden ponytail bouncing, her other assets performing.

  She and Sherwood were both surprised by his turning about and uttering. “Now we must consider how to dispose of Townsend. He will be expecting you shortly.”