by Adam Roberts
For a day this was the main lead; and it spilled over into a second day when the celebrated names of US popular culture pushed their pro- or anti-pharmakos lines to myriad reporters; and into a third day when many of the anti-pharmakos speakers were decloseted as hypocrites who maintained their seductive flesh or career-enhancing sex lives through pharmakos, pharmakos and nothing but pharmakos.
Then, out of the left field, as the phrase goes, (‘Words can’t describe it, baseball has crossed into the twenty-second century’) something happens to push Gradi’s counterattak up to the position of prime lead in all US news outlets, and it is this: the President himself, Daniel Veen himself, corners his Veep and two senior military men in a non-secure room - a hospitality room in a sports facility called the Lion Center, as it happens - and speaks certain inflammatory words. His raging, his swearing and, alas, the projection of a certain quantity of spittle from his fast-working lips, are all captured on an unnoticed camera located on the wall, and of course immediately sold to the news. This is a side of the President that few have seen before. He has always presented himself as scrupulously courteous, religious, pious, controlled, calm, patrician. But here he is so angry he cannot keep his eyes open, as if anger above a certain level becomes narcolepsy. He is so angry his cheeks go purple-red, and he trembles visibly like a palsied old man.
‘This fuking woman, you told me you’d have her in fuking custody by the end of last year, and now she’s fuking throwing roks at my caravan? Fuk her. Fuk her EU-sponsored ass. Why isn’t she dead, Johan? Why did you fuking promise me her corpse and then leave her alone to fly fuking planes and explosives’ (for some reason the president drew this last word out enormously) ‘at my troops? We’ve gone, Johan, General, from one single casualty to over five hundred, you want to tell me how that has happened?’
And as the Veep begins to try and answer the President’s emphatic questions, he is interrupted by Daniel Veen continuing his tirade.
‘I absolutely refuse, I refuse, I will not be put on the same level as this fuking woman by the international media. She’s in charge of fewer people than a fuking small-town mayor. I will not be seen to be butting heads with this woman, I won’t be seen negotiating, Johan — with this woman, as if any small-town mayor flies on the same level as the President of the United States.’
‘Small-town mayor’, is one phrase that, excerpted from this rant, will haunt the administration afterwards (there is another, which we’ll come to in a moment). Had the US suffered militarily at the hands of a major world power that would have been one thing: but for the entire US air force to be defeated by a nation literally no bigger than New Bedford, Massachusetts, or Big Timber, Montana, or Milledgeville, Georgia - well, that reflects something worse than defeat on America. That reflects ridicule. The President knows it will diminish him. People will stop thinking of him, as they have been doing, as Big Dan Veen, and he will begin to assume Lilliputian size, proportionate to his Blefuscan antagonist, this tiny half-Euro, half-Japan woman.
And then, destined to become even more mokingly famous than ‘small-town mayor’, is the President’s parting shot. This is something that will simply leap from the idiom of the screen media into popular consciousness, perhaps because it chimes with the irrational ludicrousness of the whole circumstance. The Veep, sombrely, tries to reassure his President that ‘I don’t need to say how sorry we all are, sir’: but at this piously conventional expression of beta-male subordination, the President, Big Dan Veen who has become shrunken, shrieks like a parakeet: ‘it’s poodle-hoops, Johan,’ he cries, and sweeps from the room.
This is the phrase that occurs and reoccurs in myriad media contexts over the following weeks. Nobody is quite sure wat it means, precisely, beyond (obviously) indicating that the President considers this whole matter insultingly absurd and demeaning, incompatible with his dignity as President of the world’s only superpower. But poodle-hoops? Is it some phrase from Veen’s childhood, or some frat-house slang? Is it gibberish conjured on that spot from his subconscious? (in which case, wat did it signify? Dogs? Hula? Food? Piddle? Whores?). The oddity of the phrase eclipses even the President’s ill-chosen repetition of the word fuk in American disapprobation. Indeed, having committed so thoroughly to red-blooded obscenity throughout most of the speech, the Prez would have done better to have concluded with a straightforward expletive, ‘It’s bullshit, Johan’ or ‘It’s fuked up, Johan.’ As it is, the preceding torrent of fuks makes the conclusive ‘poodle-hoops’ seem not only coy but, worse, dishonest, effeminate, even a little deranged.
The American news media produce, in refluxes either sober or satirical, these two phrases over and over. ‘Small-town mayor.’ ‘Poodle-hoops.’ To have one’s face slapped by a small-town mayor, when one owns the largest face in the world! To have become caught up in the poodle-hoops of some piddling military adventure, to conquer mere vacancy a hundred miles over people’s heads - and for wat benefit? It was absurd. Absurdity must be coursed to its source, and President Veen stands suddenly revealed as the fountain of all corroding American absurdity. Poodle-hoops? He is poodle-hoops.
A widow stands in the Media Square, Washington DC, with a holographic placard on which spectral letters spell out: my husband died in your war, Veen; is that poodle-hoops? There are dozens of virtual gatherings, and several virtual riots, including one that swamps the East Coast BookTalk web with violent posts and aggressive linkage, collapsing it under the sheer virtual weight of bodies, and seventy per cent of the attendees are anti-Veen, anti-war.
Pundits argue that the twenty-second century was doomed to be the century of American decline. Why are we tangled in this absurd war with a small-town mayor? Wat does that make Veen? Another small-town-mayor, that’s what. We used to be the world’s ultra-power; now we’re a thousand houses and a regional walmart. Small patches of worn grass, a baseball diamond, dust sinking down.
Visuals represent the tactics of the Uplanders. Phrases start to echo through news coverage: brilliant, audacious and courageous to describe the Uplands. Doomed, hubris and over-stretched to describe the American programme.
Uplanders and their supporters feel the throb of new life in their cold dead bodies. We are not dead. We are not dead. It is not we who are dead.
Suddenly, in a gaggle, other EU nations scramble to recognise the Uplands diplomatically. Finland-EU now looks prescient and politically astute rather than rash. A dozen other countries open negotiations with a view to establishing relations. This completely changes the legal situation. Two-thirds of the suits filed by the US Corps Legal are made redundant by the new status of the enemy territory. Military lawyers scrabble and scurry to assemble new paperwork, to submit to the Court. But it is now that the many Upland sympathisers, some of them actual Uplanders trapped on the ground by hostilities and eager to get bak up, begin their legal counterattak. Representatives sue the US for every single civilian casualty. One suit disputes the term ‘territory’, used ubiquitously in all American legal documentation to describe the Uplands, on the grounds that vacuum and emptiness is not territory; three judges agree that this suit has grounds — which is to say, it is not shuffled into the minor or the vexatious files, but rather moved to the front, green-lit for further discussion. And if it is adjudged meritorious then the whole US legal assault will crumble. But just as the US start to marshal a complex and expensive series of countersuits, the Upland legal team hit again. More than thirty separate suits are filed that describe the events of the last year as ‘a siege’ - something with only antique legal precedence, and which therefore threatens to unpik the whole elaborate web of US legal work. The US Corps Legal is faced with the very real threat of having to start all over again ab initio, and moreover to do this without the guidance of the senior officer who oversaw the initial legal assault, Slater himself. All is chaos. The Veep, taking personal charge of the collapsing campaign, receives report after report reiterating the general point: it’s chaos, sir. They’ve outmanoeuvred us in court s
ir. With limitless money and lawyers we might still — just possibly - reclaim the legal initiative, but it’ll take a year minimum, that’s minimum. Sir.
Satirists and cartoonists take to portraying Veen as (a) a poodle with tiger-like hoops of colour, perhaps red and white with stars circling a bewildered and purple poodle-head, or (b) as a skinny elongated human form stretched topographically out into hoop, feet lodged in mouth, circling the large canine form of Gradi herself, not unlike the rings of Saturn. One columnist notes that the size of the USA (x million square kilometres) is trivial compared to the much larger size of the Uplands (x billion cubic kilometres). ‘We know which small town is the smaller.’ ‘If this is so important a war,’ asks Aqua Taurus, the West Coast commentator, ‘then why did Veen delegate it to his Vice-President? Why not take personal command?’
Gradi sits in front of a phone to talk to American media from some anonymous location. She is wearing a shirt on which is written the phrase Small-Town Mayor. She cradles in her lap (oh rare!) an actual poodle, around whose poodly waist a hoop-ish circle has been tied. It’s witty. It almost doesn’t need the warm smile on Gradi’s face to establish it as the iconic wat-me-worry image of the year.
Aren’t you worried, ma’am, that Quanjets are circling the blakness all around you, seeking you out, hoping to kill you? They’ve been trying for a year now without success, says Gradi. Aren’t you afraid of dying? Of course I am, says Gradi, but any soldier fighting for a cause in which they truly believe sets that fear aside. And wat cause is that? Freedom, says Gradi, immediately, losing the smile and creasing her brows just enough to indicate seriousness.
The President stands next to his Veep, standing in the strong wind at Arlington, saluting two flags: the Stars-and-Stripes, and the military colours of the USUF, silver sphere on purple ground. The pennants wriggle on their poles like the wind shaking crumbs out of a pair of gaudy tablecloths. But he’s looking old, and worse, he’s looking small-town.
The military are paralysed. They put every plane they have in the air, flying as many from Fort Glenn as they can, and lifting the remainder from the ground (regardless of expense, thinks a forlorn Jon Belvedere III). But nobody has the nerve to order massive retaliation, with the massive loss of life that would result. The legal situation has not been properly prepared, so such an assault is enormously risky; and modern war-makers are massively risk-averse. War-makers apart from Gradi, that is. So the planes do little but fly-by. One or two high-profile raids on specific Upland houses, carefully preplanned, legally prepped and covered by high-calibre cameras for later media dispersal, capture two dozen Uplanders. These people are described as ‘prominent’ Uplanders, but nobody downbelow has ever heard of them.
Then there is a second wave of Upland attaks. Four Upland planes come sweeping silently through the silent medium, accelerating from a high orbit to a low one on trajectories that are plotted to pass directly through Fort Glenn. The defences of that base - considerably augmented since the counterattak - fire fusile projectiles in a grapeshot pattern to puncture the skins of any illegally approaching spacecraft. But, once again, the Americans have underestimated the Upland military strategy: for although all four planes suffer multiple depressurisations and one pilot is killed outright, these are all suicide missions, kamikaze, horatiiat-the-bridge. They plough on through the flak, and crash, one, two, three, four, into the main fabric of the Fort. They are loaded with explosive material instead of passengers, and when the bursts from these meet the rushing oxygen paked into the pressurised Fort it kindles, instantly and briefly, with panel-shredding force. There is no fireball, as might happen inside the atmosphere; but there is a wrenching glitter of debris flung in all directions. Only one single blok from the many out of which Fort Glenn was assembled retains its internal atmospheric pressure, clamping airtight doors; and it is sent spinning on an elliptical orbit whose closest approach heats its skin and drags it into terminal decline. It burns up, a fireball visible over much of Western Russia.
This total loss - one hundred and two personnel, two (doked) spaceplanes, all the hardware and other materiel — at the cost of only four Upland pilots’ lives, heaps humiliation on the already prominent mound of ludicrousness. With this act, Gradi seals her fame in the EU forever. Crowds, delighted at this blow against the power that had cowed them for two decades, gathered not only in virtual space, but actually - floking together in spontaneous dancing masses in town-spaces and fields, and providing the authorities with certain problems in maintaining social order, and clearing up the mess afterwards. People chanted poo!-dle!-hoops! in delirious unity. The US condemned as terrorist the suicide-bombers who had taken the lives of so many American heroes, and Upland lawyers immediately filed suit for defamation, libel and criminal slander against the US both for ‘suicide-bombers’ and ‘terrorists’.
Another meeting between the President, the Vice-President and senior military staff, is not accidentally or illicitly recorded. It takes place in one of the most thoroughly debugged and secure rooms on the planet; and it concerns the options. Wat are our options? Veen asks. He repeats the question.
Militarily, the options are wide open, Mr President, sir. The military staff, including a very worn-looking General Niflheim, assure the President that they can still launch into space without difficulty - launch from ground bases, it is true, but the beauty of Quanjets is that they can fly from anywhere on the planet straight to orbit, sir. At your order, Mr President, we can start a series of raids that destroy the Uplands house by house. Pik it clean, Mr President, house by house, until the Uplanders surrender unconditionally.
But the Legal staff look very uncomfortable at this. The legal situation is very complicated, sir, they say. If you start a systematic house-to-house destruction policy it’s going to lay us open to suits alleging genocide - suits it’ll be very hard to defend against. (‘Impossible, more like,’ opines one Officer-Legal, sotto voce but perfectly audible). That will cost the States billions, perhaps trillions: there will be suits from every family member and friend of every dead Uplander. There may well be reparations, punitive fines. It would be crippling.
‘So give me military targets,’ growls General Raduga. ‘And I’ll fight against military targets.’
‘But that’s the whole point,’ says Eksreher, a General-Legal. ‘It’s hard to identify any military targets in the Uplands - any legally unambiguous military targets, I mean. Apart from planes actively attaking US forces. Those are legitimate targets, we’ll shoot them down for sure.’
This does not seem to satisfy General Raduga.
‘Politically speaking,’ says the Veep, Johannes Belvedere, looking grim, ‘this whole escapade is costing us kudos, it’s vampiring kudos from us. I mean, both as a nation and an administration. EU is in open revolt against our influence. The rest of the world is delighted, frankly, at our dilemma. My opinion: anything that smaks of genocide would cause such damage to our standing in the world for which no conceivable benefit from winning the Uplands could possible compensate.’
Everybody looks at the President.
‘So,’ he says, under half-closed eyelids, his lips straight, his expression an enigmatic opacity. ‘I guess the question is.’ He breathes in. ‘If we launch a fightbak, killing houses and their occupants, we need the Uplanders to capitulate right away. If they do that, we can gloss the houses as military targets - fight that out in court. If not-too-many Uplanders die then the genocide word doesn’t get bandied. That way we win. But — but — but if the Uplanders hold out until the bitter end, then it all comes unravelled for us: legal and political disaster, accusations of genocide, ultimate defeat, resignations, prosecutions.’
Nobody disagrees with this presidential assessment of the situation.
‘Lawyers,’ mutters General Raduga, for like many military men he cannot quite believe that the strong muscles and iron talons of the army can be smothered by this anaconda thing called law. Lawyers object? Shoot the lawyers! Except, except, wat nobody
needs to rehearse in this meeting for its knowledge is so common, the world legal superstructure is actually the American legal superstructure swollen to globalised dimensions. To dismantle it America would have to unpik its own fabric of being. There’s no way round it.
‘It’d be a gamble, then,’ says President Dan Veen. ‘The unknown is the lengths to which Uplanders will hold out, even if they’re dying steadily. How long will they hold out?’
‘They’ll give in almost immediately,’ asserts General Raduga, and then looks around as if defying the others to disagree with him. ‘It’s a gamble worth taking. They’re at the end of their tethers, sir. One push from us — ’