then everybody thought they were joking.”
“Not quite everybody, I guess.”
“You’re right about that,” Noah said. “In fact, Enron was really just a huge diversion, like a Bernie Madoff, a patsy to throw to the wolves. Carbon trading moved forward anyway. The Chicago Climate Exchange is probably the best example, especially since it’s basically founded or fronted or funded by a Who’s Who list of environmental luminaries, like Al Gore and Goldman Sachs. But I can see why no one really cares-the Exchange’s founder thinks it’s probably only a ten-trillion-dollar-a-year market.”
Molly stared at him in astonishment. “Did you say ten trillion a year?”
“Uh-huh. And the backing for it goes right up to the top, internationally. So here’s a little pop quiz: What do you get when you combine corporate greed with political corruption and sprinkle a few trillion on top?”
“I don’t know… fascism?”
Noah shook his head. “You get Doyle & Merchant’s newest client.”
The hourglass on the screen had disappeared moments before, and was replaced by a dialog box with two buttons, one labeled HALT and the other PROCEED.
“Now I know what I’m looking at,” Molly said. “So let’s see what’s next.”
Noah clicked the remote, and the screens all began to change. The slides that had been incomplete filled in with callouts, numbers, names, legends, and dates to illustrate the long-term agendas within each area of American government and society at large. Some of these agendas spanned only a few years, others more than a century.
Pointers along the time lines began to move; text formed and then faded as significant events in recent history were reached and passed by. Milestones appeared, enclosed in the Overton Window of each screen as it moved slowly from left to right.
It was far too much ever-changing information to absorb, like watching all the movies in a multiplex simultaneously. But as they turned and took it all in at the center of the circle of screens, Molly suddenly touched his hand, and gripped it. It seemed the same realization had come over them both, at the same instant: This wasn’t eight separate agendas at all. It was only one.
Along the bottom, the steady advance of time. Through the middle, the slow, sporadic movement of the Overton Window-usually pushing forward, but sometimes pulling back, as though the public might have rebelled briefly against the relentless pressure before giving in to it again.
To the far right of each screen a final goal was listed. As Noah looked to each of them he realized something else that all these endpoints had in common. They weren’t written and presented as though they were unthinkable extremes, but rather as achievable goals in some new, unified framework of command and control, ready to come forth on the day the old existing structure failed.
• Consolidate all media assets behind core concepts of a new internationalism
• Gather and centralize powers in the Executive Branch
• Education: Deemphasize the individual, reinforce dependence and collectivism, social justice, and “the common good”
• Set beneficial globalization against isolationism/sovereignty: climate change, debt crises, finance/currency, free trade, immigration, food/water/energy, security/terrorism, human rights vs. property rights, UN Agenda 21
• Associate resistance and “constitutional” advocacy with a backward, extremist worldview: gun rights a key
• Quell debate and force consensus: Identify, isolate, surveil opposition leadership/threaten with sedition- criminalize dissent
• Expand malleable voter base and agenda support by granting voting rights to prison inmates, undocumented migrants, and select U.S. territories, e.g., Puerto Rico. Image as a civil rights issue; label dissenters as racist-invoke reliable analogies: slavery, Nazism, segregation, isolationism.
• Thrust national security to the forefront of the public consciousness
• Finalize the decline and abandonment of the dollar: new international reserve currency
• Synchronize and fully integrate local law enforcement with state, federal, and contract military forces, prepare collection/relocation/internment contingencies, systems, and personnel
According to the progress shown, many of these initiatives were already well under way. The slide devoted to Finance showed a time line beginning in 1913, and its Window had moved nearly to the end. The screen for Education began at a point even earlier and was also well along. Advances in one, concerning surveillance, security, and the militarization of law enforcement, had accelerated radically in the years since 9/11.
There’s a difference between suspecting a thing and finally knowing it for certain. Noah felt that difference twisting into his stomach. You can hold on to the smallest doubt and take comfort in it, stay in denial and go on with your carefree life, until one day you’re finally cornered by a truth that can no longer be ignored.
“Look over there,” Molly said.
But he’d already seen it. While every other slide had shown advancement and slow progress over its individual time span, one hadn’t moved at all, as though its role in all this was simply to be ready and awaiting activation. Also unlike the others, its time line didn’t measure years or decades, but only three final days.
Unlike the others, this slide had no Overton Window. EXIGENT was the legend at the far end of the line, and it seemed there would be no question of public acceptance, no need to rally opinion on this front. Whatever it was, it would bring its own consensus.
“Casus Belli,” the heading said, and Molly’s translation was still fresh in his mind.
An incident used to justify a war.
CHAPTER 20
Outside the skies were still threatening, and to accompany the frigid light rain a wicked crosstown breeze had begun to blow. In that sort of weather almost everyone on the street is looking for a ride, so it took a few blocks of trying before Noah and Molly were able to hail an empty cab headed downtown.
When they’d closed the door the driver turned and asked where they were going.
“Ninth Street and Avenue B, by Tompkins Square Park,” Noah said. “And do us a favor,” he added, passing through enough of a tip to make his point. “We’re not in a rush, so just take it really, really easy, understand?”
The man in front took the money, gave a nod in the rearview mirror, and then signaled and pulled away from the curb with exaggerated care, hands on the wheel at ten and two o’clock, driving as if an inspector from the Taxi & Limousine Commission were watching from the shotgun seat.
Molly kept to her side of the car, looking out the window in silence as the ride got under way, but after a minute she reached across and found Noah’s hand to hold.
“There were no dates on those screens at the end,” Noah said. “There’s nothing to say that this thing is happening tomorrow, or next week, or next year.”
She shook her head. “It’s happening now.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I can see it. The economy is crashing, Noah. There’s no net underneath it this time. That’s why they’re rushing through all this stimulus nonsense, both parties. All the cockroaches are coming out of the woodwork to grab what they still can. It’s a heist in broad daylight, and they don’t care who sees it anymore. That’s how I know.
“They’ve doubled the national debt since 2000, and now with these bailouts, all those trillions of dollars more- that’s our future they just stole, right in front of our eyes. They didn’t even pretend to use that money to pay for anything real, most of it went offshore. They didn’t help any real people; they just paid themselves and covered their gambling debts on Wall Street.” She looked at him. “You asked how I know it’s happening now? Because the last official act of any government is to loot their own treasury.”
He couldn’t think of a thing to counter that, at least nothing that either one of them would believe.
“We’ll be okay,” Noah said.
