C) 1976/84 God help us growth of 3rd party, American. (The bastards! The simple, the perfect name . . . !) Result: Gradual withering away of DAR, bad defeat in 1980 presidential, total collapse in 82 congressional election. Back to 2-party system: Am vs FDR.
So far so good. Nice & historical. But how tell a class, without accusations of partisanship, what an Am victory means? What a ciestruction, what a (hell! let’s use their own word) subversion of everything American . . .
Or am I being partisan? Can anyone be as evil, as anti-American, as to me the Senator is?
Don’t kid yrself Lanroyd. If it’s an Am victory, you aren’t going to lecture on Wed. You’re going to be in mourning for the finest working democracy ever conceived by man. And now you’re going to sleep & work like hell tomorrow getting out the vote.
It was Tuesday night. The vote had been got out, and very thoroughly indeed. In Lanroyd’s precinct, in the whole state of California, and in all 49 other states. The result was in, and the TV commentator, announcing the final electronic recheck of results from 50 state-wide electronic calculators, was being smug and happy about the whole thing. ( “Conviction?” thought Lanroyd bitterly. “Or shrewd care in holding a job?”)
“. . . Yessir,” the commentator was repeating gleefully, “it’s such a landslide as we’ve never seen in all American history—and the American history is what it’s going to be from now on. For the Senator, five . . . hundred . . . and . . . eighty . . . nine electoral votes from forty . . . nine states. For the Judge, four electoral votes from one state.
“Way back in 1936, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt” (he pronounced the name as a devout Christian might say Judas Iscariot) “carried all but two states, somebody said, As Maine goes, so goes Vermont.’ Well, folks, I guess from now on we’ll have to say—ha! ha!—As Maine goes . . . so goes Maine.’ And it looks like the FDR party is going the way of the unlamented DAR. From now on, folks, it’s Americanism for Americans!
“Now let me just recap those electoral figures for you again. For the Senator on the American ticket, it’s five eighty-nine—that’s five hundred and eightyn i ne—el ecto r al—”
Lanroyd snapped off the set. The automatic brought up the room lighting from viewing to reading level.
He issued a two-syllable instruction which the commentator would have found difficult to carry out. He poured a shot of bourbon and drank it. Then he went to hunt for a razor blade.
As he took it out of the cabinet, he laughed. Ancient Roman could find a good use for this, he thought. Much more comfortable nowadays, too, with thermostats in the bathtub. Drift off under constantly regulated temperature. Play hell with the M.E.’s report, too. Jesus! Is it hitting me so bad I’m thinking stream of consciousness? Get to work, Lanroyd.
One by one he scraped the political stickers off the window. There goes the FDR candidate for State Assembly. There goes the Congressman—twelve-year incumbent. There goes the United States Senator. State Senator not up for reelection this year, or he’d be gone too. There goes NO ON 13. Of course in a year like this State Proposition #13 passed too; from now on, as a Professor at a State University, he was forbidden to criticize publicly any incumbent government official, and compelled to submit the reading requirements for his courses to a legislative committee.
There goes the Judge himself. . . not just a sticker but a full lumino-portrait. The youngest man ever appointed to the Supreme Court; the author of the great dissenting opinions of the ’50s; later a Chief Justice to rank beside Marshall in the vitality of his interpretation of the Constitution; the noblest candidate the Free Democratic Republican Party had ever offered . . .
There goes the last of the stickers . . .
Hey, Lanroyd, you’re right. It’s a symbol yet. There goes the last of the political stickers. You’ll never stick ’em on your window again. Not if the Senator’s boys have anything to say about it.
Lanroyd picked up the remains of the literature he’d distributed in the precincts, dumped it down the incinerator without looking at it, and walked out into the foggy night.
If. . .
All right you’re a monomaniac. You’re 40 and you’ve never married (and what a sweet damn fool you were to quarrel with Clarice over the candidates in 72) and you think your profession’s taught you that politics means everything and so your party loses and it’s the end of the world. But God damn it this time it is. This is the key-point.
If. . .
Long had part of the idea; McCarthy had the other part. It took the Senator to combine them. McCarthy got nowhere, dropped out of the DAR reorganization, failed with his third party, because he attacked and destroyed but didn’t give. He appealed to hate, but not to greed, no what’s-in-it-for-me, no porkchops. But add the Long technique, every-man-a-king, fuse ’em together: “wipe out the socialists; I’ll give you something better than socialism.” That does it, Senator. Coming Next Year: “wipe out the democrats; I’ll give you something better than democracy.”
IF . . .
What was it Long said? “If totalitarianism comes to America, it’ll be labeled Americanism.” Dead Huey, now I find thy saw of might . . .
IF
There was a lighted window shining through the fog. That meant Cleve was still up. Probably still working on temporomagnetic field-rotation, which sounded like nonsense but what did you expect from a professor of psionics? Beyond any doubt the most unpredictable department in the University . . . and yet Lanroyd was glad he’d helped round up the majority vote when the Academic
