Distraction

America hadn't really been suited for its long and tiresome role as the Last Superpower, the World's Policeman. As a patriotic American, Oscar was quite content to watch other people's military coming home in boxes for a while. The American national character wasn't suited for global police duties. It never had been. Tidy and meticulous people such as the Swiss and the Swedes were the types who made good cops. America was far better suited to be the World's Movie Star. The world's tequila-addled pro-league bowler. The world's acerbic, bipolar stand-up comedian. Anything but a somber and tedious nation of socially responsible centurions.

We're so intelligent now that we're too smart to survive. We're so well informed that we lost all sense of meaning. We know the price of everything, but we've lost all sense of value. We have everyone under surveillance, but we've lost all sense of shame.

I am not ranting. I possess a perspective here that you people, who are locked in the ivory basements of your own sub-cultures, simply do not possess.

This is not to say that science itself is politics. Scientific knowledge is profoundly different from political ideology. Science is an intellectual system producing objective data about the nature of the universe. Science involves falsifiable hypotheses, reproducible results, and rigorous experimental verification. Scientific knowledge isn't a political construct, any more than element 79 in the periodic table is a political construct. But the things people do with science are every bit as political as the things people do with gold.

But the economy's out of control. Money just doesn't need human beings anymore. Most of us only get in the way.

...We'll exchange rings, we'll throw rice. We'll put down roots.' We don't have roots. We're network people. We have aerials.

Take away America's money, and you've got a country of tribes.

Now, for the first time, the President began to look genuinely powerful, even dangerous. This was a classic political coalition: it had worked in Medieval France. It was the long-forgotten bottom of the heap, allied with the formerly feeble top, to scare the hell out of the arrogant and divisive middle.

It was a frightening thing, to see two mentally incompetent sidewalk buskers, with battered folk musicians, who might any moment burst into song.

You're too straight, you just don't understand these guys' priorities. They don't expect any law or justice from the U.S. government. They don't even expect the government to be sane. The whole federal system just detached itself from them and floated off into deep space. They think of the government as something like bad weather. It's something you just endure.

It had never occurred to the lords of the consumer society that consumerism as a political philosophy might one day manifest the grave systemic instabilities that Communism had. But as those instabilities multiplied, the country had cracked. Civil society shriveled in the pitiless reign of cash. As the last public spaces were privatized, it became harder and harder for American culture to breathe. Not only were people broke, but they were taunted to madness by commercials, and pitilessly surveilled by privacy-invading hucksters. An ever more aggressive consumer-outreach apparatus caused large numbers of people to simply abandon their official identities. ¶ It was no longer any fun to be an American citizen.

You see, I'm from your government, and I'm here to help you.

One of the great beauties of politics as an art form was its lack of restriction to merely standard forms of realism.

[R]idicule is the radical's best weapon. The powers that be can stand anything but being laughed at.

A massive rate of change is normalcy for America. What we need is planned change—Progress. We need Progress!

We need common sense and political stability and sensible, workable policies. That's what government is for.

You know, developments here remind me of the Internet. That old computer network, invented by the American scientific community. It was all about free communications. Very simple and widely distributed—there was never any central control. It spread worldwide in short order. It turned into the world's biggest piracy copy machine. The Chinese loved the Internet, they used it and turned it against us. They destroyed our information economy with it. Even then the net didn't go away—it just started breeding its virtual tribes, all these nomads and dissidents.