Christian Nation (47 page)

“Yes. So you see, for our countrymen who are not saved, they have a helping hand to avoid sin and evil. Not really an issue for us, you know. But still, it’s helpful to understand. Especially for people like us, from the island. Just remember, they’ll know if you don’t go to work, they’ll know if you are sick, they’ll know everything you buy and do and everything you read and write—every word. If your face is pointed toward a camera, they know everything you say. Now the big machines, they’re not looking at every person all the time—unless, of course, they identify you as being at particular risk for temptation or evil conduct. When the big machines see something they don’t like, you ‘go pink.’ That’s what it’s called. It means there’s an issue. If that happens, then the machines’ analysis is referred to a real person, a deacon, who surveys the data and decides on the next steps. Not a good idea to go pink, my friend. Just so you know. Can be a real hassle. But of course, it’s a blessing as well, since the deacons can usually intervene before the sin is actually committed.”

“Thanks for the tip. I doubt, though, that I’ll be doing anything that could be considered remotely … well, pink.”

“Of course. And,” he said, turning toward the house with a smile that I knew to be artificial and suspected that the big machines did not, “the dream of eradicating evil has been nearly realized. Thank God.”

“Thank God,” I said, also squarely facing the back of the house.

The
Wall Street Journal
and
USA Today
were delivered each day, via our Devices, to a set of reading tablets in the house. The five of us took turns cooking breakfast and ate together every morning. After a quick prayer, we were left together to read the papers. At first it was an odd feeling knowing that somewhere a big machine was looking at each article I clicked to read and how long I spent with the piece as it searched for patterns and considered what they meant. I learned from the newspapers that the world outside America had changed a great deal during the past three years. Jordan had been true to his word and had terminated all America’s treaties and alliances. United States troops were withdrawn from the Korean peninsula, Japan, Europe, and the Middle East. The power vacuum in Asia was filled almost immediately by China, which invited Japan and all of Southeast Asia, including Australia, to join the Greater China Cooperation Area. It was an offer none of those countries was in a position to refuse. In a month, without a shot being fired, China had established a sphere of economic and military domination covering the entirety of the western Pacific. It was nothing less than a new empire, a reprise of the colonial model pioneered by the British, under which all petroleum and minerals in Australia, Indonesia, and elsewhere in the region were reserved to feed China’s insatiable demand for energy and resources. In return the “cooperating” countries purchased the products of China’s burgeoning manufacturing sector. The Chinese occupied the former US military bases in Japan, the Philippines, and Korea. The Christian Nation seemed to me to be on good terms with China, notwithstanding the fact that every newspaper I read used the adjective “godless” before the word “Chinese.” I couldn’t figure out this passive acceptance of the Chinese empire, and I wondered what had happened to the evangelistic imperative. But having created a Godly Kingdom in America, the federal government seemed content to allow great swaths of humanity to wallow in atheism and error.

The Middle East had been messier, as Jordan had reiterated America’s support for “biblical Israel” as the country’s sole international commitment. But having made clear that the Jews must continue to be in control of Jerusalem, Jordan made no effort to protect the Saud family from the Shia revolution that swept the Middle East. The Islamic fundamentalists, with tacit approval from Washington, soon realized their dream of a Shia Islamic Caliphate extending from Pakistan through Iran, Egypt, the entire Gulf, and North Africa. In an attempt to unwind globalization and shock the world economy back to a pre-modern condition, the ayatollahs in charge shut in and abandoned all the oil and gas wells in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and the old United Arab Emirates. Within three months, 60 percent of the world’s oil production disappeared. Planners in the United States had long assumed that any government in control of the oil fields of the Middle East might threaten to withhold oil from the market—and even do so for a time to achieve some specific objective—but would eventually act in its own economic interest and resume production. This proved incorrect. The Shia Islamic Caliphate decided that the disruption to the Western world and the potential obliteration of modernism in general were far more appealing than the money and power they could have had by continuing to produce and sell petroleum products to the West. As a result, the economies in the developed world other than China and Russia staggered. As a quid pro quo for American acquiescence to the restoration of an Islamic Caliphate, Israel was left alone, and it too realized its destiny as a religious state, with a dramatic revision to its liberal constitution in order to establish the primacy of the Torah and effectively guarantee political domination by the ultra-orthodox Jewish sects.

It was more difficult for me to figure out from the newspapers what had happened in Europe. NATO was gone. The European Community had survived, but it seemed to subsist in a state of Finlandized subservience to Russia, which, through its supply of natural gas and control of the gas pipelines, dominated the western part of the continent both economically and politically. Only the UK and the Scandinavian countries seemed to endure in a state of true political and economic independence. Very little was said of them in the American press.

In Manhattan, fewer cars on the streets appear to be the only symptom of the shock suffered by the country having lost access to half the crude oil it had consumed before. But the newspapers suggest many other changes in the country at large. Shale gas wells linked by a dense web of natural gas pipelines dominate the landscape in a great swath of the country extending from upstate New York down to Texas. Every new car runs on natural gas, and a type of coal-based slurry has replaced fuel oil as the power source for America’s home furnaces. Mountain after West Virginia mountain has disappeared to give up its coal, and a hazy smog once again has settled over many cities and suburbs of the country. Politicians appear at each new coal-fired and nuclear plant opening, promising that God will provide and, within a decade, things will return to “normal.”

M
Y JOB DID
NOT
start for a week, so the first few days after my move to Commerce Street I spent wandering around Greenwich Village and, later, the rest of Manhattan. Since I was unable to digest all I was seeing and learning through conversation, my dreams became vivid and memorable. After one of my long walks, I dreamt that a neutron bomb had dispatched all the real New Yorkers and that Stepford Wife–like facsimiles had been installed in their place by the big machines. For a Christian Nation where we were all supposed to be attentive to our souls, the New York I found during these walks was strangely soulless. The absence of the gays was palpable. The West Village, once so animated and irreverent, now had a suburban ambiance. Fast-food outlets and national chain stores, once rare in Manhattan, were ubiquitous. I observed an elevated sense of fashion compared to what we saw on television in the rest of the country, but it was subdued. Nothing outrageous. Nothing revealing. Nothing, really, very interesting.

And then, I slowly realized, there was the lack of foreigners. New York, a beacon of cosmopolitanism since the seventeenth century, was the one place in the country where walking down any street at any time, you could always hear a language other than English being spoken. Before the war, the population was polyglot, and residents walked the streets with millions of visitors from around the world. But I now found during my walks that the world had stopped coming to New York. While I was on Governors Island, illegal immigrants in the city had joined those from around the country in being detained and repatriated. New Yorkers who had been educated in our schools, who greeted us every day as our doormen and taxi drivers and whose children were born here, were torn from their families and sent back to countries that were for many of them only distant memories. Eventually even those members of their families who were in the United States legally joined their loved ones in exile. New immigration stopped, and hundreds of thousands of Americans from the Rust Belt and the South migrated to New York to fill the shoes of the missing immigrants.

My new job was a short walk across Greenwich Village to the old NYU Bobst Library building on the south side of Washington Square. As I entered the building, it suddenly occurred to me that this was only the third job I’d held in my life: the firm, TW, and now the Christian Nation Archives. I was greeted by my direct supervisor, a corpulent middle-aged woman with a helmet of carefully composed hair, an engagingly warm smile, and an accent that suggested the southern reaches of the Midwest.

“I am Mrs. Scott,” she said, “but I hope you will call me Lurlene. No need to stand on formality here—like my Dale used to say, God rest his soul. After all, we are all … Well, yes. So now. I know you were at the, um, the facility…. I just want you to know it makes no difference. You know, we are now all together despite, you know—”

“Don’t worry about it,” I interrupted. “I understand. I’m here now and anxious to get to work.”

“Oh good. And so important, you know. Our work. Really, I mean, you know how much trouble all that, well, trash caused. So much trouble. So it’s up to us to sort it all out. What’s left, that is.”

The old NYU library is unlike the Classical or Gothic palaces of the great Ivy League universities. The building is urban and modern with a tall glass atrium at its center. It had been one of the larger open-stack research libraries in the country, with fourteen stories of books and reading areas.

Lurlene walked me down to the second sub level of the building where dozens of tables were positioned in neat rows in the center of a large room. I was thrilled to find that the room smelled of old books. The index clerk at each table received books from the open stacks in old-fashioned metal book carts. His job was to inspect each book, reading only as much of the content as was necessary. The clerk then chose from stacks of coded index cards the approximate size of old-fashioned bookmarks and inserted the chosen card behind the cover of the book. The clerk then placed the indexed book onto an empty cart.

“That will be your desk,” said Lurlene, pointing to an empty table. “But first you must learn the alphabet.” She saw my look of confusion. “Oh dear, of course, silly me. My husband—now with the Lord—always said, ‘Lordy, Lurlene, folks don’t understand a thing you say. For heaven’s sake, slow down.’ Have you lost someone, Greg?”

“Yes, but as you say, they are with the Lord.”

“Still. So, well, yes. Here, alphabet means the letters—you know, A-C means approved Christian literature. The prefix D means books to destroy, so D-D, for example, means books to destroy that have to do with some kind of deviancy. But there are more than twenty-six letter combinations actually, and they’re a bit tough to learn. So for a day or so you’ll work with Mr. Thornton …” She then lowered her voice, whispering conspiratorially, “who is a bit, let’s say, stiff. You’ll see.”

Mr. Thornton informed the group of three workers who were starting that Monday that he had been chief librarian at Patrick Henry College. He told us that immediately after the end of the Holy War he had been selected personally by President Jordan to organize the Christian Nation Archives around the country where those physical books not selected for destruction were to be preserved for the use of COGA-approved historians and other scholars. No physical books, of course, were required any longer by the general public, who had access to the entirety of the COGA-approved canon through their Devices.

“As saved Christians, you all understand just how urgently God requires us to rid His kingdom of all traces of smut, filth, and evil. Our redemption as a nation is conditional—conditional on our following through and eradicating evil the way God wants. Think of it this way, Gentlemen: Every ungodly book was a paving stone in that wicked road of human-centered, egotistical arrogance that led this nation off the path of righteousness. As long as such books still exist, they have the potential to exercise their evil influence on the fragile and flawed minds of man. God calls us to their eradication. So, job one, so to speak, is to ensure that not a single such book remains. Do you understand? You might think, what does it matter if a couple old books remain on a shelf somewhere? But sin is like a virus. It worms its way out of the pockets where you try to keep it hidden and then it waits, silently, for the chance to strike. Understand?”

The three of us nodded silently. I was surprised by the depth of the anger directed at the humble book. This was a rhetoric I had not heard before Governors. Mr. Thornton continued: