Lightning Rods (33 page)

Authors: Helen DeWitt

Tags: #Fiction, #Fiction / American, #Fiction / Literary

There is a streak of Puritanism in the American psyche that goes right straight back to the Pilgrims, and that streak has been an unmitigated blessing to the American criminal since time immemorial. What these critics fail to recognize is that if a demand exists for a service, and you criminalize that service, the only people who benefit are organized crime. As it happened, however, Joe was working hand in glove with Walter Pike, and as everyone knows, organized crime doesn’t stand a chance when the FBI is on the job.

Joe had stopped worrying about the legalities, or rather he had stopped thinking he might one day have to
start
worrying about the legalities, as soon as he and Walter shook hands on the deal. And in fact Joe had nothing to worry about.

Walter had nothing but praise for Joe’s outreach work among the Christian community. He was equally supportive of Joe’s plans to develop a service for people who were uncomfortable with the concept of a lightning rod. He reiterated that Joe had nothing to worry about, and as it turned out Walter was as good as his word.

To insist on a strict observance of the written law over the laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger would be absurdly sacrificing the end to the means—nobody puts these things better than Thomas Jefferson, and Walter was second to none in admiration for our third President. Still, there’s no point going around
looking
for trouble. Nobody at the FBI likes breaking the law unnecessarily. In the long term, if inappropriate legislation happens to be in place, the simplest thing is to just get rid of it and replace it with something feasible. It’s just a matter of knowing who to call.

There are pieces of legislation which would leave everyone better off which would be political suicide for a politician to be seen to vote for, let alone propose.

Every politician knows that. Luckily, over the years ways have been found to get around one of the drawbacks of a democratic system. For example, a good way to get around the problem of the vote is to tack the piece of legislation on as a clause in some other piece of legislation, something everyone would
want
to be seen to vote for, like Hurricane Disaster Relief. Hurricane Disaster Relief is a good example, as a matter of fact, because everyone is going to realize you have to get something like that passed into law with a minimum of delay, you wouldn’t expect someone to hold up a bill like that nitpicking at this or that amendment.

That just leaves the politician who has to put his John Hancock on the actual proposal that is going to get tacked on. A tried-and-true method of getting around this problem is to frame the language of the bill in such a way that it does not specifically mention the thing that would be political suicide. A skilled politician knows how to express himself so that the language will permit a desirable set of events to fall within the law, without allowing it to appear that he anticipated anything of the kind.

If something is in the interests of national security a man with the good of his country at heart will do things he might not do for purely personal gain. A member of Senator Johnson’s staff drew up an amendment relating to Vending Machines and Workplace Stress Reduction, so that it was ready to spring into action at the first suitable opportunity. He included a school milk provision just to be on the safe side.

It sometimes happens that nature is not as dramatic as we might like her to be. For some reason there just weren’t any floods or other natural disasters of a scale to hit the national press. He was beginning to think he was going to have to tack it onto a Fisheries and Forestry act, which was always a possible—sometimes you can get away with slipping the legislation into something so boring you wouldn’t expect anyone to read it. But luckily a small hurricane swept in out of the Gulf of Mexico in the nick of time. The Vending Machines and School Milk Amendment got quickly added to the Hurricane Ethel Disaster Relief Bill, which was rushed right through out of concern for the victims of Hurricane Ethel.

There’s an old Chinese saying: Politics is the art of the possible.

That’s true as far as it goes. But there’s something else that’s important to remember. The father of our country said it best, so we’ll let George Washington have the last word.

In America anything is possible.

Acknowledgments

David Levene introduced me to
The Producers
. Mel Brooks wrote “Springtime for Hitler.” I’m especially grateful to Jeffrey Yang and the staff at New Directions for their enthusiastic support, and to Edward Orloff for excellent business advice: I wish more agents were like him.

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

An excerpt from
Lightning Rods
was originally published in
n+1
.

e-ISBN: 1978-0-8112-1952-5

Cover design: Steve Attardo / Rodrigo Corral Design

First published clothbound in 2011. First e-book publication 2011.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

DeWitt, Helen, 1957–

Lightning rods / Helen DeWitt. —1st American cloth ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-8112-1943-3 (hardcover: acid-free paper)

1. Corporate culture—United States—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3554.E92945L54 2012

813'.54—dc22