The Living Will Envy The Dead (24 page)

(And it turned out, afterwards, that we couldn’t have carried out a paternity test.  Good thing I didn’t know that at the time…)

The third case was the worst, in so many ways.  John Anderson was one of the more isolationist members of our little community.  He loathed company – his wife had left him years ago, taking with her his son and two daughters – and the government, for which he reserved a special hatred.  He had been delighted at the results of the Final War and the destruction of the meddling interferers from Washington – most of whom wouldn’t have known which end of a cow was which – but he resented our plans to survive.  His land was his land, as far as he was concerned, and that went double for anything else that happened to be his.  He didn’t mind us repossessing some buildings and houses that had been abandoned by the owners, who normally lived in the big cities and had never come out to us, but it was a different story when it was his buildings that were being reclaimed.  Never mind that he had never used them since his wife had left…

And then he’d taken a pot-shot at one of the farmers, and then at Jackson when he had arrived in response to a complaint, treating him – all the while – to a torrent of racist abuse.  Jackson probably deserved a commendation for not rising to the bait and hurting Anderson, but he was a clear and present danger to the remainder of the town.  What had been tolerable, even funny, before the war could no longer be tolerated, not when lives were at stake.

The discussion had been brief and acrimonious.  “John Anderson,” I said, “you are ordered to leave Ingalls and not return to the town.”  It wasn't my sole decision, for once.  It was the decision of the entire Cabinet.  It still left a bad taste in people’s mouths for weeks afterwards.  John Anderson hadn’t done anything beyond taking pot-shots at people, defending his property.  Sure, we needed it, but where would it end if we established a precedent?  There was little choice.  “If you return, you will be shot on sight.”

And then we ended up trying to establish a unified government.

If anything, that was worse than upholding the law.

Any government will work if authority and responsibility are equal and coordinate. This does not insure “good” government; it simply insures that it will work. But such governments are rare — most people want to run things but want no part of the blame.  This used to be called the “backseat-driver syndrome.”

-Robert A. Heinlein

And so we come to the government.

Ed’s Iron Law of Government runs like this;

“The more you want from your government, the less it will deliver.”

Why?

Think about it.  The Government is basically a lot of people trying to run things, right?  They have the power and the responsibility – or at least what we choose to give them – and they should be able to do whatever we think they should do, or so we think.  It’s not true.  A government is an organisation, just as a Marine Company or a business is an organisation, and the more you want it to do, the less it can do.

Take communism, for example.  Perfect communism can really be summed up as the state controlling everything.  The communists and their fellow travellers generally call it something along the lines of ‘everything belonging to the People’ – note the capital ‘P’ there – but the basic truth is that everything is owned and run by the government.  It seems a good idea on paper – there will be no competition, no duplication of effort and no disputes – but in practice it simply doesn’t work.  Why not?  There’s just too much for the government to do.  Even if they’re all upright honest Soviet Men – the Soviet Union used to claim that it had created a new species of human – they’re still going to be burdened with the task of doing
everything
.  How can a single government handle it all? 

A state can be described as a living creature.  If you lower bread prices, for instance, you hurt farmers who want profits to encourage them to work harder.  If you raise bread prices, you hurt the poor, who cannot afford to buy bread and therefore starve, a recipe for social unrest and revolution.  It isn’t a coincidence that most Russian periods of civil unrest started when the shops ran short of bread, or that the Russian government was prepared to buy grain from filthy capitalists like us to feed their people; when the poor starve, they have nothing left to lose. 
Everything
a communist state does has a knock-on effect somewhere else.  They simply can’t make it efficient, even without accounting for human nature.

And humans are ornery creatures.  The Russians have a joke that goes something like this.  “The Government only pretends to pay us, so we only pretend to work.”  I prefer a more practical story from my days in the Marines.  A fellow rifleman once worked for this really good singer before signing up with the Corps.  He was asked to name his price and promptly named the largest salary he dared, only to see it accepted at once.  Overjoyed, he didn’t bother to question his good fortune until it was too late, when he discovered that everyone else in the band earned twice what he earned.  He asked for a raise and was told no.  Just how pleased do you think he was?  It probably won’t surprise you to know that he didn’t serve the singer to the best of his ability and left in a huff when told to work harder, or be sacked.

Like I said before, everything depends on self-interest.   If you make it easy for a person to be paid without doing any work, they won’t work.  If you penalise your producers, you won’t have any producers.  If, as I have claimed, a person is always governed by self-interest, it is important to note that a person’s personal self-interest may not accord with the government’s self-interest.  Everyone who bought one of those Chinese cars, pre-war, was putting money in the hands of a bunch of fascists, but they were cheaper than American cars.  People – and this is the fact that liberals and conservatives normally miss – vote with their wallets.  They don’t vote for principles unless they’re rich or secure enough not to need to worry.

And what does all this have to do with Ingalls, you might ask?  Five months after the Final War, we found ourselves hosting the first Constitutional Convention.  You’d think that we’d all agree at once to form a new government and carry on from there.  I know that I expected that the process of forming a government wouldn’t take
that
long, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.  Farmers are political too – hell, almost every segment of American society is political in one way or another – and they were mad as hell at Washington.  They wanted change they could believe in long before it became a political slogan and pretty much everyone else agreed with them.  If they had all agreed on the kind of change they wanted, the whole issue might have been settled fairly quickly.  They couldn’t agree at all.

Ingalls had received the dubious honour of hosting the Convention for a number of reasons.  The first one was that we were roughly in the centre of explored territory.  (The maps might have been accurate on some details, still, but politically large swathes of territory might as well have been filled with dragons.)  We could host a meeting fairly easily and, with the radios, help the delegates to get back in touch with their constituencies.  I hadn’t worried
that
much over security, at first, but between the ten Principle Towns and the smaller locations, we had over four hundred people coming to stay.  At least most of them worked for their supper.

I had found a former Constitutional Scholar called Ben-David Singleton and placed him in charge of the Convention.  The entire process was already chaotic when we started to organise it properly and I couldn’t cope.  I – and everyone else in authority – was being bombarded with all kinds of suggestions and a whole series of threats from various interest groups.  Some wanted a strict ban, for example, on all kinds of governmental interference in farming, others wanted the farmers alone to have the right to vote and so on.  I spent more time than I wanted to spend simply skimming through thoroughly worthless suggestions and discarding them.  You wouldn’t believe all the shit we had to wade through.  One woman wrote in, quite seriously, and proposed that all alcoholic drinks be firmly prohibited, along with drugs, pre-marital sex, private gun ownership and pretty much everything else that makes life worth living.  The religious establishment, such as we had in the absence of any links outside West Virginia, wanted some religious laws to be instituted; thankfully, that proposal got shot down swiftly. 

And pretty much everyone wanted change and
their
chance to talk.

We held the first Convention in the open air, mainly because of the fact that the entire population of Ingalls – and hundreds of representatives from nearby towns and settlements – wanted to watch the delegates design the new constitution and hammer out a working plan for future government.  Oh, there were a few people who thought that Ingalls – or insert another town name here – should go it alone, but the benefits of cooperation were too apparent for such proposals to get very far.  Ingalls had changed considerably over the past few months – every patch of land that could be used as a garden, if only a small one, had been turned into a Victory Garden – but without cooperation, we might shrink away and die.  Despite everything, there was enough trust in the
ideal
of American government to keep the flame alive.  There are places in the world that weren't that lucky.  They tended to cease to exist in the expansion following the reconstruction.

“The first Constitutional Convention will come to order,” Ben-David said, after the first speeches had been made.  Every Mayor wanted a chance to address the crowd and, being Mayors, had had to have that chance.  I won’t reproduce all of their speeches, but rest assured that they were starkly pragmatic, rather than boring and tedious hot air.  Ben-David’s famous book holds a complete transcript of everything that happened at the Convention.  “Gentlemen, we stand on the brink of making history.”

It was Ben-David’s pitch and he played it well.  “Our forefathers built on this land a great nation,” he said.  “They created rules that allowed us to live together in reasonable peace and harmony.  They didn’t create a finished product, but one that evolved, without breaking.  Even the stresses of civil war and racial conflict failed to destroy our nation.  What we have to decide, now, is how much of the old we want to discard and how much more we will add to the laws that bind us together.

“It is easy to suggest, as so many have, that we should make this or that little change, secure in the knowledge that we’re doing the right thing.  I must caution you against any such move.  We might create, here, a precedent that allows some later tyrant to defeat us and strangle us in our own laws.  We have seen the creation, in the last few years, of many constitutions, all vast wordy texts that inspire no loyalty from their alienated peoples.  We can make the same mistake, but we must not do so.  I urge you all to look to the past as a guide, but to the future as a goal.  We will reach it as a united nation or a series of small entities, torn apart by civil war and strife.  We must consider, when we look at the past and see what we would change, if we might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

“It seems a silly analogy, but it is one to remember,” he continued.  “When the Founding Fathers created this nation, they did not design a finished product.  There is much to regard with scorn and shame in the early years of the United States of America.  They allowed slavery, an offence against God and man, an offence against human dignity and the equality of man before God, to exist.  They treated women as second-class citizens and refused them the vote.  We are appalled to think of them as our ancestors, but the system they designed
evolved
!  They adapted and added women, and blacks, and Native Americans, the chance to vote.  You may feel that we went too far when we evolved, but our society adapted.  How many other political states can make that claim?

“And I do not feel that we should discard the Constitution, as some have suggested.  I have heard from many – many – people over the last few weeks and most have spoken in favour of retaining the Constitution, with perhaps a few minor changes.  I feel that yes, we should consider the Constitution to be a vital part of our new society.  I feel that we should adapt it, based on the past, while looking to the future.  We stand here, knowing that we will be judged, in the future, by the fruits of our labours.  It behoves us to make them as secure as possible.  We, too, must not design a finished product.  A finished product will merely break at the first hurdle.”

He paused.  “And now I throw open the floor for debate,” he said.  “I ask people to make their opinions known.  The Constitution, old or new, must enjoy the support of the people.  I must warn everyone, however, that rowdy behaviour will see the person responsible evicted from the area.  We should try to approach the future with a little dignity.”

He received a standing ovation before the first person rose to speak.  It was, I freely admit, a very disorganised assembly.  Ben-David had planned it that way.  The people would make their opinions known, allowing the people who were actually going to do much of the legwork in adapting or rewriting the Constitution to hear what they had to say and incorporate their ideas.  It was a chaotic system, but as he pointed out, the appearance of democracy was important.