“Yes but why, Wade, why? How do these people win elections? I have never understood why so many decent hardworking Americans will loyally and you have to say even pigheadedly continue to vote for people whose explicit declared project is to rip them off.”
“People don’t see it that way,” Wade said, beginning to doze again.
“But it’s so obvious! Cutting jobs, reducing wages, increasing hours, shaving benefits and retirements—all this downsizing is the downsizing of labor costs, meaning less of what companies make is given to the employees and more to the owners and shareholders. And this is the Republican program! They advocate this transfer of profits! They write and pass the laws that allow it, and oppose the laws that try to stop it! So why do people vote for them, why? Nobody making less than about seventy grand a year should ever even think of voting for them! And even the people who make more should reconsider their priorities.”
“You’re a true Democrat, Phil.” Though he had been a Green in his first term, and an independent in his second.
“That’s true, but still, how do they do it?”
“They tell people it’s Democrats ripping them off, with taxes. People see business paying them and government taking it away.”
“But business takes it away too! They take it first and they take more and then they run off with it! People are just squeaking by while their employers are zillionaires! At least if the government rips you off then they use the money to build roads and schools and airports and jails and all, they build the whole damn infrastructure! No, taxing and spending is good, that’s what I say—tax big and spend big, I say that right on the floor of the Senate.”
“We know, Phil. We watch in the office and we weep.”
“Yes you do, because government is the people! The owners just take the money and build castles in Barbados. How can they justify that, how can they sell that program?”
“Ideology is powerful.”
“I guess so. You must be right. Although I’ve never understood why you can’t just look the situation in the face and see what’s going on.”
“An imaginary relationship to a real situation.”
“Very imaginary. But we’ve got to be even more imaginative than they are, Phil. Our imaginations are stronger than theirs!”
“Maybe. They seem to have the upper hand right now.”
“Do you think so? Don’t you think we’re gaining on them?”
“Do you?”
“Sure I do! I know it looks slow. But there are lots of people out there sick of being downsized. Give them half a chance and they’ll go for it. They don’t want revolution, but if they see a reform process leading to a desirable goal then they’ll walk away from these Götterdämmerung cowboys and they’ll all start up their own co-ops.”
“Capitalization trouble.”
“Yeah, but it’s legal, that’s the thing. It’s like a kind of progressive’s loophole in the law. And there’s so much of it happening already, under the radar. It’s like there are two sides battling for which fork of the path history is gonna take.”
“Your teeter-totter teleology.”
“What’s that? Sure, ecology’s on our side. It’s a good angel bad angel kind of thing. Co-opification versus the Götterdämmerung. But you know, everything’s going down in flames—ordinary people with kids can’t possibly like that, can they Wade? They’ll have to choose co-opification.”
“You would think so.”
“We have to make sure. Oh, man. I’m getting tired. I think the nightcap has finally done its thing, Wade. I’m gonna crash I think. I’m in Kashmir, try not to call me in the middle of the night, okay? But give me another report when you get there.”
“I will. Good night, Phil.”
“Night night.”
Then he was waking up again under the light touch of a stewardess, and an hour later off the plane and through the airport and onto a smaller plane, and flying south to Christchurch, over the green hills of New Zealand’s two islands. Then down onto a small-town airport, and out waiting for luggage, in the late afternoon. His wrist phone told him it was three days after Phil’s call about Antarctica; but he had lost a day crossing the international date line. His internal clock appeared to be at about 4 A.M.
He pushed his luggage on a cart through the parking lot, out to the roundabout at the airport entrance, where his hotel was located. Just around the corner, he was told, was the U.S. Antarctic Centre. So after checking in and taking his luggage to his room, he walked around to the Centre in a dreamlike state, to make his appointment for clothing issue.
Inside a big low building he sat on a long wooden bench with some other men checking in, and tried on an entire L.L. Bean catalog of winter clothing, pouring cornucopiastically out of two big orange canvas bags packed specifically for him. The array of solar and piezoelectric gloves and mittens was particularly impressive, and he commented on it to one of the Kiwi helpers in the room. The man looked at his manifest and shrugged: “You’re going a lot of places.”
“Am I?”
“That’s what it says.”
So Wade hefted his bags and shambled back to the hotel, then had dinner in the hotel restaurant. Every face there came straight out of Masterpiece Theatre, New Zealand now being considerably more British than the British. Back in his room he slept deeply, barely woke to his alarm; stared at his face in the bathroom mirror; good-bye to that world. He lugged his bags back to the Centre. It was dawn, and he and several other men changed into their extreme weather clothing. “We’ll cook in the plane,” an American commented, “and if we go down this stuff won’t keep us alive a single second longer.”
“Propitiating the gods,” a Kiwi official suggested.
The official herded them into a larger room, like an ultrafunctional airport lounge, where they and their orange bags were sniffed eagerly by a big black dog on a leash. Then they were led out to an old bus, and driven across the airport tarmac to the side of a big green four-engined prop plane with the number “04” painted in white behind its nose. Wade followed the other passengers up tall steps and through a small oval door, into a dim interior.
He shuffled back into a big poorly lit cylindrical space, which was almost filled by the bladeless fuselage of a khaki helicopter. The walls were covered with things; on the floor against the walls, aluminum tubing supported red nylon webbing seats. The other passengers sat here and there, and Wade realized there were only going to be a dozen of them—half in black overalls and big red parkas, half in khaki pants and leather flyers’ jackets. These latter were the Kiwi crew of the helicopter. Wade sat down next to them.
Overhead the space was filled by scores of pipes, lines, struts and cannisters, many of them encased in gray canvas-covered insulation tubing, laced into place with what looked like very long shoelaces, and marked everywhere by stencilled numbers, acronyms, cryptic instructions and so forth; and all covered with a layer of dust. If it had been a movie set the art director would have been accused of shamelessly camping it up: a flying machine of the previous century, how quaint! Except this one had to fly them for eight hours across an islandless stormy sea.
Uneasily Wade jammed the foam earplugs he had been given into his ears, and got his webbing seatbelt fastened. Then the engines started, and even with the earplugs the roar was deafening. The dozen passengers were cast into a speechless world, a world of sign language, smiles, nods, thumbs-up, and so on. A crew member wearing a jacket that proclaimed him part of the New York Air Guard checked them over, then climbed up a hatchway to the cockpit. They were moving; perhaps they were taking off. The other red-parkaed passengers drifted into books, or reverie; the Kiwi helicopter crew members got up and wandered about, finding flat places to lie down and go to sleep. This left the webbing seats around Wade empty, and he lay down as well. Hot air alternated with frigid blasts.