“Directly the project is finalised,” Norman said. “Elihu and I are going to present it to President Obomi together. Another three or four days, I guess.” He hesitated. “You know something?” he continued. “I’m scared of what I’m going to find when I actually get there.”
“Why?”
“Because…” Norman tugged at his beard with awkward fingers. “Because of Donald.”
“Whatinole does he have to do with it? He’s off the other side of the world.”
“Because I shared this apt with him for years, and always thought of him as a neutral kind of guy, leading a rather dull easy-going life. Not the sort of person you’d form strong opinions about. And then all of a sudden he told me he’d been responsible for the riot I found myself caught up in—down the lower East Side. I told you about that, didn’t I?”
“You talked about it at Guinevere’s party. So did a lot of other people.” Chad shrugged. “Of course, to claim responsibility for starting a riot is arrogant, but I see what you’re setting course for. You mean you’re wondering whether the Beninians are set up the same way he was, capable of starting something disastrous when they blunder out into the big scene.”
“No,” said Norman. “I’m wondering whether I’m the one who’s ignorant and apt to trigger a disaster.”
context (17)
FEELING THE OVERDRAFT
“Yes, my name’s Chad Mulligan. I’m not dead, if that was going to be the subject of your next silly question. And I don’t give a pint of whaledreck about what you called up to say to me, even if you are from SCANALYZER. If you want me to talk I’ll talk about what I want to, not what you want me to. If that’s acceptable plug in your recorders. Otherwise I’m cutting the circuit.
“All right. I’m going to tell you about the poor. You know where to look for a poor man? Don’t go out on the street like a sheeting fool and pick on a street-sleeper in filthy clothes. Up to a few days ago the man you picked on might have been me, and I’m worth a few million bucks.
“And you don’t have to go to India or Bolivia or Beninia to find a poor man, either. You have to go exactly as far as the nearest mirror.
“At this point you’ll probably decide to switch off in disgust—I don’t mean you, codder, taking this down off the phone, I mean whoever gets to hear it if you have the guts to replay it over SCANALYZER. You out there! You’re on the verge of going bankrupt and you aren’t paying attention. I don’t suppose that telling you will convince you, but I’m offering the evidence, in hopes.
“A codder who lives the way I’ve been living for the past three years, without a home or even a suitcase, isn’t necessarily poor, like I said. But free of the things which get in the way of noticing the truth, he has a chance to look the situation over and appraise it. One of the things he can see is what’s changed and what hasn’t in this brave new century of ours.
“What do you give a panhandler? Nothing, maybe—but if you do cave in, you make it at least a fin. After all, his monthly licence costs him double that. So he’s not really poor. Costs have gone up approximately sixfold in the past fifty years, but fifty years ago you were liable to give a panhandler a quarter or a half. Relatively, panhandlers have moved up on the income ladder.
“You haven’t.
“The things which have gone up the standard, average, six times include your typical income, the cost of food and clothing, the cost of the gewgaws without which you don’t feel you are anybody—a holographic TV, for instance—and rents and housing costs generally, like heating charges.
“The things which have come down a little include intraurban transportation—that’s to say, a New York token, which I cite because I’m a New Yorker by adoption now, costs only eighty cents instead of the dollar twenty or so it would cost if it had kept pace with everything else—and, to most people’s surprise, taxes, which finance things we’re not going to carp about such as medicare and education. These aren’t bad at present, by the way.
“But what’s gone up, way way up? Things like water. Did you know you’re paying eleven times as much for water as people did fifty years back, and you’re not managing to use any more than they did then because there isn’t any more?
“And recreation space! Did you know that having a decent-sized open space within easy walking distance adds thirty per cent to your assessment for urban taxes?
“And health itself! I’m not talking about hospital care—that’s okay these days. I’m talking about natural, normal, everyday health with its resistance to infection and abundant energy.
“You can probably recognise the New Poor, as the phrase calls them. You may not know how; you may indeed be puzzled about how you can tell when they’re wearing clean clothes and carrying all kinds of lovely doodads which may not be the year after next’s model but are serviceable and numerous. You can tell them, though—can’t you?
“Well, what you recognise them by is the fact that they don’t spend—they can’t spend—on the things you add to keep yourself going. They eat mass-produced force-grown meat. So do you, but you add protein capsules and B12. They drink pasteurised imperishable milk. So do you, but you take calciferol tablets. They eat battery eggs. So do you, but you take Vitamin A. And even with all this, you probably also take Wakup pills, energisers, tranks, niacin, riboflavin, ascorbic acid—I’ve been going through a friend’s medicine cabinet, and they’re all there.
“Even so, you’re losing out. You’re falling further and further behind.
“I used a fifty-year baseline a moment ago. Let’s use one again. What have you got that’s new, around the place? The fifty years from 1910 to 1960 saw the arrival in the average Western home, and a good few non-Western ones, of the telephone, the radio, the television, the car of unlamented memory, plastics, the washing-machine, the electric stove, iron, toaster and mixer, not to mention the freezer, the hi-fi set, and the tape-recorder.
“I’ve been around the place where I’m staying, which belongs to a highly paid executive with one of our biggest corporations. I cannot find one single object which is as revolutionary as the things I just listed. True, the TV is holographic—but the holographic principle was discovered in the 1930s, catch that? They were ready to apply it to TV by 1983 or 1984, but it didn’t come in for another decade after that. Why not?
“Because you couldn’t afford it.
“Same with the screen on your phone. They had videophone service operating in Russia in the 1960s. You couldn’t afford it until the eighties. And that’s supposed to be new, anyway—thirty years old already?
“Why do you think you get such a generous trade-in allowance when you switch from next year’s model of some gadget to the year after next’s? Because some of the parts are going to be put right back into the new sets, and what can’t be cannibalised will be sold as precious—I repeat, precious—scrap.
“The biggest single building project in this country right now is costing a hundred million buckadingdongs. What do you think it is? You’re wrong. It’s a jail.
“Friends, you don’t have to go to India or Africa to find people existing on the borderline of poverty. You are. Our resources are stretched to the point where reclaiming a gallon of water so someone can drink it a second time costs eleven times more than it did in 1960. TV you can live without, a phone you can live without, but water? Uh-huh! We don’t starve to death, but if you want a diet that’s fit to match your unprecedented tallness and muscularity you pay not six times as much as your grandfather did but more like nine to ten times, depending on how you take in your vitamins and other supplements.