Interface (64 page)

"Getting good results here," Zeldo said, looking at the readouts of Cozzano's blood pressure. "He's calming down. He was a little
nervous before."

"Perfect," Ogle said. "I just invented a new form of political
rhetoric: don't say a damn thing."

It was perfect, Aaron realized, sitting there staring at Cozzano on
the TV. He had seen a lot of these debates. The candidates always came off as high-strung, bickering game show contestants. But Cozzano had a solid dignity that was way above all that. He gave
the impression of a man who had been deeply absorbed in thinking
profound thoughts, not paying any attention to his surroundings,
who had suddenly been interrupted by the nervous, carping
moderator of the debate. Who was now giving the matter some serious thought before he blurted anything out.

Aaron felt as though he should jump to his feet and salute
Cozzano. He felt that way even though he was sitting ten feet away
from Ogle and knew damn well this was a manipulated image.

"I have certain values that I am not willing to play games with,"
Cozzano said. Then he paused for quite a while, thinking. The
audience was dead silent. Even the inside of Ogle's trailer was dead
silent. The whole universe seemed to be revolving around
Cozzano. "One of the things I value is dignity and self-respect. These things are our birthrights. Some squander them. Once you
have lost them, you can't get them back. And one way to squander
your dignity and self-respect is to whine and carp and beg."
Cozzano pronounced these words with almost palpable disgust.
"My attitude is that I don't care how unlevel the playing field is.
I'm going to play by the rules anyway." At this point Cozzano
seemed to become visibly pissed off. He leveled his gaze directly into the camera for the first time, held up his meaty right hand,
pointed into the lens. "I will never crawl on my knees to Japan or
any other country and cry uncle, the way George Bush did in 1992.
I'd rather die." Cozzano sat back in his chair, held his gaze on the
lens for a few more seconds, then looked away.

The Eye of Cy had become blindingly bright: America was
feeling strong, conflicting emotions.

There was silence and then confusion. He had only used up a small portion of his allotted time. Dr. Lawrence wasn't sure what
he should do. The TV feed cut uncertainly back and forth between
Governor Cozzano and Dr. Lawrence.

"You still have thirty seconds," Dr. Lawrence said. "Would you
like to elaborate?"

"What's to elaborate?" Cozzano said.

A definite pattern was now noticeable when the feed cut
between Dr. Lawrence and Cozzano. People had generally made
up their minds that Dr. Lawrence was a jerk.

"That was wild," Ogle said. He sounded a bit uncertain. He
grabbed the POPULIST-ELITIST joystick and shoved it a little closer to POPULIST. "That took balls. Aaron, don't we have a
toilet-scrubbing ex-autoworker?"

"Yeah," Aaron said, choosing a line of the same name from a
menu on the computer screen. A graphic came up summarizing the
way that this particular member of the PIPER 100 had reacted to
Cozzano's speech.

It was all jaggedy contrasts and mood swings. Clearly this man's
feelings had been hurt. But it wasn't all negative either. Toward the
end of Cozzano's statement, the ex-autoworker's emotional state
had swung sharply upward.

"Huh. That's interesting," Ogle said. "The appeal to pride seems
to work. But it's not old-fashioned jingoism. It's a question of
personal, individual pride. Core values."

On TV, Dr. Hunter P. Lawrence was explaining that the candidates could now rebut each other's statements.

McLane flashed up on the screen with a bit of a stunned,
nervous, beady-eyed look, as if he wanted to stare at Cozzano but
couldn't. "Well, it seems to me that, uh, the best ticket to self-
esteem and dignity is to have a steady job. Everything else follows
from that. Under my administration, I'll be pursuing policies that
will stimulate the vigor of our free enterprise system and lead to job
growth in general. After all, it's hard to be dignified when you're
living on welfare."

The Eye of Cy pinkened briefly as the word "welfare" was spoken. "Cheap shot," Ogle mumbled.

"It's easy to scoff at the concept of the unlevel playing field when
you have been born into an affluent family and haven't suffered
from massive layoffs the way our auto workers have," McLane
continued. "But for those people in Detroit-"

The Eye of Cy displayed a few brief flashes of green as several
people took pleasure in McLane's personal attack on Cozzano. But
most people didn't like it. They didn't like it at all.

Cozzano had turned slightly in McLane's direction. He looked
like a great man, alone in his study, busy with important matters, who has to get up and discipline a puppy who has just piddled on
the rug.

"My family is affluent because we love each other and we work hard," Cozzano said. "And I can promise you, Tip, that if you seek
to gain the esteem of the American public by running my family
into the ground, I will make you regret it on many levels. When a
man makes cracks about my family, my natural response is to invite
him to step outside. And I'm not above doing that here and now." Ogle rocketed half out of is chair and started screaming. "CUT
TO TIP! CUT TO TIP! CUT TO TIP!" Aaron could hardly see
anything; the Eye of Cy had become blindingly intense, like a
parabolic dish pointed directly into the sun. But the image in the middle changed and Tip came on the screen; his mouth was half
open, his eyebrows somewhere up in the middle of his forehead, his eyes darting back and forth nervously. The Eye of Cy turned
blue (people who, as of three seconds ago, hated Tip McLane),
with a few angry red screens (people who wanted Cozzano to
punch McLane right here and now).

"Knockout punch," Ogle said. "Tip's out of the race." But just
in case, he shoved the KIND/GENTLE-BELLIGERENT joystick
toward KIND/GENTLE. Then he moved the MATERIAL-
ETHEREAL joystick a lot closer to ETHEREAL.

It was almost possible to see the wheels turning in McLane's
head. The look of surprise gradually faded, until he looked
impassive, then calm and almost coldly defiant. "It wouldn't be the
first time I had settled an argument that way," McLane said.

"Ouch," Ogle said.

"But one of the first things a president has to learn is to separate
his personal feelings from the affairs of the nation, and-'

Colors shifted all over the Eye. "Damage control!" Ogle said,
and slammed one of the buttons on the armrest.

"-as for the issue of the auto industry," Cozzano said,
continuing his own sentence as if McLane had never opened his
mouth, and blithely running him off the road, "it is simply wrong
to say that people get jobs first and then feel good about themselves.
That is a shallow view of human nature. Dignity can't be bought
with a paycheck. Your student deferments kept you out of
Vietnam, Tip, so you never saw what I saw: stooped peasants in the
rice paddies who never made a dime in their lives but who had
more dignity in the last joint of their little finger than a lot of highly
paid lawyers and chief executives I can name. It goes the other way:
if you have dignity, if you respect yourself, you will find a job. I
don't care how bad the economy is. When my great-grandfather
came to this part of the country, there weren't any jobs. So he came
up with his own job. He had only been in America for a few weeks,
but in that time he had become thoroughly American. He had
come to believe that he could change his own life. That he could
take charge of his own destiny."

"Very inspiring. But when my family came to California-"
McLane began.

"Some think that unemployment hurts because of
money,"
Cozzano said. "Because you can't afford to buy Nintendo games
and fancy sneakers. That is shallow and cheap. Americans are not
pure, money-grubbing materialists. Unemployment hurts people's
feelings far more than their pocketbooks."

In the past few seconds all the graphs had veered downward, the
colors turned bluish. "I fucked
that
up!" Ogle said, whacking keys and sliding joysticks furiously. "Bad move!"

Suddenly Tip McLane was on the screen. It was too late for
Cozzano to dig himself out.

"Shit!" Ogle hissed. "Where does he get off saying that
Americans are not shallow materialists?"

McLane was amused. He knew he had Cozzano. "Apparently
the Governor of Illinois thinks that we'd all be happier being fully employed
...
in rice paddies!"

The audience laughed. The Eye warmed suddenly to Tip McLane.

"Damn!" Ogle said. "Why'd he have to get profound on us?"
He scratched his chin nervously, thinking hard, and fussed with the
controls. "We have to suppress that urge to philosophize."

"Maybe the Governor hasn't been seeing a full cross section of
the American public from his backyard in Tuscola," McLane said.
"But I have, because I've visited all fifty states during the long
primary campaign - even smaller states that my campaign manager
begged me not to visit because he said they weren't important. I
have talked to a lot of people. And over and over again, I get the
impression that the people of America don't like being talked down
to by politicians."

"That's for damn sure," Ogle said, punching a key that caused a
hallucinatory bullet to whiz past Cozzano's head.

"They know what they want: jobs. Good jobs," McLane said.
"What they don't need is vague talk about how to feel more
dignified."

Ogle groaned. The PIPER 100 were showing strong support for
McLane now. "They're killing us," he said, and slammed a big red
button that said, simply, FLIP FLOP.

"When the forces of freedom and democracy stormed Hitler's Fortress Europe on D day," Cozzano said, "the elite spearhead of
that invasion rained down out of the sky on parachutes. Parachutes made of nylon that was manufactured about half a mile away from
my house in Tuscola, by my family. The nervous paratroopers, standing in the open doorways of those airplanes, looking down at
the landscape of France thousands of feet below them, were putting
a lot of trust in those folds of nylon."

"What does this have to do with anything?" Aaron said,
mirroring the feelings displayed on the Eye of Cy: a state of chaotic
flux.

"Shut up," Ogle mumbled. "This is good material. Reaganesque
in its cloying nostalgia - with the metaphorical punch of Ross Perot
before he went batshit."

"When you jump out of an airplane flying over a war zone, you
need more than self-esteem to get you safely to the ground,"
Cozzano said. "You need a solid, well-made parachute. Young
people leaving high school and college within the last few weeks
have a lot in common with those troopers jumping out of that
airplane. And if you think that William A. Cozzano intends to send
them out that door with nothing more than some feel-good talk,
you're dead wrong."

"But that's the opposite of what he just said," Aaron said.

"Just shut up," Ogle said. "I think he's got them going." As Cozzano's analogy started to become clearer, the monitor screens
had stopped fluctuating and begun settling down into a dim
greenish pattern. "We need to get Anecdote Development
working on that D day thing."

Cozzano continued. "Just as nylon replaced silk in parachutes,
new technologies have to replace the old ones in our job market. And I can promise you that no country in the world is better than
America when it comes to inventing new technologies."

McLane interrupted him. "And no country is better capitalizing
on those inventions than Japan," he said, "which is why I'm going
to make sure that America, not Japan, reaps the benefit of her creative powers, unique among all the nations of the world."