It Can't Happen Here (49 page)

“Rats! Just a lot of irresponsible wind bags!” jeered President
Windrip. “Why! I thought
you were supposed to be the camera-eyed
gink that kept up on everything that goes on, Lee! You forget that
I myself, personally, made a special radio address to that
particular section of the country last week! And I got a wonderful
reaction. The Middle Westerners are absolutely loyal to me. They
appreciate what I’ve been trying to do!”

Not answering him at all, Sarason demanded that, in
order to bring
and hold all elements in the country together by that useful
Patriotism which always appears upon threat of an outside attack,
the government immediately arrange to be insulted and menaced in a
well-planned series of deplorable “incidents” on the Mexican
border, and declare war on Mexico as soon as America showed that it
was getting hot and patriotic enough.

Secretary of the Treasury
Skittle and Attorney General Porkwood
shook their heads, but Secretary of War Haik and Secretary of
Education Macgoblin agreed with Sarason high-mindedly. Once,
pointed out the learned Macgoblin, governments had merely let
themselves slide into a war, thanking Providence for having
provided a conflict as a febrifuge against internal discontent, but
of course, in this age of deliberate, planned
propaganda, a really
modern government like theirs must figure out what brand of war
they had to sell and plan the selling-campaign consciously. Now,
as for him, he would be willing to leave the whole set-up to the
advertising genius of Brother Sarason.

“No, no, no!” cried Windrip. “We’re not ready for a war! Of
course, we’ll take Mexico some day. It’s our destiny to control it
and Christianize
it. But I’m scared that your darn scheme might
work just opposite to what you say. You put arms into the hands of
too many irresponsible folks, and they might use ‘em and turn
against you and start a revolution and throw the whole dern gang of
us out! No, no! I’ve often wondered if the whole Minute Men
business, with their arms and training, may not be a mistake. That
was your idea, Lee,
not mine!”

Sarason spoke evenly: “My dear Buzz, one day you thank me for
originating that ‘great crusade of citizen soldiers defending their
homes’—as you love to call it on the radio—and the next day you
almost ruin your clothes, you’re so scared of them. Make up your
mind one way or the other!”

Sarason walked out of the room, not bowing.

Windrip complained, “I’m not going to stand for Lee’s
talking to me
like that! Why, the dirty double-crosser, I made him! One of
these days, he’ll find a new secretary of state around this joint!
I s’pose he thinks jobs like that grow on every tree! Maybe he’d
like to be a bank president or something—I mean, maybe he’d like
to be Emperor of England!”

President Windrip, in his hotel bedroom, was awakened late at night
by the voice of a guard
in the outer room: “Yuh, sure, let him
pass—he’s the Secretary of State.” Nervously the President
clicked on his bedside lamp… . He had needed it lately, to
read himself to sleep.

In that limited glow he saw Lee Sarason, Dewey Haik, and Dr. Hector
Macgoblin march to the side of his bed. Lee’s thin sharp face was
like flour. His deep-buried eyes were those of a sleepwalker. His
skinny right
hand held a bowie knife which, as his hand
deliberately rose, was lost in the dimness. Windrip swiftly
thought: Sure would be hard to know where to buy a dagger, in
Washington; and Windrip thought: All this is the doggonedest
foolishness—just like a movie or one of these old history books
when you were a kid; and Windrip thought, all in that same flash:
Good God, I’m going to be killed!

He
cried out, “Lee! You couldn’t do
that
to me!”

Lee grunted, like one who has detected a bad smell.

Then the Berzelius Windrip who could, incredibly, become President
really awoke: “Lee! Do you remember the time when your old mother
was so sick, and I gave you my last cent and loaned you my flivver
so you could go see her, and I hitch-hiked to my next meeting?
Lee!”

“Hell. I suppose so.
General.”

“Yes?” answered Dewey Haik, not very pleasantly.

“I think we’ll stick him on a destroyer or something and let him
sneak off to France or England… . The lousy coward seems
afraid to die… . Of course, we’ll kill him if he ever does
dare to come back to the States. Take him out and phone the
Secretary of the Navy for a boat and get him on it, will you?”

“Very well, sir,” said Haik,
even less pleasantly.

It had been easy. The troops, who obeyed Haik, as Secretary of
War, had occupied all of Washington.

Ten days later Buzz Windrip was landed in Havre and went sighingly
to Paris. It was his first view of Europe except for one twenty-one-day Cook’s Tour. He was profoundly homesick for Chesterfield
cigarettes, flapjacks, Moon Mullins, and the sound of some real
human being
saying “Yuh, what’s bitin’ you?” instead of this
perpetual sappy “oui?”

In Paris he remained, though he became the sort of minor hero of
tragedy, like the ex-King of Greece, Kerensky, the Russian Grand
Dukes, Jimmy Walker, and a few ex-presidents from South America and
Cuba, who is delighted to accept invitations to drawing rooms where
the champagne is good enough and one may have a chance of
finding
people, now and then, who will listen to one’s story and say “sir.”

At that, though, Buzz chuckled, he had kinda put it over on those
crooks, for during his two sweet years of despotism he had sent
four million dollars abroad, to secret, safe accounts. And so Buzz
Windrip passed into wabbly paragraphs in recollections by ex-diplomatic
gentlemen with monocles. In what remained
of Ex-President
Windrip’s life, everything was ex. He was even so far
forgotten that only four or five American students tried to shoot
him.

The more dulcetly they had once advised and flattered Buzz, the
more ardently did most of his former followers, Macgoblin and
Senator Porkwood and Dr. Almeric Trout and the rest, turn in loud
allegiance to the new President, the Hon. Lee Sarason.

He issued a proclamation
that he had discovered that Windrip had
been embezzling the people’s money and plotting with Mexico to
avoid war with that guilty country; and that he, Sarason, in quite
alarming grief and reluctance, since he more than anyone else had
been deceived by his supposed friend, Windrip, had yielded to the
urging of the Cabinet and taken over the Presidency, instead of
Vice-President Beecroft, the exiled
traitor.

President Sarason immediately began appointing the fancier of his
young officer friends to the most responsible offices in State and
army. It amused him, seemingly, to shock people by making a pink-cheeked, moist-eyed boy of twenty-five Commissioner of the Federal
District, which included Washington and Maryland. Was he not
supreme, was he not semi-divine, like a Roman emperor? Could
he
not defy all the muddy mob that he (once a Socialist) had, for its
weak shiftlessness, come to despise?

“Would that the American people had just one neck!” he plagiarized,
among his laughing boys.

In the decorous White House of Coolidge and Harrison and Rutherford
Birchard Hayes he had orgies (an old name for “parties”) with
weaving limbs and garlands and wine in pretty fair imitations of
Roman beakers.

It was hard for imprisoned men like Doremus Jessup to believe it,
but there were some tens of thousands of Corpos, in the M.M.’s, in
civil service, in the army, and just in private ways, to whom
Sarason’s flippant régime was tragic.

They were the Idealists of Corpoism, and there were plenty of them,
along with the bullies and swindlers; they were the men and women
who, in 1935
and 1936, had turned to Windrip & Co., not as perfect,
but as the most probable saviors of the country from, on one hand,
domination by Moscow and, on the other hand, the slack indolence,
the lack of decent pride of half the American youth, whose world
(these idealists asserted) was composed of shiftless distaste for
work and refusal to learn anything thoroughly, of blatting dance
music on the
radio, maniac automobiles, slobbering sexuality, the
humor and art of comic strips—of a slave psychology which was
making America a land for sterner men to loot.

General Emmanuel Coon was one of the Corpo Idealists.

Such men did not condone the murders under the Corpo régime. But
they insisted, “This is a revolution, and after all, when in all
history has there been a revolution with so little
bloodshed?”

They were aroused by the pageantry of Corpoism: enormous
demonstrations, with the red-and-black flags a flaunting
magnificence like storm clouds. They were proud of new Corpo
roads, hospitals, television stations, aeroplane lines; they were
touched by processions of the Corpo Youth, whose faces were exalted
with pride in the myths of Corpo heroism and clean Spartan strength
and the
semi-divinity of the all-protecting Father, President
Windrip. They believed, they made themselves believe, that in
Windrip had come alive again the virtues of Andy Jackson and
Farragut and Jeb Stuart, in place of the mob cheapness of the
professional athletes who had been the only heroes of 1935.

They planned, these idealists, to correct, as quickly as might be,
the errors of brutality and
crookedness among officials. They saw
arising a Corpo art, a Corpo learning, profound and real, divested
of the traditional snobbishness of the old-time universities,
valiant with youth, and only the more beautiful in that it was
“useful.” They were convinced that Corpoism was Communism cleansed
of foreign domination and the violence and indignity of mob
dictatorship; Monarchism with the chosen
hero of the people for
monarch; Fascism without grasping and selfish leaders; freedom with
order and discipline; Traditional America without its waste and
provincial cockiness.

Like all religious zealots, they had blessed capacity for
blindness, and they were presently convinced that (since the only
newspapers they ever read certainly said nothing about it) there
were no more of blood-smeared
cruelties in court and concentration
camp; no restrictions of speech or thought. They believed that
they never criticized the Corpo régime not because they were
censored, but because “that sort of thing was, like obscenity, such
awfully bad form.”

And these idealists were as shocked and bewildered by Sarason’s
coup d’état against Windrip as was Mr. Berzelius Windrip himself.

The grim Secretary
of War, Haik, scolded at President Sarason for
his influence on the nation, particularly on the troops. Lee
laughed at him, but once he was sufficiently flattered by Haik’s
tribute to his artistic powers to write a poem for him. It was a
poem which was later to be sung by millions; it was, in fact, the
most popular of the soldiers’ ballads which were to spring
automatically from anonymous soldier
bards during the war between
the United States and Mexico. Only, being as pious a believer in
Modern Advertising as Sarason himself, the efficient Haik wanted to
encourage the spontaneous generation of these patriotic folk
ballads by providing the automatic springing and the anonymous
bard. He had as much foresight, as much “prophetic engineering,”
as a motorcar manufacturer.

Sarason was as
eager for war with Mexico (or Ethiopia or Siam or
Greenland or any other country that would provide his pet young
painters with a chance to portray Sarason being heroic amid curious
vegetation) as Haik; not only to give malcontents something outside
the country to be cross about, but also to give himself a chance to
be picturesque. He answered Haik’s request by writing a rollicking
military chorus
at a time while the country was still theoretically
entirely friendly with Mexico. It went to the tune of “Mademoiselle
from Armentières”—or “Armenteers.” If the Spanish in it was a
little shaky, still, millions were later to understand that “Habla
oo?” stood for “¿Habla usted?” signifying “Parlez-vous?” It ran
thus, as it came from Sarason’s purple but smoking typewriter:

Señorita from
Guadalupe,

Qui usted?

Señorita go roll your hoop,

Or come to bed!

Señorita from Guadalupe

If Padre sees us we’re in the soup,

Hinky, dinky, habla oo?

Señorita from Monterey,

Savvy Yank?

Señorita what’s that you say?

You’re Swede, Ay tank!

But Señorita from Monterey,

You won’t hablar when we hit the hay,

Hinky, dinky, habla oo?

Señorita from Mazatlán,

Once
we’ve met,

You’ll smile all over your khaki pan,

You wont forget!

For days you’ll holler, “Oh, what a man!”

And you’ll never marry a Mexican.

Hinky, dinky, habla oo?

If at times President Sarason seemed flippant, he was not at all so
during his part in the scientific preparation for war which
consisted in rehearsing M.M. choruses in trolling out this ditty
with well-trained spontaneity.

His friend Hector Macgoblin, now Secretary of State, told Sarason
that this manly chorus was one of his greatest creations.
Macgoblin, though personally he did not join in Sarason’s somewhat
unusual midnight diversions, was amused by them, and he often told
Sarason that he was the only original creative genius among this
whole bunch of stuffed shirts, including Haik.

“You want to watch that cuss
Haik, Lee,” said Macgoblin. “He’s
ambitious, he’s a gorilla, and he’s a pious Puritan, and that’s a
triple combination I’m scared of. The troops like him.”