by Nowick Gray
It’s election season again. Which means, anything goes. Mexico has chosen its first woman president. In the USA, the Bidenesque husk on the throne has been summarily replaced (for now) by the empty vessel who would love to vault from first woman VP to first woman POTUS.
A few election cycles ago, I penned a vision of our impending future in the form of a novel, The Last Book: The First Woman President. Representing the consolidated uniparty, Sophie Tucker Vaughan has answered the call of the Hierarchy to implement its plan of absolute control. The picaresque hero she recruits for this mission is none other than Felix Krull, Thomas Mann’s quaint European Confidence Man.
Time-hacked across the intervening century, Felix confronts the reality of Sophie’s radical restructuring of North America. The division along indigenous title claims prefigures current controversies over UNDRIP, land claims and reparations. More broadly, the political waters in the novel roil with protest from a diffuse and decentralized movement known as the Panarchists. Confronting their threat will prove to be the ultimate test of Sophie’s true intentions.
“Your townhouse was torched earlier today. Panarchist protesters from your university, I’m told.”
“What? Anarchists? Why?” Though I felt no visceral connection to any such abode, or vocation, I felt indignant at the affront—then a wave of fear, a prickly sweat.
“No, Panarchists. They carried signs saying you were a stooge of the Hierarchy.”
“Am I?”
“Not anymore.” She smiled and stretched her hands behind her head, before stifling a fetching yawn.
“Are they going to try to lynch me, or what?”
“Don’t worry. They say they’re committed to nonviolence.”
“Burning down people’s houses?”
“It was planned as a symbolic action, when you were known to be out. They distinguish between violence to people and destruction of property. At least in their manifestos.”
“What about my job? A chair at the university, seat on a commission? Do I have lectures to give, hearings to attend?”
“You’re working for me now.”
“Great. And what if they think you’re a stooge of the Hierarchy?” I got up again and looked out the window to the street below, half expecting a crowd with pitchforks and torches.
“Listen, this building is secure, government level. Sit down, you ninny.”
Flustered, I took my seat again. “Okay, fine. So what’s my field of expertise?”
“The psychology of communications.”
* * *
“And they are a danger why, exactly?”
“They are decentralists, basically, opposed to world order.”
“You mean the New World Order?” I had heard this term bandied about during my stint in federal prison.
“We don’t use that label anymore. It’s not new, and it carries a lot of baggage. We try to make it simpler. It’s a matter of Order versus Anarchy—or Panarchy, as our opponents would have it.”
“We, meaning the Hierarchy, no doubt.”
“Smart boy. C’mon, it’s time to train you up.”
* * *
The Panarchists, she told me over glasses of chilled Sauvignon, were founded by a charismatic rebel, Edward Jensen, a former professor who had been sacked from his position at Harvard for alleged sexual misconduct. Had the young lady in question been a bona fide student, innocent in her own right, the charges might have rung true; but a leaked source tied her to the Hierarchy, and the professor, though forced to leave his post, went underground to serve as the leading thinker and voice behind the growing decentralist movement.
True to their philosophy, Sophie told me, the Panarchists shunned central organization, preferring a loose affiliation of action cells, public and private interest groups, issue-based advocates for change.
“Why did they abandon the standard political system?” I asked.
“At first they were divided. Jensen would have been a strong candidate. But after his assassination, they claimed the system was rigged, in favor of the megacorps, the figureheads of the elite, and they presented evidence to win popular support. They claimed it was a Hierarchy hit, of course.”
“And was it?”
She hesitated, a damning pause. “Who knows? After that, they refused even to try to marshal their support into electoral politics. Instead they mounted a campaign of resistance: boycotts, sabotage, strikes. Which are ongoing.”
* * *
Sophie put a shiny American twist on an old formula: domination of resources and markets; central control enforced by the usual methods honed so well by mafias everywhere—the carrot and the stick. Bribery and blackmail. Subsidies and penalties. The machinery of government, grinding its way forward through history, over a landscape littered with broken bones, shattered lives.
The global grid of data and regulation were imposed, like a net upon the ocean, within whose mesh all but the smallest fish would swim caught. Those tiny or clever enough to shapeshift their way through the matrix would survive in a different reality, a paradigm of freedom. Hearing about those pesky Panarchists, I wondered aloud what such a society would look like.
Sophie dismissed the alternative philosophy out of hand. “Well, if chaos is your cup of tea. I know you’re familiar with the Dark Ages. Or perhaps you prefer the Golden Age of the noble Neanderthal.”
“God save us,” I replied. “Or perhaps it is the Hierarchy I should thank for its small favors, our collective salvation.”
* * *
“The Hierarchy is serving the cause of spiritual evolution. Their necessary mission is to combat the Dark Forces, so human potential has the chance to be realized.”
“The Dark Forces?”
“The Panarchists would be the contemporary example.”
“Oh, that bugaboo again.” I turned to my own side of the bed and began to dress. As with all matters political, I suspected the epithet “Dark,” like the fearful labels of bygone times—“terrorist,” “barbarian,” “infidel”—was not so much an objective descriptor, but rather a projection of one’s own bias of self-justification. “And if there were no benevolent Hierarchy,” I said then, “if we poor creatures wallowing here in our own muck on earth were left to our own desires and devices, we wouldn’t stand a chance: is that it?”
Sophie buttoned her white slacks. “I’m afraid it is.”
“Does the plan say we’ll make it, or not?”
“It could go either way. It depends on what we humans decide to make of our possibilities.”
“Then it’s up to us! What good is this Hierarchy, then?”
“To remind us of the path we’re on, the probable outcomes of our actions, our true goals and our temporary illusions. And sometimes we need a little divine intervention to give us a chance to make up for our mistakes, so we don’t get ourselves killed in the process of learning.”
“Though, of course, many do make fatal mistakes. And sometimes those mistakes are fatal for others.”
* * *
A more substantive discussion turned to the wave of Panarchist protests across the nation. Employing a gamut of tactics, from sit-ins and marches to arson and sabotage, their message, as Ryan summarized it, seemed to be to “challenge the very integrity of our system of government.”
“And is the focus of their ire the Party itself?” I wanted to know.
“There’s really no focus,” said the downy-cheeked lad. “Some of their statements point to the Party, but for the most part it’s a generalized critique; we’re blamed for all the ills of the modern world.”
“What about the Hierarchy?”
All eyes looked to me, and I felt Sophie tense at my side.
Dennis broke the spell. “Let them talk all they want about the Hierarchy. We can easily dismiss them then, as conspiracy theorists.”
“Pardon me,” I said, “but isn’t the Party the political arm of the Hierarchy?”
Sophie placed a firm hand on my forearm and intervened. “Let’s not split hairs here. The point is, we need to restore the public’s trust in the electoral process, and to brand the actions of the Panarchists—or decentralists of any stripe—as a threat to our democratic way of life.”
* * *
When we hit the campaign trail we were met by relative success. Clearly no credible alternative was poised to challenge Sophie within the Party ranks. Yet we encountered a disturbing counterpoint, an organized boycott of said primaries by the decentralists. I say organized, though in fact I refer to a rather random series of political brushfires: a shopping mall blockade here, an unexplained media blackout there, graffiti cropping up on billboards and social media sites, a new meme called “final revolution.”
I use the generic term decentralists, in the absence of an identifiable foe. The Panarchists had no clear chain of command, at least none our Party operatives could determine. They were an amorphous movement, which declined to produce an opposition party to run against. I might have blamed the nefarious Dark Forces, but again, would find no face to paint, no neck to hang; only that archetypal force of resistance.
* * *
Sophie giggled and took the stage. By then no more than a dozen listeners remained. She looked at me with a mime’s frown, as I watched from offstage, and I motioned to her to go on, as if before a cheering throng. Standing erect in her slim and sensible blue dress, its hem at mid-calf, she delivered the goods with dutiful, direct speech, drumming home the keywords of the platform we had formulated:
“… democracy for all. No more shall those in backward corners of the world fall prey to the petty politics of tribe and fiefdom. Everyone shall have a vote for our global leaders.
“No more shall our corporations suffer from unfair competition abroad, where other countries exploit forced labor and subsidize their own interests, at our expense. We will tear down the barriers to free trade everywhere.
“There is only one road to world peace: not two, or three, or a hundred. One road only, to peace which reflects unity. That unity, as we look forward to the next decades of this century and beyond, must take the form of One Earth. Our banner, however proud the flag of this great nation, must be tied under a greater vision, a global vision of world order.
“To that end, there must be universal data access. Citizens of this country, and the world, must all have access to information, and it must be codified for consistency. By the same token, your personal data is critical to the mission of providing for your needs in a comprehensive and efficient manner.
“With resources freed up from the age-old warring between nations, from the wasteful competition between economies, from the useless arguments over conflicting information, we will devote renewed efforts to reversing global warming, with advanced technologies of geoengineering…”
“Hierarchy whore!” said a man in a checked sport coat and wraparound shades, standing behind the empty rows of chairs.
The critique stung, since the words in the speech were of my formulation—given, of course, the prerequisite keywords Sophie had outlined for me to focus on. I took solace in the famous Lincoln quip, You can please some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all the time. Even so, this level of vitriol was disturbing.
Sophie took the high road. “Sir, if you would care to—”
The man had fallen silent, grabbing at the back of his neck. He doubled over as if in pain, then staggered away.
Sophie shrugged and thanked the more polite stragglers in the audience before leaving the stage.
“What happened to that guy?” I said.
She just gave me that look.
“Oh, right. ‘Don’t ask.’”
“C’mon,” she said, “Let’s go for a beer.”
* * *
The newspad on the table lit up at my touch. There had been widespread protests in the wake of Sophie’s inauguration. Panarchists had come out in force: chaining themselves to flagpoles; littering federal buildings with confetti composed of the shredded remains of the Constitution; performing rain dances while dressed in black capes silkscreened with the upside-down portraits of the new president. Two prominent “ringleaders” were already arrested: Zanelle Marte, a junior instructor at Harvard, and Elfie Byweather, occupation fire-spinner, from Salt Spring Island, British Columbia. From their mug shots I recognized the pair from the tavern at our campaign outing in Spokane. Deemed as threats to national security, they were whisked away to an undisclosed prison facility.
In a video link served directly from the paper’s front page, Party security chief Robert Glaston gloated over the efficiency of the government’s response, citing the deterrent value of a “no compromise” crackdown on dissent. Madison explained that the White House had been closed to visitors today as a precaution.
* * *
“What about the Panarchist uprising?”
“Uprising? A gaggle of throwback hippies holding placards and singing folk songs? Please. I have more important matters on my plate.”
* * *
Sophie made an exception when it came to deliberations on her pet project, the so-called Continental scheme for resolving all outstanding Aboriginal Peoples’ land claims in North America. Her idea was to grant all land north of the fifty-second parallel to Aboriginal nations to administer, develop, and maintain as they wished. In return, the United States of North America (USNA) would gain absolute sovereignty over all Native American lands and reservations south of that line. The reparations and resettlement problems alone were staggering. But the advantages were obvious. The oil concerns who had to sell out from northern Alberta could move into coal in the Black Hills. Loggers could transfer from Lac St-Jean to the wood-rich Grassy Narrows reserve. The Hopi and Navaho could square off across the Nahanni River in the Yukon. Problems, sure. There would be plenty of griping about the forced removal from “ancestral lands,” on the part of Native Americans in the US; though a portion could be appeased by an alternate relocation southward to Mexico, in a subsidiary arrangement with that subnation. Also impacted would be the Canadian cities north of the line, including Edmonton and Saskatoon, and the entirety of Alaska. The economic justification for such upheaval, even taking into account the loss of the Arctic energy sector, would be the assimilation of southern Canada’s manufacturing and resource regime once and for all into the diabetic American economy, with no more funny-sounding strings (GATT, NAFTA, TPP) attached.
Hard choices, yes. We were learning fast to become hardened politicos, to deal with the pressure-ridden realities of interest-group dominance in the legislative process—and to treat people as economic pawns in the grander strategies of empire. After all winter of planning and policymaking, of research and heated late-night lobbying, of cocktails and tête-à-têtes, of diplomats and chauffeurs, of toasts and trade talks and addresses to eminent assemblies, of rail-bus rides into the high Alleghenies, and yacht parties on the silver Potomac, Sophie signed the bill into law. Immediately she notified the State Department of the new United States and Provinces of Continental America to carry out the necessary relocations.
An ulterior motive of the Continental Policy, Sophie confided in me, was to throw the decentralists into disarray. For this reason the Hierarchy acquiesced to the plan, though it was her brainchild, driven by her sympathetic identification with Aboriginal Peoples early in her career. On the one hand the policy disregarded local traditions and boundaries, and over this crime the decentralists complained bitterly. On the other hand the rearrangement favored the Northern indigenous populations, leaving them as partners in the new union to govern themselves as they saw fit, thus reducing the role of central government over that vast region. Such autonomy rankled elements in the Hierarchy, but was allowed as the cost of securing free title and authority over the bulk of the populated portion of the continent.
Debate simmered even among the Party faithful, after the bill’s passage. Dennis McElroy, appointed chief of staff, grumbled that the administration would be mired in unending lawsuits, appeals, petitions, demonstrations, or worse—violent rebellion. Ryan Willoughby, now press secretary, was flushed with the expanded importance of his role, in explaining to the public the rationale behind the land resettlements and corporate selloffs. Madison Kane, appointed earlier by Sophie as ambassador to Mexico, threatened to resign in protest, penning an angry op-ed in the New York Times about “cultural genocide.”
* * *
I dispatched memos conveying the drift of public opinion to congressional leaders, assembling data to serve over rhetoric, urging the lawmakers to pay heed to the wellspring of decentralist fervor sweeping the unsettled land. Most correspondents felt, I could say in confidence, that the Continental policy had broken asunder the nation, spilling out the trust and heritage which had bound its regions together. It was as if a spell had broken, and in its absence the disintegration of the society was underway—nay, even welcomed.
* * *
[from the classified document, The Last Book: Footnotes to the History of Humankind]
A turning point of a kind occurred when the American citizenry refused to continue its support for a government engaged in a futile military adventure in Southeast Asia. The ensuing frustration of this great power’s expansionist aims represented the forging of a new link in the chain of imperial power extending back from the United States to England, and from England to Rome.
In each case the colony responsible for the turning back of the empire became the next great world power. And so from the USA the mantle of earthly power passed to the Vietnamese people, and indeed to the under-represented American people who opposed their own government, who dared to affirm the principle of self-determination: in either case, a people whose reign may be seen not in the same terms of material expansion embraced by the imperial lineage, but rather as a symbolic coming of age of the downtrodden; as a harbinger of the pregnant upsurgence of the Third and Fourth Worlds. Those peoples, the disenfranchised, the colonized, the disinherited, shunned the empty promises of an exploitive global economy, and advocated relentlessly for regional and ethnic autonomy.
When I read these words I began to sweat, cognizant of the decentralist rivals to our own ruling Party. Was that groundswell the future? Had that future arrived—even at the gates of the White House this very morning? I touched the security camera feed for an update; saw only swirling debris on the sidewalk, drones buzzing overhead.
Even under the aegis of Panarchy, the resisters were not exactly a party, not content with building a base of support among voters for the next federal election three and a half years hence. They continued to engage in every form of rebellious action against the central government: faux declarations of independence, constitutional challenges, tax boycotts, rail-bus blockades, flag-burnings, and other sundry acts of civil disobedience and sabotage. Previously I had thought of such opposition as merely irksome—to be expected in the course of running a modern government on a scale such as ours. Now I comprehended that perhaps mine was an institution whose time of glory was past, and that for those of the decentralist movement, the future had arrived.
I looked up from the computer screen, empty in the gut with nostalgia; wishing I could have preserved my relative innocence about what I’d considered to be merely “the troubled drift of Western civilization.” Yet, even now, while I had at my fingertips not exactly a futuristic apocalypse, nor a convincing prescription for human survival, this Last Book sowed the seeds within me of what I already felt (in my opportunistic way) might become a program of true global leadership for constructive, decentralized change, to be initiated and sponsored by none other than my employer, my lover, my guardian angel, cosmic nemesis, mistress and friend (and, not to shortchange her, empress of my world), Sophie Tucker Vaughan.
Even judging solely by the weight of public outrage against our pet project, Continentalism, I had reason to believe that an officially sanctioned program of decentralization would be popular, perhaps wonderfully successful. Even most critics of the “imperialistic” merger of the US and southern Canada were applauding the granting of self-determination to the Northern native peoples. The wise course would be to follow that policy success with attractive programs in our own, larger nation, the USNA. I could see it now: local governments could be further subsidized; folk art revivals funded; village markets refurbished; neighborhood dance halls erected; solar, wind, tidal and geothermal power sources developed to perfection. It would be, I unthinkingly imagined, the modern, political equivalent of the Roman aqueducts.
Immediately doubt set in. Wasn’t it the most pompous contradiction on my part, to swallow whole this thesis of an anonymous overseer, and then to propose in the name of its critical truths a program of remedies to be controlled by the central heart and head of the most far-flung, gigantic and powerful, “successful” but doom-bound empire the world had ever seen… all the while thinking the contradiction could be erased by the fine concepts of “decentralization” or “panarchism”?
* * *
April brought to Washington a wave of unseasonal warmth, riding behind foreboding black clouds, as the streets of the nation’s capital seethed with massive protests. Sophie and I watched the action feeds from the surveillance drones, in the comfort of the Oval Office, and saw a sea of humanity clamoring, through a cacophony of megaphones and a waving forest of homemade signs, for affordable food and housing, aid to schools and the elderly, debt forgiveness and repairs to infrastructure…
“All the benefits,” sang a rainbow body-painted lady on stilts, wearing only an Uncle Sam top hat, “promised by an empire that has sucked its own homeland dry. As dry and wasted as the far-flung colonies that once were sovereign lands.”
I looked at Sophie as if to say, “She’s got a point,” and she nodded, understanding perfectly.
The security camera panned to another contingent lustily chanting, “Free the Panarchists.”
On this block was erected a small stage, where a gossamer-gowned woman with glitter in her hair addressed the crowd.
“Our dear sisters, Zanelle Marte and Elfie Byweather, sit today bound in chains, raped and tortured, for no crime but asking for our birthright here on earth, freedom in our lands and in our hearts. For organic democracy, not manufactured consent.”
Cheers from the crowd spurred her on.
“We ask only those age-old rights of the human family: liberty, equality, sustainability, and justice. A culture of cooperative community at home, and a peaceful foreign policy abroad.”
“She has a knack,” Sophie said.
“I wonder,” I replied, “what her astral lineage is.”
“Fellow citizens of Gaia,” the luminous figure exhorted, “give voice to your deepest yearnings!”
A chorus of animal cries and yelps, roars and screeches, rose in the air and dissolved into twittering birdsong. The camera panned to the sidewalks where a giant elf man and woman, woven of wood, danced grinning. Costumery was in full display, adornments of wings and fur conjuring owls and wolves.
“This is the time, the moment we have been waiting for! The awakening is at hand! Can you feel it?”
This time, as if rehearsed, an eerie silence.
“You have been silenced too long, shut up in classrooms, told not to speak, not to sing or dance, not to know your truth. Not to challenge, not to express. Let me hear you say your truth!”
Now again the full voices of the jungle rang out in the streets, rebounding off the marble monuments, calling them in effect the tombs of a nation.
“You are Avatar Nation, brought to Earth and ready to join the Star Nations!”
The crowd whirled in glee, in their faery garb and rainbow caftans, orange lace and green leather spats, golden hair wraps and chainmail bikinis, gaudy sashes and silk streamers, body paint of neo-shamans…
Helmeted Hierarchy forces closed in, a phalanx timeless as a Roman legion, boxing the crowd into a blind alley. A military truck emblazoned with the Hierarchy logo, a black-and-gold pyramid, arrived with the latest skin-burning weapon—Nenowitz’s favorite toy, the AD gun. Trained on the protesters, its invisible beams caused them to scream and writhe in pain, with no escape. A vast net was unleashed from a mortar, settling neatly over the entire throng. An attached cable pulled the drawstrings tight, and the lot was carried aloft by a silently whirring helicopter. The marble monuments stood unmoved, cold as time between empires.
“Can’t you do anything to stop them?” I pleaded.
“Stop who?”
“The goons who are abusing those poor citizens.”
“That’s Glaston’s chain of command, domestic control. Unless I step in and override.”
“You don’t consider this a worthy emergency?”
“I have to play my cards right, or they’ll cut me out of the loop altogether. I mean, us.”
The news feed on another screen featured the smug countenance of the newly appointed CEO, pontificating on “the need to maintain order and security at all costs, so we can return this great nation to the principles it was founded on. We have a mandate to fulfill: to lead the global union to a new era of peace and prosperity.”
Sophie cut the feeds and the screens went blank.
“You’re right, it’s up to me now.”
“You mean, us.”
* * *
I’ve been thinking of doing a series of broadcasts to the public, laying the foundation for a new American constitution.”
“You mean, USNA.”
“Correct. I don’t think we’re going to roll that one back. Here’s where we depart from Hierarchy policy, though. They wanted to break down national identity in a move toward global union—under their control, of course. We wanted to redress indigenous land claims and self-determination, and resolve outstanding resource issues. In the process we wind up with more of a confederacy of regions within the continental landmass of North America.”
“Sounds like a decentralist manifesto.”
* * *
“Has it come to such a crisis?”
“Oh yeah, bro. This is only the beginning. There’s a big shitstorm coming. All for the good, in the end; this forest needs its fire for the new seeds to start.”
Yet he exuded a kind of animal confidence. I asked him if there was a core belief of the Panarchist cause.
He answered without hesitation, leaning forward and peering at me with intense dark eyes, bespeaking his native heritage. “We are all people of the earth. Not citizens—denizens. Residents. Our rights derive from Mother Earth, and the Creator, not from our fellow creatures, or any government imposed from on high. We are capable of running our own affairs for the general welfare, at the local level. All the rest is needless complication—only for the benefit of those who would exploit us and our sacred Mother.”
“You see no need for modern technology?”
“What, robocars, 3D printing, computer chess masters? Like this idea of insect protein is something new? Desalinization, sure, but they fucked up the aquifers first. Methane-eating bacteria… again, it’s a solution to the problem they created. And now they want to run our moods by implanted software. Of course, in the meantime, mouthing all the great bullshit about Pax Hierarchical and endless prosperity, the H-men come marching and we get blasted in the streets. So what’s your next move?”
* * *
The Panarchists swiftly gained power of the central government; as once the crumbling of loyalty began, the tide of conversions to decentralism became irreversible. Yet with that nominal power transferred and in hand, it was deemed necessary to hold onto only long enough, a few more months, for the temporary coordinating committee to disperse it, in turn, to the various states and regions of the continent. In any case, their brief but compassionate reign was sufficient for me to disappear into the hinterland. I was free to roam at my pleasure for forty more years.
