Capable of Honor

The basic problem the goodthinkful welldoers (and the Communists they write on behalf of) have in condemning Harley Hudson's vetoes is that every other permanent member of the Security Council had used the veto without such squawking.  The Soviet Union did it quite frequently back in the early days when the US had a solid voting majority.  (Remember that until the mid-70s, China was Nationalist China.)

Tashikov, discussing a similar issue the day before (ignoring a UN resolution), had bloviated about how the Soviets did so in the name of democracy and justice (that was one of his lies) whereas the US did so in the name of colonialism and conquest (that was another of his lies).  Of course, it's much closer to being the reverse of that, which would still be true if it happened today.

Walter Dobius isn't so totally fallen, and thus can't use such a blatantly false formulation (though he offered no objection when Tashikov made it, of course, and considered Hamilton undiplomatic for pointing it out.  Instead, he made light of the previous (mostly Soviet) vetoes.  They were largely on procedural issues, he insisted (no doubt falsely).  And those that were consequential were a natural defense against being ganged up on by the West.  Needless to say, every defense people like Dobius make of the UN is contradicted when he says that, and for that matter the US was being ganged on in Gorotoland.

This is all followed a few days later by another crisis.  Jason's Panamanian brother-in-law, Felix Labaiya, has taken over the Panamanian government via coup and is threatening the Canal.  (At this time, be it noted, the Canal was an American possession and had delegates in both presidential conventions.)  Of course, the man who took over in a Communist-supported coup is a representative of democracy in the world of Walter Wonderful, and the proper US response to being attacked would be to go the UN and the OAS, where they would be talked to death while Labaiya took over the Canal.

All of this will sound very familiar today, when many Demagogues consider street violence an example of what democracy looks like, and when the left always sides with the enemies of America while pretending to value patriotism.

Incidentally, at one point Drury mentions that Election Day will be November 3.  Did he give away the year?  Well, Election Day was November 3 in 1964, which might be why he used it.  The obvious next time was 28 years later, or 1992, and so it proved (I checked to make sure).  I don't think he meant to set the story that late, particularly since there was also a reference to the US having 250 million people.  Just set it sometime in the future from the viewpoint of 1968, even though events were heavily based on that year.

I notice that the review failed to note that the news coverage in the book, at least at the national level, is overwhelmingly leftist.  There's nothing to indicate that Helen-Anne Carrew, the one conservative journalist mentioned, was distorting the truth the way Walter Dobius was.  The review also ignored the matter of mob rule.  To be sure, that aspect gets even worse in the later books, but it plays a major role in this one.

I might as well bring up the most recent reading I did in the book.  As usual, Drury portrays the media bias that dominates the airwaves, newspapers, and magazines.  Much of this -- such as the way "fair" TV anchors such as Frankly Unctuous (whose behavior makes me think of Walter Sickness) can use facial expressions to slant the news -- was well known at the time.  Little things like Dobius and Unctuous deciding to review the situation while one of Hudson's few black supporters (Cullee Hamilton) speaks up for a strong foreign policy plank are fine examples of lying by omission.

But the key element, dovetailing with the bias, is the organized mob violence.  Actually, "mob" isn't quite the right word.  The leftist activists are well organized, no doubt well funded from . . . somewhere.  (In later books, it becomes clear that a lot of it comes from the Soviet Union.)  They form large groups of grim, emotionless sorts chanting without animation -- and occasionally getting violent.  Ted Jason thinks he can accept their support without becoming tied up with them, which disgusts both his wife and his campaign manager.  Perhaps if he were a Sherlock Holmes find and familiar with "The Adventure of the Three Gables", he might better understand the danger.

After the violence reaches its culmination -- the severe beating of Crystal Danta Knox (killing her unborn baby of 7 months) by leftists who recognize her when she finds herself alone -- Carrew comes across Dobius writing his response, largely blaming it on Orrin Knox.  She then denounces him as all mind (and unlimited ego as well) with no heart.  Thus is it that he can fanatically push his policies, denouncing any disagreement as not only wrong but evil and likely to end the world, without considering how much he and his friends are encouraging the violence.

In words I've already quoted elsewhere, she tells him, "You and your friends have created a climate in this country in which it will be a miracle if the President himself isn't assassinated before this is over.  You and your friends have destroyed every pretense of objectivity, fairness, decency, nonpartisanship, honor, that the press was ever supposed to have."  This wasn't yet true in 1968, but it has come true today.

Drury's foresight wasn't exactly 100%, at least for today.  I don't think he ever went into the matter of iconoclasm (though at this point the mass rioting is still fairly new), and of course today some would point out that the rioters in effect performed a late-term abortion on Crystal Knox.  In 1968 abortion wasn't yet a major national issue.  Nor, despite the evidence of well-funded organization behind Black Shakedowns Matter and Antifa, have we seen the grim, emotionless chanting Drury showed here.  But we have seen the violence, and as the series proceeds it will get worse -- just as it has over the past decade.

I'm most of the way through the book, but the actual nomination votes and their response still remain, and I undoubtedly will have more to say.  (Of course, if I continue from here -- the series turns a lot darker in the next book -- we'll get to see how prophetic Carrew was, not that she has much longer to live either.  It can be dangerous to uncover who's backing an insurrection.)

I decided to continue on and reread Preserve and Protect. which starts with President Harley Hudson being assassinated by plane crash and goes on via increasing political violence.  This was only incipient previously, but here it becomes a major problem as Orrin Knox and Ted Jason find themselves facing off again over who will replace Hudson on the ticket.

Knox finds out that street violence to intimidate people into letting Jason win has returned when he runs into a mob on his way from picking up his wife Beth after she came back from staying with Hal and his savagely beaten wife Crystal.  Fortunately, the news from her is as good as it can be under the circumstances, but the news for the Knoxes is another matter.  They see the "protesters" with signs and chants cheering the Hudson's death and calling for Knox's (which indeed happens in one of the alternate sequels).  And then the protesters mob them, throwing stones, firebombs, and other weapons at their limousine.

Knox finds himself meditating on the way such violence has come to America in recent years.   This isn't the violence of the civil rights riots.  "Now it was cold-blooded, deliberate, engaged in blacks and whites integrated at last in sickness and hatred, organized to capture the mastery of public opinion and intimidation and downfall of the government.  Riots now were scientific, purposeful, political -- and to the decent and the stable they were terrifying, because they harnessed the animal that crawls from the gutter to the animal that conspires in clandestine rooms."

And of course, it's all for a good cause, or so they say -- but the real goal is revolution, "to destroy the republic, and finally America's enemies had devised a technique that could really, conceivably, do it."

This is followed by a nice, foreshadowing visit to Walter Dobius by the three agitation leaders, who demand that he support Jason (which of course he had every intention of doing already) -- or else.  Le Gage Shelby of DEFY is especially virulent as he damns this "worthless country", but Rufus Kleinfert quietly accepts the violence and Fred Van Ackerman quite happily looks forward to it.  Dobius finally orders them out -- but they point out that he can't guard the place all the time and that if they come back, it will be bringing fire to Dobius's old (and no doubt mostly wooden) mansion.

After all, death and destruction can hit the suburbs as well as the ghettos.  (In 1968, when this came out, there probably weren't as many armed suburbanites as there are now.  Probably Drury never anticipated that one response to this political violence would be an explosion in buying guns.)

Remember, this was all written over 50 years ago.  Drury was even more prescient in these books than Jean Raspail was in The Camp of the Saints.

I've finished Preserve and Protect, and started Come Nineveh, Come Tyre.  (I had to do something while my wifi was down for much of the afternoon).  The former deals with Orrin Knox's painful decision.  For all practical purposes, he has to name Ted Jason his VP, even though Jason encouraged the violent elements who (among many other things) murdered his unborn grandson.  He insists that Jason clearly, forthrightly condemn the violent elements in the protests.

Jason, like most Demagogues today (and some of those who don't endorse the violence), refuses to acknowledge that there's a difference between peaceful protest and rioting -- even after NAWAC attempted to punish the DNC for choosing Knox over Jason in a mass attack using military weapons as well as more conventional rioters' weapons (such as Molotov cocktails).  Knox finally gives him a choice -- he must condemn the violence at the DNC or Knox will choose an ally like Bob Munson instead.

Jason responds in his usual equivocal way, strongly condemning violent elements in NAWAC -- if there are any.  The "if" seems ridiculous after recent events, and is a good indication that he hasn't really changed.  Even so, he's nominated for VP by acclamation.  A day or so later, the Knoxes and Jasons make their appearance to publicly accept the nominations.  But the enemy who has been manipulating everything has one more trick to play, and there's an assassination -- though it isn't clear who was killed at the end.

This allowed Drury to do two sequels.  In one, Orrin Knox and Ceil Jason are murdered, and Beth Knox and Ted Jason wounded.  In the other, it's reversed.  Come Nineveh, Come Tyre deals with the first scenario.  Inevitably, Jason is nominated even before he's aware of events.  Instead of choosing a VP nominee from the other side of the party, they decide to wait until Jason can make his choice.  This is done in a party conclave that includes members from both sides -- including the terrorist leaders of NAWAC.  Of course, if it were Knox the liberals would all demand a peacenik to unify the party.  Also of course, with Jason they demand a peacenik to maintain a strong peace ticket.  Surprise, surprise.  In all of this, they talk about the half of the party (Drury never names the majority and minority parties, but it's clear that the first is the Democrats and the second is the Republicans) that supports peace at any price -- while ignoring that there's another half that supports firmness and opposition to Communism and rioters.

I will also mention that the appendix to Preserve and Protect (which wasn't in the original volume) is a speech Drury gave in 1961 on education.  In this, he noticed the increasing tendency to teach conformism and groupthink rather than independent critical thinking, and also the tendency to slight civics, American history, and even American patriotism.  I'm not sure how true that was 60 years ago; I don't think it was the case in the various schools I went to, most of which were local schools rather than military schools.  But it can be considered amazingly prescient, as with so much in these books.

Continuing in Come Nineveh, Come Tyre, the situation has gone downhill in a hurry.  Ted Jason got together with his VP (Roger Croy), his planned Attorney General (George Wattersill, "defender of the indefensible"), and the 3 NAWAC leaders to decide what to do.  He actually makes some sense here, realizing that the US shouldn't immediately flee Gorotoland and the Panama Canal Zone, and that NAWAC disbanded and the violence brought to an end now that he's been elected with control of Congress.  When they refuse and Shelby and Van Ackerman mock his liberal pretensions, he wants Watterstill, when he has the chance, to go after them.

It isn't long before this thought disappears.  Croy and Wattersill are unhappy about the violence, but for whatever reason can't bring themselves to challenge NAWAC.  In the end, Jason settles for cynical, almost mocking promise by Van Ackerman to cease the violence.

Meanwhile, the synoptic media make the same points as Jason, and the result is threats -- and worse.   One publication is hit by a bomb in their composing room, killing 3 employees and wrecking 2 presses.  They initially call it a disgruntled employee (just like Barry Zero calling terrorist attacks "workplace violence"), but they get together for a conference to decide what to do about this threat to press freedom.  Finally, they conclude that they could go all out against NAWAC (at a terrible price) and hurt Jason, or they could hush it up to continue helping a man they realize is an empty suit.  Of course, they choose the latter.

After that, things are quiet until Inauguration Day.  Jason gets advice from both sides, but writes his speech himself and carefully keeps it secret from everyone.  Then he makes his first speech as President, pulling the US out of Panama, Gorotoland, and for that matter foreign seas such as the Mediterranean.  He wants to work for peace with Tashikov in the spirit of the latter's message to him on the eve of the election.

That night, Tashikov responds exactly as anyone here would expect.  (In reality, I think the events would take a little more time, but that's a minor detail.  This is a warning, not strict realism.)  The Soviets attack in Panama and Gorotoland, turning US retreats into routs -- and blockade the forces in Panama.  In Alaskan waters, where there had been a dispute over fishing rights (supposedly resolved already), they sink most of the fishing fleets.  They send their navy through the Turkish Straits into the Mediterranean to replace the Americans.  And, most insultingly, they occupy Nome and Barrow for a couple of hours before pulling back -- even Jason might send troops in to evict them.

Jason, overnight, ultimately decides to do nothing but resume surveillance flights over the Soviet Union, appeal to the UN, and call for a meeting with Tashikov in Geneva.  His wishful thinking convinces him that this must have been rogue military elements -- after Tashikov had promised to work for peace, and Jason trusts this Communist to a degree he would never trust any American politician.  When Abbott and Munson warn him that they will oppose this fecklessness as they run to resume their congressional positions (Speaker of the House and Majority Leader of the Senate), which have been held open until after Jason took power, he promises to oppose him.

Even today, this might be considered unacceptable in Congress, though one can never be certain.  But in this world, with a large number of new Democrats brought in on Jason's coattails (Warren Strickland has 16 Republicans in the Senate), the new winners are "Jawbone" Swarthman and Arly Richardson.  Congress will be as loyal to Jason as Tiberius's Senate was to him.  And it will be as unwilling to challenge Soviet aggression, or even admit that it is aggression.  They take "peace at any price" far further than even Neville Chamberlain.  And that's where I've gotten.

Just now, the ACLU is complaining about Trump's DHS sending forces to protect national monuments from Iconoclasm.  It would be better to devote all our efforts to the benefit of blacks and let the rioters run wild.  Ted Jason and Roger Croy couldn't have said it better.

Incidentally, I will note again that Drury never mentions party names.  But it's clear which one is the Democrats and which one is the GOP.

I'm most of the way through Come Nineveh, Come Tyre, and in essence I've reached the climax.  Most of what has happened could be predicted from what already has happened.  Not surprisingly, after Congress passes the Help America Act (Ted Jason's version of Hitler's Enabling Act), Jason signs it.  That's bad enough, but a good liberal (which Jason considers himself to be) could always leave it unenforced.  (Vetoing it would have been better, but Knox's kidnappers had demanded otherwise, and Jason probably didn't need much pressure to do so anyway.)  But then he appoints George Watersill to run the Special Branch keeping track of dissenters -- and Fred Van Ackerman, psychotic dictator wannabe, in charge of enforcing the restrictions on the First Amendment.

Things continue going fast.  Beth Knox, murdered, is left on the steps of the Capitol.  The opposition immediately asks SCOTUS to reject it due to its basic unconstitutionality.  But it turns out that the Court generally splits 5-4 in favor of the administration.  Fortunately, one of the 5 is Justice Tommy Davis, a genuine liberal who realizes just how bad Help America is.  Despite distractions such as an attempt to disqualify him (there's no basis for this -- Justices decide for themselves whether or not to recuse themselves) on the grounds of his partisan rhetoric in the hearing (which is rejected 5-4), they finally retire to decide their votes.  After Justice Davis very conveniently dies from a heart attack, the vote is 4-4, which thus affirms the law.

Van Ackerman manages to get himself chosen President Pro Tempore of the Senate, putting him in line for the presidency if 3 people can be eliminated (and he knows some people who have proven to be very good at eliminating inconvenient people).  Then someone hands Walter Dobius disturbing information -- that Harley Hudson and Orrin Knox had been murdered to clear the path for Jason and Ceil Jason to destroy his equilibrium and his morale (and for that matter what conscience he had).  They had also murdered Beth Knox, of course, and also Justice Davis (probably with an air bubble in a vein).

Dobius reports all this, and numerous newspapers do so as well, including the New York Times and the Washington Post.  The response is swift.  Van Ackerman sends the police to arrest the key figures at both papers, and Dobius comes home to find "Salubria" burned down.  (At least his maid, Arbella, a better person than he was, got away.)  Van Ackerman jeeringly confronts the news figures as he has them sent to the local loony bin.  (Bronson Bernard, one of the cocksure liberals who's so sure that no harm can come from the Help America bill because they're liberals, is stunned by this and confronts Van Ackerman, who jeeringly points out that what happened to the Times -- he's a New Yorker, for all I know representing the same area She Guevara does in real life -- could happen to him.)

All that remains is really an anti-climax.  America as an idea is now dead.  An important point, which Dobius realizes, is that he and his friends created the climate that made this possible.  By not just opposing but denouncing anyone who disagreed with him, he enabled his fellow sanctimonious liberals to believe that the legitimacy of dissent depends on what causes it supports and opposes.  The book is full of liberals who take this attitude.  As Herbert Jason (Ted's scientist uncle, as much a professional protestor as a scientist) says, they had protested on behalf of the Right Causes, which made it legitimate.  Again, we see many people today routinely expressing similar views.