The Overton Window Page 14

  If Molly was wrong—and no ifs about it, she was wrong—then he’d be vindicated, she’d be deeply apologetic and sworn to secrecy about this whole fiasco, and there might still be a chance to salvage what remained of the weekend.

  A flimsy rationale, maybe, but for the moment it helped him avoid the more troubling thought that after all he’d seen in the last twenty-four hours, deep down he needed to know the truth every bit as much as she did.

  The elevator eased to a stop and the doors opened.

  The old man’s office was never dark. Night or day it was always the same: warmly lit and immaculately kept, smelling faintly of pipe smoke, black tea, and silver polish, furnished with all his fine, precious things. From the art on the walls and pedestals to the antiques and small collections of rarities interspersed among the bookshelves, everywhere you turned there was something priceless. For him it was less a place of business than an inner sanctum of quiet meditation and a shrine to the very real forms of happiness that money could actually buy.

  Few employees ever had occasion to set foot in these rooms and see these sights, but Molly paused only at the sight of one thing.

  “What is this?” she asked.

  She was looking at a marble sculpture on a pedestal in the corner. Noah’s father had commissioned it years ago. The figure depicted was a strange amalgamation of two other works of art: the Statue of Liberty and the Colossus of Rhodes. Molly would have known that much by looking; what she’d meant to ask was, What does this mean?

  “It’s the way my father looks at things … at people, I mean: societies. The law may serve some superficial purpose, but it only goes so far,” Noah said, touching the spear in the statue’s left hand. “At some point the law needs to be taken away and replaced with force. That’s what really gets things done. People ultimately want it that way; they’re like sheep, lost without a threat of force to guide them. That’s what it means.”

  Molly silently took in the statue for a while longer, like she was memorizing it. After a few more seconds she drew in a deep breath, walked to the door, peeked around the corner to make sure the coast was clear, and then turned and motioned for Noah to follow.

  “Let’s get this over with,” she said.

  Weekend work was one of the many things his father frowned upon, which led nearly all of the up-and-coming employees to maintain second offices at home. This allowed them to put in the expected seventy-plus hours per week while appearing to comply with company policy. It also meant that, with luck, Noah and Molly would have the place to themselves for the duration of their espionage.

  Down the central hall and adjacent to the conference room they keyed themselves into the locked AV booth, where the presentation files were stored. Molly stood by him as he found the coded folders on the computer, entered their passwords, and prepared the show to be launched from a remote controller at the podium inside.

  When they entered the conference room the programmed lights had already dimmed and wide white screens were descending around the walls. Digital projectors hummed and glowed as they received their data, and soon the screens lit up with an introductory slide.

  In the beginning he clicked through the content fairly rapidly; this was the section he’d already seen. He paused only when Molly asked him to stop while she absorbed the content of some particular display.

  Without the benefit of a speaker to explain them, many of the slides and visuals were difficult to understand. Animated graphs illustrated various social and political trends, time lines ticked off progress toward unnamed goals, maps with highlighted regions expanded or contracted to show unidentified changes over months, years, or decades.

  “Stop,” Molly said. “Go back one.”

  They were deeper into the presentation now, past the point at which Noah had left the meeting, but nothing had seemed particularly shocking or frightening to him. He’d breezed right past the screen she’d asked to see again. It was an introductory agenda for the group of very important people who’d come to attend the final half of the meeting.

  The heading was “Framework and Foundation: Toward a New Constitution.” No names accompanied the headings that followed, only the areas of government that each new attendee supposedly represented.

  • Finance / Treasury / Fed/Wall Street / Corporate Axis

  • Energy / Environment / Social Services

  • Labor / Transportation / Commerce / Regulatory Affairs

  • Education / Media Management / Clergy / COINTELPRO

  • FCC / Internet / Public Media Transition

  • Control and Preservation of Critical Infrastructure

  • Emergency Management / Rapid Response / Contingencies

  • Law Enforcement / Homeland Security / USNORTHCOM / NORAD / STRATCOM / Contract Military / Allied Forces

  • Continuity of Government

  • Casus Belli: Reichstag / Susannah/Unit 131 / Gladio / Northwoods / EXIGENT

  “Who was in this meeting, do you know?” Molly asked.

  “The people I saw were mostly from some advance-planning division of the DHS; domestic war-gamers, like the international kind at the Pentagon. There’s a stack of tent cards here somewhere with their names. I don’t know about the ones who came later; I only had their phone numbers.”

  “Do you still have that list?”

  “No, I don’t. I was told to burn it, and that’s what I did.” He walked toward the screen and pointed to the last entry. “What does this term mean? My Latin’s a little rusty.”

  She glanced up from her notes only for a moment. “Casus Belli. It means an incident that’s used to justify a war. Come on, let’s keep going.”

  The slides thereafter made continual references to pages in some briefing document that must have been handed out to the meeting’s participants. Without those pages it seemed there was little use in continuing further.

  “That’s it,” Noah said. “I don’t think there’s any more to see.”

  “It’s not over yet. We’re not to the end.”

  He held his thumb down on the advance button and the screens ticked by more and more rapidly. “I’m telling you, look at it, this is nothing but page numbers—”

  The walls went black, leaving the room in almost total darkness.

  One by one the screens faded in again, encircling the room with new content they hadn’t seen before. Each screen contained a linear diagram that was a trademark of the company’s strategic plans. These diagrams were used to show the firm’s clients a step-by-step layout of what to do, and how and when to do it.

  The headings mirrored the disciplines of the attendees shown earlier: Finance, Energy, Labor, Education, Infrastructure, Media, Emergency Management, Law Enforcement, and Continuity of Government.

  A security dialog popped up, and with a vocal sigh Noah entered his override password. If anyone ever checked to see who’d accessed these files and when, this would be another nail in his coffin. An hourglass indicator appeared, along with the message: Please Wait ... Content Loading from Remote Storage.

  “It’ll be a few minutes while this downloads,” Noah said. “We keep some of the more sensitive stuff off-site, to guard against the kind of thing we’re doing right now.”

  Molly had left her seat and walked a complete circuit of the round room, looking over the various headings on the screens. She stopped by his side, pointing out a bracketed rectangle that enclosed part of the illustration on the slide in front of them.

  “What’s that box?” she asked.

  “It’s called the Overton Window. My father stole the concept from a think tank in the Midwest; it’s a way of describing what the public is currently ready to accept on any issue, so you can decide how best to move them toward what you want.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said. She was looking at the screen related to national security and law enforcement. Except for the heading and the long thick line with an open box near its center, the slide was mostly blank. “How does it work?”
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  “The ends of this long line”—Noah walked up to indicate the starting point—“represent the extreme possibilities. At this end of the scale is the unthinkable, and all the way over at the other end is something else you can’t imagine ever happening, but in the opposite way. Too much good here, too much evil over there. If we were talking about government, it would be too much liberty at this end—which would be anarchy—and a complete top-down Orwellian tyranny at the other, so no liberty at all. Those in-between points are milestones along the way.”

  Molly still looked a little lost in the concept, and she motioned for him to go on.

  “Use airline security as an example,” Noah said. “Forty years ago people could pull up to the airport a few minutes before their flight, be treated with courtesy and respect, present no ID, just a ticket, and then get on the plane with just about anything in their pockets and their bags. There was some security, but it was almost invisible. Today that’s unthinkable, right? It seems like we could never go back to those days.”

  She nodded.

  “Now at the other end of the spectrum, let’s make the passengers arrive four hours early for the security line, allow no carry-ons, enforce a mandatory strip search, full-body X-ray, a cavity probe for everyone, and you have to stay in your seat the entire flight with a stun bracelet on your wrist in case you try to get up to go to the bathroom—which, of course, no longer exists.”

  “They’re actually talking about doing some of those things,” she said.

  “That’s getting to my point. If you suddenly had to go through everything I just mentioned you’d give up flying, correct? And with no security at all, you’d also never set foot on an airplane. So your Overton Window is somewhere in the middle, within this box. But my goal is to get you to accept more of those radical things over there, one step at a time.

  “Let’s say tomorrow some idiot makes his way onto a flight with a little tiny homemade explosive of some kind. It’d be all over the news for weeks, whether the guy actually did any damage or not. You get scared, and the TV is telling you that all we have to do is buy some more expensive screening machines, hire some more of the same people who let that nut on the plane in the first place, and give up a little more dignity at the checkpoints, and we’ll be safe. That, of course, is a lie, but it has the desired effect.”

  “It moves the window,” she said.

  “Right. We put a false extreme at both ends to make the choices in the middle look moderate by comparison. And then, with a little nudge, you can be made to agree to something you would never have swallowed last week.”

  “Why, though? Why would they want to do that?”

  “The airline thing was just a random example, but I can think of a few reasons. If my client sold those X-ray machines, or had a contract for those extra security people, there’s quite a bit of money to be made there. It makes the government bigger and more involved in our lives, and that can justify higher taxes and fees, more bureaucracy, bigger budgets; it can build support for an unpopular military action, on and on. And who knows? Some of your friends last night might say that it’s all part of a program to condition the American people to put up their hands and submit to anyone in a uniform.”

  “And this Overton Window, it’s used all the time?”

  “All the time, everywhere you look. We never let a good crisis go to waste, and if no crisis exists, it’s easy enough to make one.

  “Saddam’s on the verge of getting nuclear weapons, so we have to invade before he wipes out Cleveland. If we don’t hand AIG a seventy-billion-dollar bailout there’ll be a depression and martial law by Monday. If we don’t all get vaccinated one hundred thousand people will die in a super swine-flu pandemic. And how about fuel prices? Once you’ve paid five dollars for a gallon of gas, three-fifty suddenly sounds like a real bargain. Now they’re telling us that if we don’t pass this worldwide carbon tax right now the world will soon be underwater.

  “And understand, I’m not talking about the right or wrong of those underlying issues. I care about the environment more than most, I want clean energy, I want this country to recover and be great again, people should get their shots if they need them, and Saddam Hussein was a legitimate monster. I’m saying opportunists can attach themselves to our hopes and fears about those things, for profit, and this is one of the tools they use to do that. The question to ask is, if they’ve got a legitimate case for these things, then why all the lying and fabrication?”

  “So even if they can’t get us to accept everything at once,” Molly said, studying the diagrams, “they’re satisfied to move us a little closer toward the end.”

  “Exactly. In fact, without some big earthshaking event, like a Pearl Harbor or a 9/11, that’s the only way it can work. Just little nudges in the right direction, and before you know it you’ve progressed yourself right into their agenda. It’s evolution they’re after, not revolution. And when I say ‘they’ I don’t mean some secret society out there. There’s always a prime mover behind these things, and it’s easy enough to figure out who it is. Just do a little research to see who stands to benefit; follow the money and power. You know who was one of the biggest lobbyists for this cap-and-trade business, right?”

  “Greenpeace?” Molly said.

  “Nope. Enron. A lot of powerful people are lining up to cash in on the deal if it happens, but back then it was a huge push at Enron right before the whole company blew up in America’s face. Carbon trading was going to be their biggest scam since they shut off the lights in California and held the whole state for ransom. They’d already started trading futures on the weather, if you can believe that, but this heist was going to be a thousand times bolder. Back then everybody thought they were joking.”

  “Not quite everybody, I guess.”

  “You’re right about that,” Noah said. “In fact, Enron was really just a huge diversion, like a Bernie Madoff, a patsy to throw to the wolves. Carbon trading moved forward anyway. The Chicago Climate Exchange is probably the best example, especially since it’s basically founded or fronted or funded by a Who’s Who list of environmental luminaries, like Al Gore and Goldman Sachs. But I can see why no one really cares—the Exchange’s founder thinks it’s probably only a ten-trillion-dollar-a-year market.”

  Molly stared at him in astonishment. “Did you say ten trillion a year?”

  “Uh-huh. And the backing for it goes right up to the top, internationally. So here’s a little pop quiz: What do you get when you combine corporate greed with political corruption and sprinkle a few trillion on top?”

  “I don’t know … fascism?”

  Noah shook his head. “You get Doyle & Merchant’s newest client.”

  The hourglass on the screen had disappeared moments before, and was replaced by a dialog box with two buttons, one labeled HALT and the other PROCEED.

  “Now I know what I’m looking at,” Molly said. “So let’s see what’s next.”

  Noah clicked the remote, and the screens all began to change. The slides that had been incomplete filled in with callouts, numbers, names, legends, and dates to illustrate the long-term agendas within each area of American government and society at large. Some of these agendas spanned only a few years, others more than a century.

  Pointers along the time lines began to move; text formed and then faded as significant events in recent history were reached and passed by. Milestones appeared, enclosed in the Overton Window of each screen as it moved slowly from left to right.

  It was far too much ever-changing information to absorb, like watching all the movies in a multiplex simultaneously. But as they turned and took it all in at the center of the circle of screens, Molly suddenly touched his hand, and gripped it. It seemed the same realization had come over them both, at the same instant: This wasn’t eight separate agendas at all. It was only one.

  Along the bottom, the steady advance of time. Through the middle, the slow, sporadic movement of the Overton Window—usually pushing forward, but
sometimes pulling back, as though the public might have rebelled briefly against the relentless pressure before giving in to it again.

  To the far right of each screen a final goal was listed. As Noah looked to each of them he realized something else that all these endpoints had in common. They weren’t written and presented as though they were unthinkable extremes, but rather as achievable goals in some new, unified framework of command and control, ready to come forth on the day the old existing structure failed.

  • Consolidate all media assets behind core concepts of a new internationalism

  • Gather and centralize powers in the Executive Branch

  • Education: Deemphasize the individual, reinforce dependence and collectivism, social justice, and “the common good”

  • Set beneficial globalization against isolationism/sovereignty: climate change, debt crises, finance/currency, free trade, immigration, food/water/energy, security/terrorism, human rights vs. property rights, UN Agenda 21

  • Associate resistance and “constitutional” advocacy with a backward, extremist worldview: gun rights a key

  • Quell debate and force consensus: Identify, isolate, surveil opposition leadership/threaten with sedition—criminalize dissent

  • Expand malleable voter base and agenda support by granting voting rights to prison inmates, undocumented migrants, and select U.S. territories, e.g., Puerto Rico. Image as a civil rights issue; label dissenters as racist—invoke reliable analogies: slavery, Nazism, segregation, isolationism.

  • Thrust national security to the forefront of the public consciousness

  • Finalize the decline and abandonment of the dollar: new international reserve currency

  • Synchronize and fully integrate local law enforcement with state, federal, and contract military forces, prepare collection/relocation/internment contingencies, systems, and personnel