The Overton Window Page 3

  A bookish younger woman in the client party hesitantly raised her hand just a bit above the edge of the table, as though volunteering for a solo frontal assault on the guns of Navarone. She spoke, but only after a nod of permission from the man at the podium.

  “I’m not sure we understand what you mean, Mr. Gardner,” she said. “Our goals?”

  “Your goals, yes. Your future. The future of the government you serve. Which is to say, the future of this country, and the urgency to act on her behalf. And that brings us to my second story, which strangely enough continues our watery theme.

  “A while ago I was vacationing abroad in Sri Lanka—what year was it now? Ah yes, 2004, just after Christmas. A servant girl came to me and woke me from the most wonderful dream. She was breathless, the poor young thing, and told me an urgent message had arrived, word of an earthquake near Sumatra, and that we needed to leave as soon as possible. Well, I had my breakfast brought in as my things were packed and an aircraft was chartered, and we all dressed for travel and then went up to the roof to await our departure.

  “A wave was coming, you see. This earthquake had released the energy of half a billion atomic bombs under the ocean and a tsunami was spreading out from the epicenter at five hundred miles per hour in all directions.”

  He took a moment to sample his tea and then set the cup back carefully onto its saucer.

  “The helicopter soon arrived and our party began to board. It was such a beautiful morning, everything seemed as though all was right with the world, and by every appearance all the people down on the beach were completely unaware of what was coming. I wanted to stay, and so we stayed. There were teenagers surfing, families walking their dogs along the sand, or boating, or flying kites; children were searching for shells with their buckets and shovels. I couldn’t look away; it was fascinating to me—the people down there either didn’t know or didn’t understand that something unthinkable was on its way to destroy them.

  “From the roof I watched the waters slowly pull back from the beach. They all watched as well. It must have been an illusion but it seemed the sea receded halfway out to the horizon. For every one of those people who turned and ran for higher ground there were hundreds who stayed, mesmerized as their impending doom gathered strength.

  “I was later told that there had been some form of warning system in place but it had failed, or that those in charge of the public safety had become so complacent that the red phones and radio alerts went unheard and unanswered. But I’ll tell you what I believe.

  “I believe those people stayed because they thought the fragile things they’d built would last forever. They looked at the breakwater walls and they trusted them. Nothing could breach those walls, because nothing ever had before. But when the seas came in it wasn’t in the form of a wave at all, it was an uprising of Nature herself, steady and swelling and ruthless and patient, completely oblivious to the frail constructions of mankind. And it was all swept away. My holiday was cut short, and two hundred and fifty thousand people in the region lost their lives.”

  The old man looked to each of the attendees, one by one.

  “Bear Stearns, a cornerstone firm of Wall Street founded when my father was a young man, a company whose stock had quite recently been selling at a hundred and sixty dollars a share, was bailed out by the Federal Reserve and J.P. Morgan at two dollars per share. That was the beginning, my friends. That was your earthquake under the sea.

  “As I reviewed your situation this morning it occurred to me: you’re just like those people down on the beach in Kalutara, aren’t you? You’re watching a world-changing disaster on the rise, and yet for some odd reason you seem to be fretting about how the American people would feel if they were to read of your perfectly justified panic in their morning newspaper. That isn’t your problem at all, of course. It’s not what they might think of you that should be keeping you up at night; it’s what they might very well do to you, and to your superiors, in the aftermath of the global catastrophe that’s just around the corner.

  “Look at you. You’re stacking sandbags when your entire coastline is about to change forever. All the while the crimes you’re so worried that people will discover are still in progress. We are in the midst of what will become the most devastating financial calamity in the history of Western civilization, and just this week—please do correct me if my figures are wrong—the Congress and the administration have committed to funnel almost eight trillion dollars to the very institutions that engineered the crisis. And in your infinite wisdom you’ve openly placed their cronies and henchmen in charge of the oversight of this so-called economic stimulus. It’s a heist, an inside job. It’s been done before, of course. Social Security was the boldest Ponzi scheme in history until now. But all the bills for all those years are finally coming due, and there’s not enough money in the world to pay them.”

  A ring of digital projectors near the ceiling awoke out of standby and the wraparound screens encircling the room came alight with an unbroken panorama of changing, flowing imagery. Charts and graphs, spreadsheets and Venn diagrams, time lines and flowcharts and nomograms, none displayed long enough to absorb, except as a blurry continuum of research and market intelligence behind the old man’s words.

  “Over the last century you’ve saddled your hapless citizens with a hundred thousand billion dollars in unsecured debt, money they’ll be paying back for fifty generations if there are still any jobs to be had by then. Meanwhile you’re up to your necks in misguided, escalating wars on two unforgiving fronts with no sign of the end. That’s trillions more in unpayable IOUs.

  “Banks are failing across the country. More banks have failed so far this year than in the whole of the last decade. Your debt-fueled economy is entering a spiraling free fall, yet your first reaction was to ignore the needs of the voting public and reward the perpetrators themselves. While foreclosures of your citizens’ homes are breaking all records and unemployment is exploding in every state you’ve been busy dodging audits and nationalizing the mountainous gambling losses of the Wall Street elite. For heaven’s sake, you nationalized General Motors just to get your union friends off the hook. As you know, those union pensions you just took over are severely underfunded, adding another seventeen billion dollars to your tab. Seventeen billion, I might add, that you don’t have.”

  Arthur Gardner’s silvery voice had been gathering strength until it filled the room to the rafters, point upon point with the swelling command and cadence of a tent-revival preacher calling down the Rapture.

  “Just to stay afloat the government is borrowing five billion dollars every day at ever-rising interest rates from our fair-weather friends in Asia. But that will all come to an end as they see the waters receding from the beach. Sooner or later the truth will be undeniable, that these massive debts can never be repaid, and there’ll be a panic, a worldwide run against the dollar, and through your actions you’ve ensured that the results will be fatal and irreversible.

  “It’s not only happening here, it’s everywhere. Carroll Quigley laid open the plan in Tragedy and Hope: the only hope to avoid the tragedy of war was to bind together the economies of the world to foster global stability and peace. And that was done, but with unintended if predictable consequences. Instead of helping each other, these international bankers have all used their power for short-term gains, running up unimaginable debts on the backs of the public. We’re all shackled together at the wrists and ankles as the ship goes down, and, once it begins, this mutually assured destruction will come on us not over months, but overnight. A depression that makes the hell of the 1930s look like heaven on Earth will sweep across this country in a tidal wave of ruin, the scale of which has never been imagined. And when that happens, who do you think the masses will come for? Here’s a little hint: The people who will be held responsible are sitting around this table.”

  The room fell silent. The humming of the projectors was the only discernible sound.

  “Yes, they will
come for you. All of you. You built this system; you told them everything would be fine. It is your lies they will remember when they realize that their money is as worthless as the promises you made them. It is your deceit they will recall when they realize that the future of their children has vanished. And, trust me when I tell you, it is your faces they will picture when they realize that forty-hour weeks at minimum wage have replaced their retirements.

  “How do I know all of this? Simple: When things go wrong, there must always be someone to blame; a villain, if you will. As they say in your neck of the woods, ‘If you’re not at the table, then you’re on the menu.’ If you walk out of here today with the same arrogance you came in with, then you, my friends, will all soon be the special of the day.”

  He paused to take them in again, a half circle of understandably pale, stricken faces lit only by the cold proofs of impending doom projected on the screens around them.

  “But all is not lost,” the old man said. His features softened with the tiniest hint of a knowing smile.

  “Tell us what we need to do.” It was the woman who’d spoken up earlier. Judging by the breathy reverence in her voice, she’d already entered the early stages of baptism into the cult of Arthur Gardner.

  He stepped to a neat stack of identical folders at the near corner of the table and took the top copy in his hands. “Your answer is in here,” he said. “I am a strategist, and a man of some modest renown in that sense, though in this case I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m standing on the shoulders of giants—Woodrow Wilson, Julian Huxley, Walter Lippmann, Cloward and Piven, Bernays and Ivy, Saul Alinsky. The list is long. All I’ve done here”—he held up the folder—”is to crystallize the vision of those who’ve come before me, those who dreamed of a new and sustainable progressive nationalism but never saw their dreams fully realized.

  “Because we must, we will finally complete what they envisioned: a new framework that will survive when the decaying remains of the failed United States have been washed away in the coming storm. Within this framework the nation will reemerge from the rubble, reborn to finally take its rightful, humble place within the world community. And you,” he said, looking around the table, “will all be there to lead it.”

  A hand went up on the far side, a question from the senior member of the party, who’d so far only listened in silence.

  “Mr. Gardner,” the man said. “What about the public?”

  “What about them? The public has lost their courage to believe. They’ve given up their ability to think. They can no longer even form opinions, they absorb their opinions, sitting slack-jawed in front of their televisions. Their thoughts are manufactured by people like me. What about the public? Twenty years ago in this room I showed a small group of shortsighted businessmen how to sell the public the most abundant substance on the face of the earth at ten times the price of premium gasoline, the very same water that flows from their own kitchen faucets for one-tenth of a penny per gallon. That would seem unbelievable; it defies all logic and reason. Your grandparents would have called it larceny, fraud, or wanton thievery … and rightly so, I might add. But that experience proved one thing to me: there’s a double-edged sword by which the public can be sold anything, from a three-dollar bottle of tap water to a full-scale war.”

  The screens winked out at once, and left behind were three tall words in black on white, dominating the room from floor to ceiling.

  HOPE AND FEAR

  “Do you see? If the people are simply swindled there’s always a chance they might one day awaken and rebel against the crime. But we don’t change their minds; we change the truth. Most people simply want to be left alone; they’ll go along with anything as long as we maintain their illusions of freedom and the American way. We leverage their hopes and feed their fears, and once they believe, they’re ours forever. After that they can be taken by the scruff of the neck and shown the indisputable scientific proof, with their own eyes they can read the label that says contents drawn from a municipal water supply, and they will only nod their sleepy heads and walk past the faucet to the vending machine. That’s when you know that anything is possible.

  “You!” He pointed to Mr. Purcell at the far end of the table, who flinched as though he’d just been goosed by a cattle prod. “You entered this room thinking of me as a hired hand, believing you were a master of these proceedings, and since you pay my salary, by all rights you should have been correct. Why then did you allow me, your humble employee, to overpower you, to control you, to humiliate you in front of your peers and subordinates? Why?”

  When it became clear that not even a stammering answer was forthcoming the old man continued.

  “Indoctrination. I made you afraid, Mr. Purcell, and in your fear you accepted my truth, my power, and you abandoned your own. The public will do the same; leave them to me. The misguided resistance that still exists will be put down in one swift blow. There’ll be no revolution, only a brief, if somewhat shocking, leap forward in social evolution. We’ll restore the natural order of things, and then there will be only peace and acceptance among the masses.” He smiled. “Before we’re done they’ll be lining up to gladly pay a tax on the very air that they breathe.”

  Arthur Gardner walked a few steps closer to the group at the other end of the table.

  “Each of you was invited here this afternoon at my suggestion. The small but serious problem you brought with you was merely a point of entry, a premise for our introduction today. That leaked document sparked a conversation that I’ve had with your superiors, and they with theirs and so on, about a wide-ranging plan of action that has long been in development and now awaits its execution.

  “I told them that now is the time, and ultimately they concurred, with one condition. You, all of you here, are to be put in charge of enforcement—the boots on the ground, if you will. Before this new order of things can be brought forth, it was decided that you must all, unanimously, agree to protect and defend and rebuild what will remain of this country after its transformation.”

  On the screen behind him a quotation faded in, finely lettered as though written in the author’s original hand. It took a moment but Noah soon recognized the words from Julius Caesar.

  There is a tide in the affairs of men,

  which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

  Omitted, all the voyage of their life

  is bound in shallows and in miseries.

  On such a full sea are we now afloat,

  and we must take the current when it serves,

  or lose our ventures.

  The old man watched them as they read, and then he spoke again.

  “Shakespeare wrote of a time of great decision, and ladies and gentlemen, that time has come. We stand at a crossroads; the civilized world stands at a crossroads. Down one path all men are created equal: equal in poverty, equal in ignorance, equal in misery. Down the other is the realization of the brightest hopes of mankind. But not for all men; that was a brief experiment, tried and failed. Abundance, peace, prosperity, survival itself—these coveted things are reserved for the fittest, the deserving, the most courageous of us, the wisest. The visionaries.”

  The room was still again, and he let it stay that way for a while.

  “Now,” Arthur Gardner said, his voice just above a whisper, “while the tide is in our favor—come with me. You can still save yourselves, and in so doing, you can help us build a whole new world upon the ashes of the old.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Noah stopped in the middle of the main hallway and stood there for a while, his head full of unfinished thoughts and that troubling fogginess you feel only when you’ve forgotten where you’re going, and why.

  That meeting was still going on, but without him. His father had called a break and passed him a note with a list of phone numbers and a few bullet points of instructions—one last errand to perform before he could leave for the weekend. These were apparently VIPs to be invited for the after-hours porti
on of the presentation, provided the first part had gone as hoped. Evidently it had.

  This task he’d been given had started out strange, and then one by one the calls had only gotten stranger.

  There were no names, only numbers. Each of the calls was answered before the second ring, not by a service but by a personal assistant. Every one of those phones was professionally attended after business hours on a Friday night, and probably twenty-four hours a day by the sound of it. That seemed oddly extravagant, but maybe it wasn’t so unusual considering the circles in which his father was known to travel.

  There’d been audible indications of a scrambler during at least four of the brief conversations, and some sort of voice-alteration gizmo on one of them. Everyone had seemed extremely wary of revealing any information about the identity of the person associated with each number, but the last one hadn’t been quite careful enough.

  Noah had caught a last name spoken in the background during this final call. It was a Manhattan number, a 212 area code, and the name he’d heard was an uncommon one. He’d also seen it in the newspaper earlier in the day. That call had been to the private line of the most likely nominee for the next U.S. Treasury secretary, assuming the election went as forecast.

  This man was also the current president of the New York branch of the Federal Reserve. He and twenty or so others of comparable status were apparently now dropping everything and coming here, bound for a conference room where Noah’s father was waiting with the previous attendees.

  He walked to the southeast corner suite and keyed himself into the private kitchen used to prepare his father’s meals on those days he was in town. The room was all tile and polished granite and stainless steel, larger than most of the executive offices and equipped for Arthur Gardner’s personal chef.