2030_ The Real Story of What Happens to America - Albert Brooks [45]
Bernstein had so many meetings where Spiller was on a screen dressed in a sharp blue suit that he became sure the suit was fake and Spiller was really naked or at best in his underwear. Before Spiller spoke, the President said, “Good to see you’re actually here, Morton. Where’s that suit?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing. Just making conversation. How’s the farm?”
“It’s doing well.”
“Good,” the President said. “Give my best to the family. How long you here for?”
Spiller could hear the sarcasm in Bernstein’s voice and didn’t want to get him more annoyed than he was going to be after their meeting, so he played dumb. “I’m here for a long time, unless you need me to go somewhere.”
“That’s fine,” the President said. “I like seeing you in the flesh. So what’s up?”
Van Dyke answered. “We’ve run numbers on California. They’re not good.” Bernstein turned to Spiller.
“Spiller the beans, Morton.” It was a joke he had used before, but the people in the room chuckled. A lot had changed over the course of the history of the United States, but the one thing that always remained the same was that people laughed when a president made a joke. A bad joke, an incomplete joke, a repeated joke, it didn’t matter. It was the original form of ass kissing. Bernstein would even comment on it to his wife. “They laugh at everything. I bet all leaders go through this. I’m sure when Moses made a bad joke they stopped working on the golden calf and chuckled.” His wife laughed at that and he even wondered if that was fake, too.
When Morton Spiller was finished with his presentation on the dire economical state of postearthquake California, he sat down and waited for the President to speak. All Bernstein said after looking at the charts and graphs and a screen full of numbers was, “What does this mean?”
“It means we can’t fix it,” Spiller said. “We have never had a disaster of this kind. Never before has a city even close to the size of Los Angeles been basically leveled. It’s worse than a war. Even a nuclear device would not have done this much damage. To rebuild would cost twenty trillion dollars, and that might be low-balling it.” The President let this sink in.
“Twenty trillion? What about the insurance companies?”
“No insurance company can come up with money even close to this,” Spiller said. “They’ll all go out of business unless we bail them out. There is no way people will get reimbursed from their insurance.”
Someone else at the table gave an example. “It’s as if every vehicle in the United States had an accident on the same day. No insurance company ever figured that into their equation.” Bernstein got angry.
“Bullshit. Insurance companies knew damn well this would happen. It was always predicted. They just didn’t give a shit. They should never have insured these people to begin with if they had no intention of paying. That’s against the law, isn’t it?”
“It might be, sir,” Spiller said, “but I’m afraid that’s not the issue. They do not have the money. We don’t have the money. Courtrooms at this point are not going to help anyone. We need to figure out a way to deal with this.” The President turned to the secretary of the Interior.
“What’s the current situation at this moment?”
“We’re just trying to keep everyone’s head above water now, sir. Tending to the really sick, leveling buildings that are on the verge of falling, supplying water and food—that’s all we can do right now.”
“And even that is costing five billion a week,” Spiller said.
The President rubbed his forehead with his right hand and let out a groan. “So what the hell do we do?”
Van Dyke had a thought. “We should first rebuild the hospitals so the people can get better treatment over the long run. Right now all we have are the triage units, and the best they can do is sew someone up or help with the spread of disease. We need better facilities.”
“I understand that,” the President said. “I’m asking about the larger issue. How do we rebuild our West Coast?”
There