Distraction - Bruce Sterling [101]
“How can you say that? Look at this amazing place we live in!”
“You just think that this is the ivory tower, sweetheart. In reality, you’re slum tenants.”
“But nobody thinks that way!”
“That’s because you’ve been fooling yourselves for years now. You’re smart, Greta. You have eyes and ears. Think about what you’ve been through. Think about how your colleagues really have to live now. Think a little harder.”
She was silent.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Take your time, think it through.”
“It is true. It’s the truth, and it’s awful, and I’m very ashamed of it, and I hate it. But it’s politics. There’s nothing anyone can do about it.”
“We’ll see about that,” he said. “Let’s move on into the speech.”
“Okay.” She wiped her eyes. “Well, this is the really sick and painful part. Senator Dougal. I know that man, I’ve met him a lot of times. He drinks too much, but we all do that nowadays. He’s not as bad as all this.”
“People can’t unite against abstractions. You have to put a face on your troubles. That’s how you rally people politically. You have to pick your target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Dougal’s not your only enemy, but you don’t have to worry about that. The rest of them will come running out of the woodwork as soon as you nail him to the wall.”
“But he built everything here, he built this whole laboratory!”
“He’s a crook. We’ve got chapter and verse on him now. Nobody dared to cross him while he was in power. But now that he’s shipping water and going down fast, they’ll all rat him out. The kickbacks, the money laundering.… You’re in charge of Instrumentation. Dougal and his cronies have been skimming your cream for years. You’ve got a legal and moral obligation to jump on him. And best of all, jumping on Dougal is a free ride politically. He can’t do a thing about it. Dougal is the easy part.” Oscar paused. “It’s Huey that I’m really worried about.”
“I don’t see why I have to be so nasty.”
“You need an issue, and there’s no such thing as a noncontroversial issue. And ridicule is the radical’s best weapon. The powers that be can stand anything but being laughed at.”
“It’s just not me.”
“Give it a chance first. Try the experiment. Launch one or two of those zingers, and see how your audience responds.”
She sniffed. “They’re scientists. They’re not going to respond to partisan abuse.”
“Of course they are. Scientists fight like crazed weasels. Look at your own history here at the lab! When Dougal got this place built, he had to cash in a lot of favors. He needed the Christian fundie vote before he could build a giant gene-splicing lab in the East Texas Bible Belt. That’s why the Collaboratory used to have its own Creation Science department. That setup lasted six weeks! There were fistfights, riots, and arson! They had to call in the Texas Rangers to restore order.”
“Oh, the creation-science problem wasn’t all that bad.”
“Yes it was! Your little society has blocked out that memory because it was so embarrassing. That wasn’t the half of it. Next year they had a major brawl with the Buna residents, regular town-gown riots.… And it really hit the fan during the economic war. There were federal witch-hunts for foreign science spies, there was hyperinflation and lab guys living on bread crusts.… See, I’m not a scientist like you. I don’t have to take it on faith that science is always a noble endeavor. I actually look these things up.”
“Well, I’m not a politician like you. So I don’t have to spend my life digging up ugly scandals.”
“Darling, we’ll have a little chat sometime about your twentieth-century Golden Age—Lysenkoism, atom spies, Nazi doctors, and radiation experiments. In the meantime, though, we need