Distraction - Bruce Sterling [209]
She said that the Netherlands was surrendering unconditionally. She said that the country was declaring itself an open country, that her tiny military would lay down its arms, that they would accept the troops of the occupier. She said that she and her cabinet had just signed documents of surrender, and the Dutch government would voluntarily dissolve itself at midnight. She proclaimed that the War was over, and that the Americans had won, and she called on the American people to remember their long tradition of magnanimity toward defeated opponents.
The speech took eight minutes. And the War was over.
For a strange historical instant, the United States went mad with joy, but the madness subsided with remarkably few casualties. Their long trials had made the American public peculiarly resilient. No more than eight hours passed before the first net pundits began to explain why total victory had been inevitable.
Total victory had its merits. There was no resisting the overwhelming prestige of a hero President. His favorables shot into the high nineties and hung there as if nailed to a mast.
The President was not caught napping by this development. He wasted no time: scarcely an hour; scarcely a picosecond.
He commandeered domestic airlines by executive order. There were swarms of American troops in every Dutch airport by morning. The Yankee soldiery, dazed and jet-lagged, were met by a courteous and chastened Dutch populace, waving homemade American flags. The President declared the War over—barely bothering to have a docile Congress certify this—and declared the arrival of a new American era. This epoch was to be henceforth known as the Return to Normalcy.
Like a sorcerer slamming swords through a barrel, the President began to bloodlessly reshape the American body politic.
The Normalcy manifesto was a rather astonishing twenty-eight point document. It stole the clothes of so many of America’s splintered political parties that they were left quite stunned. The President’s national plan for action bore only the slightest resemblance to that of his party platform, or that of his supposed core constituency in the Left Tradition Bloc. The President’s idea of Normalcy had something in it to flabbergast everyone.
The dollar would be sharply devalued and made an open global currency again. A general amnesty would free from parole anyone whose crimes could be considered remotely political. A new tax structure would soak the ultra-rich and come down brutally on carbon-dioxide production. Derelict and underused buildings would be nationalized en masse, then turned over to anyone willing to homestead them. Derelict cities and ghost towns—and there were many such, especially in the West—would be scraped clean from the face of the earth and replanted in fast-growing trees. Roadblocking was henceforth to be considered an act of piracy and to be punished without mercy by roving gangs of the CDIA, who, since they were all former roadblockers of the most avid temperament, could be expected to know just how to put an end to the practice.
A constitutional amendment was offered to create a new fourth branch of government for American citizens whose “primary residences were virtual networks.” America’s eight hundred and seven federal police agencies would be streamlined into four. There was a comprehensive reform plan for the astoundingly victorious American military.
There was also a new national health plan, more or less on a sensible Canadian model. This would never work. It had been put there deliberately, so that the President’s domestic opposition could enjoy the pleasure of destroying something.
The President’s fait accompli was not to be resisted—least of all by the state of Louisiana. Recognizing the hurricane power of this turn of events, Green Huey bent with the wind.
Huey resigned his office as Governor. He begged the people’s forgiveness and shed hot tears on-camera, expressing deep regret for his past excesses, and promising a brand-new, hundred-percent, federally