Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [20]
Phil frowned at the sight. “You know, the goddammed House is never going to appropriate enough money to clean up this city.”
Senators and their staffs often had an immense disdain for the House of Representatives. “True.”
“It’s too much like one of their Bible prophecies, what was that one?”
“Noah’s flood? Revelation?”
“Maybe. Anyway they’re loving it. No way they’re going to allocate money to interfere with God’s judgment. That would be bad. That would be worse than, than what—than raising taxes!”
“Joe’ll wake up if you yell like that.”
“Sorry. I’ll calm down.”
Joe rolled his head on Charlie’s neck. “No,” he said.
“Ha,” Phil said, grinning. “Caught in another one.”
Charlie could just glimpse the boy’s red cheek and furrowed brow. He could feel Joe’s agitation; clearly he was once more locked into one of his mighty dreams, which from his sleeping scowls and jerks appeared to be fierce struggles, filled with heartfelt Nos. Joe awakened from them with big sighs of relief, as if escaping to a quieter, lesser reality, a kind of vacation cosmos. It worried Charlie.
Phil noticed Joe’s distress, patted his damp head. Step by broad step they ascended the Memorial.
To Phil this place was sacred ground. He loved Lincoln, had studied his life, often read in the nine volumes of his collected works. “This is a good place,” he said as he always did when visiting the memorial. “Solid. Foursquare. Like a dolmen. Like the Parthenon.”
“Especially now, with all the scaffolding.”
Phil looked in at the big statue, still stained to the knees, a sight that made him grimace. “You know, this city and the Federal government are synonymous. They stand for each other, like when people call the administration ‘the White House.’ What is that, metonymy?”
“Metonymy or synecdoche, I can never remember which.”
“No one can.” Phil walked inside, stopped short at the sight of the stained inner walls. “Damn it. They are going to let this city sink back into the swamp it came out of.”
“That’s synecdoche I think. Or the pathetic fallacy.”
“Pathetic for sure, but how is it patriotic? How do they sell that?”
“Please Phil, you’re gonna wake him up. They have it both ways, you know. They use code phrases that mean something different to the Christian right than to anyone else.”
“Like the beast will be slain or whatnot?”
“Yes, and sometimes even more subtle than that.”
“Ha ha. Clerics, everywhere you look. Ours are as bad as the foreign ones. Make people hate their government at the same time you’re scaring them with terrorists, what kind of program is that?” Phil drifted through the subdued crowd toward the left wall, into which was incised the Gettysburg Address. The final lines were obscured by the flood’s high-water mark, a sight which made him scowl. “They had better clean this up.”
“Oh they will. He was a Republican, after all.”
“Abraham Lincoln was no Republican.”
“Hello?”
“The Republicans in Congress hated him like poison. The goddammed Copperheads did everything they could to sabotage him. They cheered when he was killed, because then they could claim him as a martyr and rip off the South in his name.”
“Limited value in hitting them with that now.”
“But it’s still happening! I mean whatever happened to government of the people by the people and for the people not perishing from this earth?” Pointing at the marred lines on the wall, looking as heavily symbolic as an image in a Cocteau film.
“An idea that lost?” Charlie said, spurring him on.
“Democracy can’t lose. It has to succeed.”
“ ‘Democracy will never succeed, it takes up too many evenings.’ ”
“Ha. Who said that?”
“Oscar Wilde.”
“Please. I mean, I see his point, but don’t quote Oscar Wilde to me when I’m trying to think like Abraham Lincoln.”
“Wilde may be more your level.”
“Ha ha.”
“Wilde