The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 22

me that I do not rant thereupon. Charity Factor. What arrogance. What heartlessness. It reminds me of nothing so much as the tale of the Norse ogre who lived at the edge of Jotunheim, the land of the giants, and whose wife was renowned for taking in, and feeding, and giving succor to orphans who fled the wars between the gods. When this ogre came home at night, drunk and lustful, he would eat the soft flesh of the children to whom his wife had given refuge, until he was nearly insensate. Then he would stumble to his wife’s bed, blood-soaked and self-satisfied, and would grumble to her as he fell upon her, “Now that I’ve had my way, you can give those left all the charity you want.”

I say this here and for now about Brave New Benthamism. What Grim Fiddle thinks does not matter. What Grim Fiddle has done about what he thinks, there is the proper subject for his passion.

Mord the Hard-Fisherman

IN my third year at Vexbeggar, the news from Stockholm grew ominous. I had been comforted that summer by Molly Rogers on vacation, but in the fall she hurried back to Israel to keep him from dangerous, irrational acts. They wed soon after, perhaps the result of a near breakdown by Israel. I was never sure and never asked, since I missed the ceremony, and afterward it seemed irrelevant. Molly sent me verse about the ordeal, “Quiet Israel Quiet,” and it reassured me that the marriage had been the proper culmination of a twenty-one-year courtship, Earle giving the bride away, Guy crooning old folkie favorites, the manse draped with Thord’s elegant friends.

Israel’s honeymoon only temporarily interrupted the gloom in his letters. Israel took it very hard that Peregrine suffered alone in the King’s prison—since none had ever dared visit him for fear of reprisal. The King’s Spies were much on the highways then, suppressing those who were called seditious troublemakers but were more properly identified as aliens, that is, brown-eyed foreigners.

This shame needs brief explanation. Like other countries in the North, Sweden never recovered from the shocks of the wars in the Middle East. As widespread egalitarian propriety decreased, chauvinism and concomitant bigotry flourished. I have no desire to explicate this formula. I am sure the New Benthamites justified it at great length. It is enough to say that my mother’s people came to place a misinformed emphasis on their own heritage, especially on their folklore and their so-called aristocracy, a corrupt lot who responded to this miraculous resurrection with pomposity and wrongheadedness. A spastic feudalism was imposed on a people who had been free of such stupidity for three centuries. Fashion dictated assemblies, processions, balls, baroque etiquette, and a boastful endeavor to remake what had been a struggling industrial state, become slightly inert with socialism, into a painted court in the midst of a much reduced subsistence economy and actual starvation. There was nothing logical about the transformation. The Earl of Gotland could share a horse-drawn carriage (the affection for automobiles disappeared with the petroleum supplies, was replaced with equestrian affectation by the elite) with a chief engineer from the Kiruna iron mines. It was the ridiculous leading the ridiculed. In their covetousness, the only thing all segments of the citizenry could agree on was bigotry. There developed a witch-hunting not seen since the Dark Ages. The Kingdom of Sweden became a stranger to reason.

I know Sweden was not alone in such degenerate politics. That was no comfort to the laborers and hangers-on from the Middle Eastern and African kingdoms (and some from European republics drifting toward anarchy) who were driven from their homes to the streets, and from the streets into what were called halfway camps, from which they were provided passage out of the country on merchantmen leased by the King’s government. Pogroms swept Sweden of the dark races first, then of the less dark, the yellow, the sallow, and finally of those few Jews who were caught once again in history’s spasms.

The triumph of successive pogroms did not satisfy the most extreme chauvinists, a political party called the Loyalist League for Swedish Homelife, or Loyalists. There seemed an escalating need for ever more cruel measures against shadows. In America, Israel told me, this battle would have been understood as red-blooded Americans versus Them; in Sweden, it was the blue-eyed Norse versus Them. I do not care how it compared to historical race wars. It was hellish. Families were arrested and separated unless they complied with ad hoc relocation programs organized by vigilante groups and permitted by the King’s silence. The few desperate men who dared to resist the witch-hunters were maimed or murdered. And there was always the fire that they used to burn out the intransigent.

The random hangings and seeming suspension of habeas corpus panicked the few libertarian groups, one of whom, the Cartesian League for Reason and Decency, organized small rallies in Stockholm. This was in the late 1980s. Sadly, the Cartesians were unable to agree on a single strategy. Denouncing racism and murder is admirable; it also lacks specifics, such as naming the guilty. At the last rally, the Cartesians presented many diverse speakers, who confused the crowd with poetry and high ideals. The crowd chanted “Crush Infamy!” meaning the King’s government. This resulted in a chain-swinging match with the mob dispatched by the Loyalists to bait the Cartesians. The riot that followed blocked streets and shattered shop windows. It was predictable mayhem. That was the night the old Royal Palace was burned down, along with four blocks of the foreign quarter—the mickey mouse club included.

The next day, the Cartesian League was suppressed by the King’s Spies, a thousand-year-old Norse tradition of security police revived by the King’s government in order to assuage the Swedes’ persecution fantasies and to complement the aristocracy’s power fantasies. All financial contributors to the Cartesian League (Thord Horshead among them) were notified that they were under investigation for conspiracy to