The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 86

him that he was the Frazer heir, and it was his destiny to rule South Georgia if it was any man’s. Germanicus stood firm. I did not want an argument, added, “We disagree. I need your help to get Lazarus’s constitution accepted. That way every man, and woman, can speak for their own ways. Trust law, like Lazarus says, not men.”

Germanicus pointed at the black-ice islands and spoke the last word that day. “I trust what I can see and hear. I can’t see that volcano. And I can’t hear the law. I’ll trust a man, and a man I know at that, and my advice to ye be to do the same. Trust yerr master. Talk be ice, it melts in anger.”

I brooded on Germanicus’s words. He had as little faith in republicanism as did the Hospidar. They all believed in what Lazerus’s books called absolutism, “one God, one land, one man, one way,” what is really kingship without the onus of primogeniture. The crucial disagreement among South Georgia’s patriots was not over form of government; it was over who should succeed Elephant Frazer. Germanicus had as much told me that he and his young comrades wanted me as their next master. The Hospidar wanted himself. This was not sophisticated political science. It was crude, antiquated, vulnerable, defeatist in its way. I was sympathetic. It proceeded from their disillusionment and stoutheartedness. The South Georgians saw themselves caught between the failure of modern republican states to maintain enlightenment in the face of man-made catastrophes (famine, war, rebellion) and their own imminent failure to maintain a marginal existence as an abandoned colony in the face of natural catastrophes. How could they reasonably be expected to embrace yet another republican scheme when the British Parliament had failed them completely? Their desire for absolutism was an anachronism, an insult to reason. Yet for them republicanism was ungainly, untrustworthy, an insult to their commonsensical instinct for survival. The young patriots were willing to accommodate their desire by reaching for a new master who was from outside the community and who was endowed with what they thought were extraordinary powers—Grim Fiddle. I felt trapped by my discernment; I was puzzled as to whether Germanicus and his comrades were pragmatic or simpleminded.

One night that winter I asked Lazarus for help understanding the South Georgians. It was just after we had adjourned another poorly attended, acrimonious Assembly debating the articles in Lazarus’s constitutional draft. We sat side by side behind the podium in a dimly lit and empty chamber, the wind outside like a woeful chorus.

“Slaves are stubborn,” said Lazarus, tapping his pen, splattering squid ink. Lazarus had aged, grown heavier, with deep lines on the unscarred part of his copper face that made him appear less rusted than weathered, like iron at sea. Marriage and fatherhood had tempered him, had also made him mordantly earnest. He w-as thirty years old, proud, cool-hearted, able, fast. “The condition of slavery makes one intrinsically conservative. Don’t change, you think, it will make it worse. These people have inherited the remains of the ruinous British imperial system that kept them slaves for generations—absentee landlordism, mercantile exploitation, like w-hat Ireland, the Americas, India, Africa, and Australia threw off in the twentieth century. Because they’re alive, they think that system was stable. They try to mimic it with despotic rule and oligarchical secrecy. We know better. What they have now is entropic and doomed. The beasties in the camp aside, old Frazer is a benevolent despot. He’s well-meaning, blunders on, his authority weakened every time he must judge between factions. His major weakness is that he can make no sensible provision for succession. They don’t see it. They expect another hero will emerge magically to lead them. That’s what they think you are. It doesn’t happen that way. The history of despotism is clear: The legacy of a strong ruler is a weak one. The weak despot will leave behind a strong one, but the transition will be chaotic and bloody. The best way to break the cycle—tyranny, anarchy, tyranny—is to provide the people with a means to determine their own destiny. That’s what we’re doing, Grim, leveling the highs of benevolent despotism, raising the lows of draconian burglary, while people like you and Germanicus develop confidence to rule by democracy, assembly, committee, debate, consensus.”

I told Lazarus I liked how scientific he made it sound. I also asked him why what he said had not worked in Sweden and America; I added that Israel had told me that republicanism in the hands of bullies—Germanicus’s ten bad men—becomes mediocre subsistence for the common people and unbounded luxury for the ruling class, and that whenever a dissident group challenged the rulers, it was isolated and corrupted, or if not corrupted, destroyed.

“It can look that way,” said Lazarus. “Your Israel had a sharp wit. It misled him. What he said is true only if the people participate in their own degradation. Sweden and the United States are gigantic models. They might distort what I can say. I’ll try. Plato, I’ve read him to you, he thought a good state had limits of size. South Georgia approximates his ideal new state, Magnesia, in that it is intimate, modest, moralistic, nonpoetic, cut off—meaning it’s free from accidental invasion. We have problems, they’re solvable. Virtue is possible here. It might have once been possible in America. No longer. America’s Republic failed not because the philosophy of republicanism is flawed, rather because the white men who wrote the constitution were flawed and afraid of the will of the people their work enfranchised. They created a new man, free, ambitious, scientific, then came to see him as a monster. They released a truth—that all people are created equal—and then saw they could not contain it. The truth has no master. Over the following two hundred years the Republic thrived because of that masterless truth. Yet, yet, the continual yearning for universal suffrage, when combined with the fact that the population