The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 87

of the nation became increasingly nonwhite, led the white masters to conclude they were cursed by their own ancestors’ accidental, philosophical genius. They wanted to remain more than equal in a country in which they had become a distinct minority. So the white masters, Israel’s ruling class, alienated people from the power to assemble and vote. It’s easily done—intimidation of a free press, telling people they are powerless to change their fate, confusing the opposition with the circus of party politics. America became a republic in name only. Actually, it was, is, a despotism, the president elected with less than a majority of those that vote, which number was itself always less than a majority of those eligible to vote. The president spoke for himself and his gang, and then eccentrically. He didn’t have a majority mandate and he knew it, so he acted the sly prince, appeals to the godhead, manifest destiny, dreams, the Red aggressor. That was your Nixon. He was not much more than what we have in old Frazer, an appointed despot.”

I paused, saw something, then spoke more to please Lazarus than myself. “Then America failed as a republic because it could not trust the beasties it attracted and enfranchised. Enfranchised?”

“A simplification, it will do,” said Lazarus, no smiles. Lazarus had stopped changing expressions; the face of an angry young man was gone, replaced with a mask of inhibition, placidity, and a stare that seemed faraway. The burn scars covered the right side of his body but only a third of his face, dark purple skin like fingers up from his neck and onto his cheek. He was self-conscious of the twisted part of his face, knew that smiling or frowming made his scars look worse. He had a habit of tapping his scar, doing so as he continued, “It’s the people who are strong, Grim, and the strongest people are w-hat you call beasties. By simple size of number, the beasties are strongest. They have more chances to get the future right. I know, I’m a beastie. Grim Fiddle is a beastie.”

“Not strong enough, I think,” I said. “What else explains what we found, that fleet of the damned?”

“A transient event. A function of anarchy. A product of a state wherein law and morality have broken down temporarily and yet the idea of national sovereignty has prevented the lawful nations from intervening. The idea of law can momentarily protect lawlessness. The fleet of the damned—really a superstitious name, misleading—that refugee exodus, then, it was also an example of the chaos that occurs between successive tyrannies in the cycle of despotism. It can be stopped with rigor and, yes, strong stomachs. We can stop it here, dismantle that camp, get Toro Zulema elected as a spokesman for his people, and all with a republic. A people’s republic.”

“What keeps majority rule—this people’s republic—from becoming a mob?” I asked. “Or becoming a tyranny, like America in Vietnam? And isn’t it true that a majority can cast out a minority? Wouldn’t that be the will of the people, too? Isn’t that what happened out there, and in Sweden, and in America with my father? What prevents frightened people from acting without decency? I read Charity Bentham’s books. She said charity is a function of self-interest. She never explained to my satisfaction how to stop a group of nations—and not tyrannies, all of them republics—from each acting in their supposed best interest like murderers.”

“One answer to your problem is to reformulate your question,” said Lazarus. “Exile is one result of slaves being stubborn, like Germanicus. Factions such as the one your father represented, Vietnam war protesters, were not republicans. In their way, dissenters like your father were absolutists, and crazed, and selfdestructive, typical romantic misanthropes, white men complaining that the world is not white enough. They said, peace or nothing. They got what they asked for.”

“I don’t think Peregrine and Israel asked for exile, nor did Guy and Earle ask for Saigon,” I said. “And I don’t think the beasties asked for Ascension Island. Sometimes, Lazarus, you and Plato sound more dangerous than the despots.”

“It is not possible or desirable to rule innocently,” said Lazarus, a hypothesis he often recited to me afterward, one that I have seen the truth of, and the ruin of. “Learn that. The people have a will. They must be shown how to use it. Forced, if it comes to that. Trust me. We can make them see we’re the future here, and right, and their last chance. What we need is time and will.”

“And luck?” I tried, ending our debate that night with what I meant as levity. I was trying then to love Lazarus, as he was trying to love the people of South Georgia. He was smarter than anyone on the island (he and Orlando the Black and Longfaeroe were our only university graduates), and his arrogance should be excused by his struggle to translate what he thought into what he thought we could understand. On South Georgia, his mind was somewhere between dogma and praxis. He was not yet ready to act as violently as he could talk. There was more to him than radical-republican-without-a-country, of course; for example, though he loved Violante and his little girl, Cleo, he did not conceal his sorrow about Cleopatra. He encouraged me to talk about Cleopatra, drew me out on my lingering fascination for her, as a way, I believe, of testing his own devotion to her memory. We shared an icon. We did not share a mind. He believed that revised Benthamism on South Georgia would protect South Georgia from what I now see as a ghastly distortion of Benthamism evidenced in the Atlantic Ocean. I remained reluctant to commit myself to him, as I also resisted Germanicus. Lazarus kept at me, for he was long-winded, detail-conscious, rhetorically adept, without humility or patience. He did have regrets.

I have mentioned his regret for the murder of Father Saint Stephen. He talked to me only