"William Tenn - Null-P" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tenn William)

beginning my lecture," he chuckled, "I would like to tell you that this 'normal man' of yours is no Messiah.
All he is, I am afraid, is a bell-shaped curve with ambitions, the median made fleshтАФ"
He got no further. He was brained with his own demonstration microscope.
Even that early, a few watchful politicians noticed that no one was punished for this hasty act.
The incident could be related to many others which followed: the unfortunate and unknown citizen of
Duluth, for example, whoтАФat the high point of that city's Welcome Average Old Abnego paradeтАФwas
heard to remark in good-natured amaze-ment, "Why, he's just an ordinary jerk like you and me," and
was immediately torn into celebratory confetti by horrified neighbors in the crowd.
Developments such as these received careful consideration from men whose power was derived
from the just, if well-directed, consent of the governed.
George Abnego, these gentry concluded, represented the maturation of a great national myth which,
implicit in the culture for over a century, had been brought to garish fulfillment by the mass communication
and entertainment media.
This was the myth that began with the juvenile appeal to be "A Normal Red-Blooded American
Boy" and ended, on the highest political levels, with a shirt-sleeved, suspendered seeker after political
office boasting. "Shucks, everybody knows who I am. I'm folksтАФjust plain folks."
This was the myth from which were derived such superficially disparate practices as the rite of
political baby-kissing, the cult of "keeping up with the Joneses," the fop-pish, foolish, forever-changing
fads which went through the population with the monotonous regularity and sweep of a windshield wiper.
The myth of styles and fra-ternal organizations. The myth of the "regular fellow."
There was a presidential election that year.
Since all that remained of the United States was the Middle West, the Democratic Party had
disappeared. Its remnants had been absorbed by a group calling itself the Old Guard Republicans, the
closest thing to an American Left. The party in powerтАФthe Conservative RepublicansтАФso far right as to
verge upon royalism, had acquired enough pledged theocratic votes to make them smug about the
election.
Desperately, the Old Guard Republicans searched for a candidate. Having regret-fully passed over
the adolescent epileptic recently elected to the governorship of South Dakota in violation of the state
constitutionтАФand deciding against the psalm-sing-ing grandmother from Oklahoma who punctuated her
senatorial speeches with reli-gious music upon the banjoтАФthe party strategists arrived, one summer
afternoon, in Fillmore, Wisconsin.
From the moment that Abnego was persuaded to accept the nomination and his last well-intentioned
but flimsy objection was overcome (the fact that he was a reg-istered member of the opposition party) it
was obvious that the tide of battle had turned, that the fabled grass roots had caught fire.
Abnego ran for president on the slogan "Back to Normal with the Normal Man!"
By the time the Conservative Republicans met in convention assembled, the dan-ger of loss by
landslide was already apparent. They changed their tactics, tried to meet the attack head-on and
imaginatively.
They nominated a hunchback for the presidency. This man suffered from the ad-ditional disability of
being a distinguished professor of law in a leading university; he had married with no issue and divorced
with much publicity; and finally, he had once admitted to a congressional investigating committee that he
had written and published surrealist poetry. Posters depicting him leering horribly, his hump twice
life-size, were smeared across the country over the slogan: "An Abnormal Man for an Abnormal World!"
Despite this brilliant political stroke, the issue was never in doubt. On Election Day, the nostalgic
slogan defeated its medicative adversary by three to one. Four years later, with the same opponents, it
had risen to five and a half to one. And there was no organized opposition when Abnego ran for a third
term...
Not that he had crushed it. There was more casual liberty of political thought al-lowed during
Abnego's administrations than in many previous ones. But less politi-cal thinking and debating were done.
Whenever possible, Abnego avoided decision. When a decision was unavoidable, he made it