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

entirely on the basis of precedent. He rarely spoke on a topic of current interest and never committed
himself. He was garrulous and an exhibitionist only about his family.
"How can you lampoon a vacuum?" This had been the wail of many opposition newspaper writers
and cartoonists during the early years of the Abnegite Revolution, when men still ran against Abnego at
election time. They tried to draw him into ri-diculous statements or admissions time and again without
success, Abnego was sim-ply incapable of saying anything that any major cross-section of the population
would consider ridiculous.
Emergencies? "Well," Abnego had said, in the story every schoolchild knew, "I've noticed even the
biggest forest fire will burn itself out. Main thing is not to get excited."
He made them lie down in low-blood-pressure areas. And, after years of building and destruction,
of stimulation and conflict, of accelerating anxieties and torments, they rested and were humbly grateful.
It seemed to many, from the day Abnego was sworn in, that chaos began to waver and everywhere
a glorious, welcome stability flowered. In some respects, such as the decrease in the number of
monstrous births, processes were under way which had nothing at all to do with the Normal Man of
Fillmore; in othersтАФthe astonished announcement by lexicographers, for example, that slang expressions
peculiar to teenagers in Abnego's first term were used by their children in exactly the same con-texts
eighteen years later in his fifth administrationтАФthe historical leveling-out and patting-down effects of the
Abnegite trowel were obvious.
The verbal expression of this great calm was the Abnegism.
History's earliest record of these deftly phrased inadequacies relates to the admin-istration in which
Abnego, at last feeling secure enough to do so, appointed a cabinet without any regard to the wishes of
his party hierarchy. A journalist, attempting to point up the absolute lack of color in the new official
family, asked if any one of themтАФfrom Secretary of State to Postmaster-GeneralтАФhad ever committed
him-self publicly on any issue or, in previous positions, had been responsible for a single constructive step
in any direction.
To which the President supposedly replied with a bland, unhesitating smile, "I always say there's no
hard feelings if no one's defeated. Well, sir, no one's defeated in a fight where the referee can't make a
decision."
Apocryphal though it may have been, this remark expressed the mood of Abnegite America
perfectly. "As pleasant as a no-decision bout" became part of everyday language.
Certainly as apocryphal as the George Washington cherry-tree legend, but the most definite
Abnegism of them all was the one attributed to the President after a perfor-mance of Romeo and Juliet.
"It is better not to have loved at all, than to have loved and lost," he is reported to have remarked at the
morbid end of the play.
At the inception of Abnego's sixth termтАФthe first in which his oldest son served with him as
Vice-PresidentтАФa group of Europeans reopened trade with the United States by arriving in a cargo ship
assembled from the salvaged parts of three sunken destroyers and one capsized aircraft carrier.
Received everywhere with undemonstrative cordiality, they traveled the country, amazed at the
placidityтАФthe almost total absence of political and military excite-ment on the one hand, and the rapid
technological retrogression on the other. One of the emissaries sufficiently mislaid his diplomatic caution
to comment before he left:
"We came to America, to these cathedrals of industrialism, in the hope that we would find solutions
to many vexing problems of applied science. These problemsтАФthe development of atomic power for
factory use, the application of nuclear fission to such small arms as pistols and hand grenadesтАФstand in
the way of our postwar recovery. But you, in what remains of the United States of America, don't even
see what we, in what remains of Europe, consider so complex and pressing. Excuse me, but what you
have here is a national trance!"
His American hosts were not offended: they received his expostulations with po-lite smiles and
shrugs. The delegate returned to tell his countrymen that the Ameri-cans, always notorious for their
madness, had finally specialized in cretinism.