The 45th, page 29
“We all know what you think,” said Conrad Wilson from the other side of the table. “You’ve made it clear before that -”
“You saw what he did in that press conference last week! - A holiday for FDR! I told you,” she hissed. “Rufus warned all of us. He isn’t a conservative - He’s worse than any Democrat we could have elected. He’s -” But, suddenly, she was interrupted by a voice booming over the loudspeakers: “Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States.”
They were all on their feet, and if it was not with the kind of wild enthusiasm they might have shown for one of their own, one of the candidates who had sought the nomination, with polite respect and even, some of them, friendly interest.
Julian Drake had already broken with tradition by arriving only in time to give his speech. Ismael Cooper had explained in a way that left no room for argument that the president always worked during meals and would therefore not be available for dinner. Julian walked in now without stopping to shake anyone’s hand and without so much as a wave to the crowd. He stood at the lectern, looked down at what would have been his speech had he brought one with him, smiled to himself, and then, with the smile still on his face, looked up.
“You would like to know what kind of conservative I really am, how far back in the past I am willing to look for guidance as to what we should do in the future, or, rather, what we should do now, to make the future more consistent with the ancient principles on which this country depends not just for its prosperity but for its continued existence. How far back in history do I look? - To our first historian.” The smile grew broader, more confident, the look of someone eager to share something he knows you will find every bit as fascinating as he. “That first historian that I know all of you have read more than once, that historian from the day you first read him, you keep going back to read again - Herodotus, who by telling us about something once done in Babylon tells us something about ourselves. You look confused,” he laughed. “Let me explain.”
There was something in the way Julian Drake told a story that made you, while you listened, think it one of the most interesting things you had ever heard. It was, in a way, the difference between listening to an unusually dull accountant read a page of Shakespeare and watching Lawrence Olivier play the part of Henry V. Julian was talking about a Greek historian dead for twenty five hundred years, someone that perhaps not more than a tenth of his audience had ever heard of, and perhaps not more than a tenth that number had ever read, and he had them all thinking that this was a writer they really ought someday to read.
“According to Herodotus, it was the best law the Babylonians ever had, the law that made Babylon strong and united, one city instead of two. Every city, every nation - including especially our own - is in constant danger of becoming divided against itself, two cities instead of one: the city of the rich and the city of the poor, each of them doing everything it can to dominate, and even destroy, the other. But Babylon, ancient Babylon, not only kept the two cities in balance, but managed to knit them together. They did it with women.”
There was a quickening of interest, everyone more alert, the suggestion of a woman’s involvement, provocative, sensual. Julian caught the subtle change of mood, the heightened sense of expectation. He treated them with an immediate digression that seemed to teach moderation.
“It seems a strange, and perhaps barbaric, practice to use women as a means of solving a social problem, a tribute, perhaps, to the ignorance of an ancient age which still thought in terms of duties instead of rights. But, if the ancients were far from perfect, we in the modern world have problems of our own, and if we cannot follow exactly what was done in the past, we might still have something to learn if, looking deeper, we look beneath the surface of what an ancient writer wrote.
“It was quite remarkable, ingenious, even - dare I say it? - Machiavellian, the way some unnamed lawgiver gave the law that saved Babylon from the kind of discord and division that almost always leads to civil war. With a single, stunning, alteration in the way marriages were arranged, the rich lost some of their wealth and the poor became almost well to do. Marriages were arranged, not by parents interested in what was best for heir families, the way it was done for generations among the titled nobility of Europe, but by the workings of a free market - a kind of capitalism, if you will - in which those who could afford it were able to buy exactly what they wanted.”
He had them now, everyone eager and attentive, waiting to hear the wonders that could be brought about by the marvelous workings of a system of free enterprise in which success, instead of punished, was rewarded, not with more money, but with the love of a woman.
“An auction was held,” explained Julian, suppressing a smile at a secret his audience could not wait to hear, “an auction unlike any you have heard of before, an auction in which men paid for women…and women paid for men. Once each year,” he continued, hurrying on before they could react to this outrageous remark, “all the women of marriageable age were paraded out in front of all the men who were ready to marry. The bidding began. The most beautiful woman brought the highest price, a price that only the richest man could afford to pay, a price that had no limit beyond the buyer’s wealth and desire. The women were auctioned off until all the women anyone wanted to pay for were gone. The next step was the work of genius. The money paid for those more desirable women now became the inducement by which men who had not been able to buy the more desirable women were willing to take the women who were left. Instead of men paying for women, women, in a manner of speaking, now began to pay for men. Men bid, not what they were willing to pay, but what they were willing to take. Each woman - and I am sorry for putting it like this, but this is what they did - each woman, as she got uglier, brought a bigger price, a dowry that, for the ugliest of all, was equivalent to what the richest man had paid for the most beautiful woman, an amount, according to Herodotus, staggering in value.”
Raising his arms, Julian turned up his palms and shrugged. “It was - not to put too fine a point on it - redistribution, but redistribution that, instead of breeding resentment, passed unnoticed. The wealthy got the women they desired; the poor, who took the women the wealthy did not want, got their money. This reduced, if it did not eliminate, the disparity of what they had and in that way removed the principal cause of dissension and distrust. Babylon remained one city instead of two. What happened later,” added Julian, with a warning glance, “when Babylon was conquered and its ancient laws abandoned, proved, at least for Herodotus, how sound the reasoning had been. The rich, who could now do whatever they wanted, became richer still; the poor, driven to desperation, sold their daughters into prostitution, a trade practiced just outside the gates of the city from which they were now excluded.”
No one seemed quite certain what to make of it, whether their reaction should be curiosity about a strange, long-forgotten custom practiced for a time by a long-forgotten civilization, or resentment, the growing suspicion that Julian Drake was in the most oblique way imaginable questioning the very measure of their success.
“It would be easy to dismiss the ancient custom of an ancient city as irrelevant to the problems of the modern world. No one arranges marriages anymore. Women are not put up for auction; men do not participate in a bidding war. And if it is true,” he added drily, “that women sometimes marry more for money than for love, and that men have sometimes found marriage to a woman from a wealthy family more desirable than marriage to a woman from more meager circumstances, there is a difference between what someone does in their private life and forcing everyone into the same practice. Better to leave to random chance the result of how each of us decides to live. Be compelled to buy or sell at auction the marriage we wanted, or had, to have? What could ancient Babylonians have to teach us about the meaning of human freedom?
“Everything, if you want the truth; everything, if you believe with Herodotus, and not just Herodotus, that a city, that is to say, a country, cannot survive divided against itself; everything, if you are willing to admit the possibility that human nature does not change, that the questions that have to be answered, the problems that have to be solved, if human beings are to live together in a tolerably decent way, were the same in the past as they are today. Engraved on the American coinage are the words, in Latin, ‘Out of many one.’ The need to keep a people united did not vanish with the advent of American capitalism. The war between rich and poor, whether in ancient Babylonia or modern America, is always there, waiting to erupt, and the only way to stop it is to stop anyone from becoming permanently rich.”
There was a rumble of discontent, an almost universal expression of displeasure. Several people sitting at table in back got up and left. Dozens more shook their heads in angry disagreement. Julian seemed to enjoy it. He became even more serious.
“The Babylonians understood this, and passed a law to prevent it. Plato understood this, and explained why it happens. When ‘wealth and the wealthy are honored, virtue and good men are less honorable,” insists Socrates in the most famous dialogue Plato wrote. What is honored is practiced, what is not honored is neglected. When that happens,” said Julian in a tone that suggested that nothing was more important, instead of ‘men who love victory and honor, they finally become lovers of money-making and money; and they praise and admire the wealthy man…while they dishonor the poor.’ The result is always the same: ‘Such a city, not being one but of necessity two, the city of the poor and the city of the rich, dwelling together in the same place, ever plotting against each other.’”
The more serious conservative writers sat forward on their chairs, intrigued that Julian Drake could quote Plato off the top of his head, but more astonished that he would insist on the evils of acquisition to an audience in which even those who were not rich themselves admired , and envied, those who were, and do it, moreover, by using something first reported by a Greek historian. They were intrigued, others were appalled. What did - what was his name? - Herodotus, what did Plato - someone they remembered only philosophy majors read in college - have to do with anything that mattered? The world had changed, the world had become more enlightened. Everyone knew that. Everyone, at least everyone with a brain, knew that capitalism, and only capitalism, could provide, could protect, freedom, and everyone knew that capitalism - free market economics - could only survive if everyone continued to be rewarded for their success.
“You wanted to know what kind of conservative I was,” said Julian. “Someone who believes in the importance of remembering the important lessons of the past. I did not become president to tell you, or anyone else, what you might like to hear. I did not become president to encourage you, or anyone else, in the false belief that nothing had to change. I did not become president to shy away from reminding you that what too many of us now think irrelevant: the greatest minds of the past were as familiar to the Founders we claim to revere as the names of today’s well-known entertainers are to us. Herodotus, Plato - Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, Madison - the authors of the documents that have ordered our existence as a nation, did not just read them, they studied them - in the original Greek
“You wanted to know what kind of conservative I am - The real question is what kind of conservative are you. It is no answer to say that this, or any other country, can, or should, be held together by giving everyone an equal opportunity to become rich; that everyone, or almost everyone, will be content with the knowledge that because others have started with next to nothing and managed to get rich it is possible for them to do so as well. It is no answer, because the question, strange as it may seem to our modern, all too modern, ears is whether becoming rich is really good for anyone. The question, the real question, is what kind of people we should be. We are what we look up to, what we honor above everything else. We honor what we have been taught is important, what we have been taught to believe. Plato - yes, Plato - wrote in another dialogue that ‘the most well-bred dispositions usually spring up in a home when neither wealth nor poverty dwell there. For neither insolence nor injustice, nor again jealousies and ill-will, come into being there.’ A well-bred disposition meant in ancient times, and should still mean now, a well-ordered soul for whom nothing is more important than doing everything he or she can to protect and preserve a well-ordered city, a place, a country, in which the public is always more important than anyone’s private interest; a country, a civilization, in which the wealthy compete among themselves to see who can provide more of what will benefit the public; a country in which, as Herodotus once taught, redistribution is seen not as an evil, but a virtue, a way of producing the kind of moderation that, by preventing the war of rich and poor, makes out of many, one, a single people which understands that the measure of success is not how much you have, but how you choose to spend it. This, to say no more, is the ancient wisdom that, for those of us who wish to follow the highest teachings of the past, we need to follow.”
Julian Drake looked one last time at his audience, nodded briefly, whether to underscore the significance of what he had said, or simply to indicate he was finished, that there was nothing more to say, then turned and left as quickly, and as decisively, as when he arrived. There was little applause, much confusion, and a vague sense of disappointment. The president called himself a conservative, but after what he had just said, the word had a meaning not just different from the way most of them had understood it, but completely alien from everything they believed. There were exceptions, mainly among those who had gone to the better universities and, in protest against the prevalent liberalism, had studied Burke and Churchill, and even some of the ancients, but there were also a few who, without having read anything of serious importance about politics and history, had sufficient intelligence, and were sufficiently fair minded, to recognize a tour de force when they saw it.
“He’s right. Everything he said.” Conrad Wilson rested his elbows on the table. All around him people were leaving. The ballroom was full of muffled noise. He looked across at his old friend, Rufus Chambers. “You have to admit it, the argument he makes….It may not be what we want to hear; we wouldn’t have heard it from any of the other candidates, the ones we wanted to win, but I can’t honestly say we - the country - would be better off it they had. He’s right. That’s all I can say. I was wrong.” He shook his head, deploring his own failure to grasp from the beginning how different Julian Drake was from all the other politicians with whom he had come in contact. “He’s right, the country can’t….”
Everyone else had left the table and headed for the exits. Angela Murray was on her feet, ready to leave, but when she heard this she sat down again and pulled her chair closer. She looked at Wilson as if he had lost his mind.
“That’s truly philosophical of you, Conrad,” she remarked, her black painted eyebrows arched high up her piercing, unforgiving eyes. “Philosophical - that is the word, like that goddamn Julian Drake, trotting out all his old quotations from books no one has ever read. So, what now, exactly? - We’re all supposed to be like good students in our freshman year, giving back to our instructor what he has just told us about the rise and fall of some forgotten civilization? Aren’t you a little old, Conrad, to start acting the repentant schoolboy, promising to study harder, promising to learn your lessons, promising -”
“Oh, shut the hell up, Angela!” shouted Wilson, becoming angrier with every vicious , sarcastic word she spoke. “Why can’t you admit that the country is in trouble, that things can’t go on like this much longer. He’s right, damn it! We are two countries - two cities =- the rich and the poor. He’s right when he says its nothing short of delusional to think that we can solve the problem by this stupid insistence that everyone has an equal right to get rich. It’s a lie - everyone doesn’t have an equal chance. And even if it were true - what then? - You’d still have rich and poor. Remember what he said - the rich become arrogant and demanding. That’s a pretty damn good description, don’t you think?”
“You’re overreacting,” insisted Chambers, trying to calm them both down. “You’re right, Conrad - He knows how to give a speech. No one else I know of could have talked about the things he did - talked about Hero…whatever his name is, - and Plato, and held his audience. Even if no one knows what he is talking about, even if none of us….he doesn’t let you doubt for a moment that he knows, that he’s read - and understood - all those dead writers he’s so fond of, and that everything they say, all of it, makes perfect sense to him. But, Angela is right as well. He isn’t a conservative, not the way we have always understood the word. What he said at the beginning - that marriage auction he talked about - Redistribution, that is what he is all about. He wants to destroy the rich, take away everything we have earned. The only difference - the only difference I can see - between Drake and the Democrats is that he thinks the rich should be grateful that they won’t have their lives ruined by money!”
Angela Murray’s narrow, pinched face twisted up with rage. She held her thin, bony hands tight together as if it were the only way to stop herself from beating them on the table.
“I told you months ago, I told you both, what a threat he was, what a danger to everything we believe.” She gave Chambers a hard, determined glance, challenging him to decide whose side he was on. “He wants to destroy us - Isn’t that what you just said? What do you do when someone wants to destroy you, what is the only choice you have when someone lets you know it is him or you?”
Wilson shot out of his chair, shoved it up against the table, and put both hands on top of it. A lethal stare, silent contempt for the ease with which she was willing to contemplate the worst crime imaginable, said more than the spoken word ever could. He turned to Rufus Chambers.
