Warday

Mad as hatters. And the Positive Extinctionists. And above all the Destructuralist Movement. That one’s really dangerous, because it’s so darned seductive. Give up. Live hand to mouth. Become a goddamn caveman. That’s what the Destructuralists are saying.

Despite all that has happened, I don’t think humanity would do a service to the planet by voluntarily rejoining the apes, which is what Destructuralism is really all about.

Another thing that’s mad is the movement in Europe to make us pay reparations. For what? Both combatant powers lost the war. By staying out, Europe won it. Now it turns out that the whole European peace movement, the Greens and such, were secretly supported by the very governments they were opposing, to give the Soviet Union the impression that Europe was too divided to be dangerous. Meanwhile, the Secret Treaties—you’ve heard about those? Don’t look at me with such blank faces! What are you, a couple of idiots? I’m not a political science professor. The English and the Germans and the French and probably the Italians and the Japanese all had secret treaties to the effect that in the event of a sudden and unexpected nuclear war between the two superpowers, they would seize American nuclear components on their soil. So the Russians had us isolated and didn’t even know it.

It’s pitiful. If they had but known, they wouldn’t have felt nearly so cornered by Spiderweb.

Let me tell you something. There’s a school of thought that the Europeans tempted the Soviets into getting trigger-happy by revealing those treaties to them and making the Western Alliance seem disastrously split. Their real purpose was to trick the superpowers into crushing one another. And they succeeded brilliantly.

We’re in a state of advanced confusion. And the Soviets! My God, from what I’ve heard, they’ve dissolved. We got a report from the London School of Economics to the effect that the Soviet’s Eastern European empire is gone. Poland, Rumania, Hungary renounced COMECON. Czechoslovakia broke off diplomatic relations with the Russians. Now the Czechs are under United German protection, whatever that means. Russia lost Moscow just the way we lost Washington. And there were those purple bombs in the Ukraine. Nobody knows what they were, but they killed every stalk of wheat, and now nothing will grow there. The LSE report estimates that the USSR has lost close to half of its population. It’s divided into republics, military areas, communist states, even a White Russian enclave. A madhouse of starving, diseased inmates that nobody can help. Then there’s China. India. Bangladesh. Do you know about them? About the fate of the world, my friends?

There has been a great reduction in the numbers of humanity on this planet.

When the fallout blew south and east out of the Dakotas, we lost most of the stored grain in the Midwest. And we had to abandon crops on about twenty-eight percent of our grain-planted acres. Smoke blotted out the sun for so long the temperature dropped in the Midwest. Add to that the cash crisis, the collapse of the banking system, the disruption of transport, and you have a net farm output down fifty-five percent by 1989. And in 1990 we dropped to thirty-eight percent of 1987 levels. Farm machinery broke down and spare parts were hard to get. People couldn’t get their land tested for radiation, and they abandoned it rather than breathe the dust of their own soil. You had hundreds of thousands of good acres abandoned, and then the great dust storms. That’s not over yet. That’s going to be a problem. If we don’t get in there and at least reseed the land with grass, we’re going to see the bare topsoil in the Midwest blowing all the way to the Atlantic and the Gulf. Of course, that would be the end of this country as a farming entity. We’d then have another famine.

The Agriculture Department is pushing hard to do this reseeding from the air. The trouble is, we can’t get enough grass seed!

There isn’t enough, not in all the world, to get cover on all the fallow acres before next spring. The past few years we’ve had long, wet winters. We’ve had dry springs, but not dry enough to cause more than local dust problems. But time is against us.

Let’s see now, which of my peeves and beefs haven’t I covered?

Well, there’s the state of the industrial economy. The fact that most Americans are traveling in trains when we could easily be flying. The fact that the Japanese will not provide us with the equipment to build microchips on our own. Short-term, that’s a sensible policy for them, but in the long run the vision of America as an agricultural society, industrially backward and politically castrated, just isn’t going to work.