The President knew he was going mad.
The morning after he saw the angel wrapped as a ball of fire, he called Jim Sierra, of Domestic Affairs, to the Oval Office.
“Who the hell is that beggar in Lafayette Park?” The words hit with no introduction, as Jim, thin, wiry, stepped in the door.
“Sir?” he asked.
“There’s a tramp in Lafayette Park.”
Jim gave a laugh. “There’re a lot of tramps in Lafayette Park. Give me a clue which one.”
The President smiled his famous grin. He appreciated Jim’s humor and didn’t want to make things worse. Right: nice and easy now, or surely Jim would diagnose him as insane.
“You know that bunch of demonstrators across from the White House? There’s a whole camp of them there, with their ugly signs, their tents. Some are living on the sidewalk. One of them sits cross-legged on a gray blanket, staring at the White House door.”
“Yes?”
“I don’t give a damn how you do it, but get them out of there. I don’t want to see them again.”
“All of them?” Jim’s shock registered on his face. He thought of the demonstrators, twenty, forty, maybe fifty of them at any given time; they came and went; they took a turn of so many hours or so many weeks and were replaced by other Believers from other states. They were organized. They sat, stood, slept, spoke soapbox speeches in Lafayette Park, marched to other cities as a protest, waved flags and banners, and camped on the grass.
“They’re protected by the Constitution,” he said thoughtfully. His first loyalty was to the presidency. His second was to the pleasure of solving problems efficiently, with mathematical purity. “We can’t just clear them out by the police. The Press would get on it. You’d have a hundred more demonstrators tomorrow, and five hundred after that, if you kept carting them off. They’re permitted to sit there.”
“I don’t care how you do it.” The President was ashamed to say his interest lay in one man only, one filthy vagrant who might not even belong to the demonstrators, who sat on a gray blanket on the cement sidewalk—sleeping on the heating grates, perhaps—who knows what he did when it got cold?
“Get an ordinance,” he said. “Get the courts to say they can’t demonstrate so close to the White House.”
“They used to sit right in front of the White House, on the sidewalk there,” Jim said, shooting the cuffs of his immaculate tailored suit. “They were moved across the street to Lafayette Park.” The homeless. The wanderers. The ill. The nomads. All of them eyesores in an unsightly world. No way to care for them in a depressed economy.
They had been moved out once before in the 1980s, only to return after a victorious ACLU suit.
“Then they can be moved again. Or pick them up for loitering and take them to a shelter. Clothe them. Feed them. Lock ’em in jail. Just get them the hell out of my sight.”
He turned back to the papers on his desk.
In those times, weapons had names. Like gladiators. Some of the names were fashioned from letters and numerals: ABM, MX, SSN-21.
Another group of weapons had names of charming innocence: Cruise missiles. They sounded like friendly postcards from romantic ports of call. Some had affectionate nicknames or diminutives, like Midgetman. Or Daisy Wheel. And some had names to strike terror in the hearts of man: Sleuth, Stealth, Strike, Storm.
Mostly the harsh glottals were preferred by the military poets. (It is a mistake to presume the two words form an oxymoron: military/poet. Simply that they hear a different drum.) The poets who named the gladiator weapons wore stars on their uniforms and gold braid on their hats. Their mouths, like those of fish, were composed of a single curving line, downturned.
Their business was destruction. They took it seriously.
In those days the poets were also playing with intergalactic laser-beam weapons. It was the Ring of Fire, pure mathematics, which is synonymous with poetry. A balance. Purity. Like a fine golf shot.
In their efforts to make the opposition aware of the perfect beauty of the perfect mathematical golf shot, in an effort to express their thoughts more clearly, they repeated their same arguments louder. Their opponents were also poets, who saw not the perfect balanced shot, landing a hole-in-one in space, but a fatal accident in which the club itself falls back to earth and probably incinerates the whole course, including the city they themselves lived in, their house and dog, and also their own children, their immortality. Given the perfect inconsistency of chance and accidents (itself a kind of mathematical poetry), they preferred safer games than intergalactic golf.
The military poets did not understand why the antistellar pacifists did not hear peace, as they did, when words of war were sung. The pacifists did not understand why songs of war were heard when they preached peace.
At one time the warriors would appear to win, and then trillions and quadzillions would be appropriated for development of weapons that could ride on solar winds; at another time the opposition would be in precedence, and all work on the systems would stop. For years it had gone on that way.
The reason that both sides kept repeating the same arguments, increasing only the decibels, is that neither could believe that its opponents could listen and yet disagree. Therefore they spoke louder. Or at a higher pitch. Thinking they hadn’t been heard.
What they were squabbling about was the best way to have peace.