ELI JARED PRESSED the button on his intercom. “Peterson, I find I have some time. I think I’ll go kill Angus Glass.”
“What?”
“Alright. Alright. Forget that. Just write down how I get to Angus Glass’s office and hand me the paper when I walk out the door.”
“Wouldn’t you rather he come here, Mister President?”
“No. No. I don’t see any reason to get blood on our carpet.”
His fists were thumping on the door. “Mister Secretary!? Mister Secretary!? Open the blessed door!”
“Who’s there?”
“I’m here! Jared! Open the door for God’s sake! I’ve come to kill you.”
“To kill me, sir?”
There was a long silence from behind the door.
“Well? Well? What are you waiting for?”
“Mr. Jared, are you serious?”
“Now open the blessed door or I’ll break it down!”
Angus Glass opened the door cautiously, but there was no caution at all as Eli Jared pushed it in further and stormed into the room with the door practically knocking down Angus Glass. He was able to balance himself and watched Eli Jared walking throughout the room.
“I see you’ve turned your carefully designed apartment into a freshman’s dorm room. It’s nice to see those rock-stars looking down at us. Very mature. Very mature.”
“Mr. Jared, why are you here?”
“That’s right. It’s my nickel, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You know what that phrase means?”
“What phrase?”
“‘My nickel.’ You know how that phrase started?”
“No, sir.”
“It’s when pay-phones cost only a nickel for a phone call. It means I called you to tell you something, and it means you didn’t call me. Get it?”
“I sort of thought it was something like that. I just never thought about it.”
“Well then, since you understand that, I’ll let you live a little longer. May I sit down here on top of your guitar?”
“I’ll get that off.”
“Good. Good. That will make the chair more comfortable for me.” Eli Jared didn’t wait for Angus Glass’s assistance. Instead, he carefully put the guitar on the floor himself and sat down on the cleared chair. “Any last words?”
“Brilliant last words! They can put that on your tombstone. Let me write them down. Got a piece of paper? ‘Why are you here, sir?’ and then underneath it they can etch the year of your birth and then when I killed you.”
“Please, sir. Why are you here?”
“To hear what you have to say to me.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“What’s going on, Glass? Let’s hear it. Do you have anything to tell me?”
Angus Glass thought it over. He dragged a wooden chair to put its back opposite Eli Jared, and then he sat on it backwards, his legs straddling the base of its back. “Okay. I can think of some thing to tell you.”
“Go! Quick. Let’s go.”
“I’m a pacifist.”
“That’s what you have to say?”
“Well, I think that’s bothering you.”
“It doesn’t bother me in the least as long as you don’t try to convert anyone here to your pacifism.”
“I’m not trying to convert anyone. But when anyone asks my opinion, they get it. And I think there are better ways than war. I think the way to stop war is not to be a participant in war. It takes two to fight a war.”
“It takes only one to kill the innocent. What should we do? Watch?”
“Avoid it in the first place. Don’t enact policies that lead others to attack. Our policy should be peace by example.”
“I see. It’s our fault according to Glass.”
“That’s right.”
“Mr. Glass, you are guilty of visionless morality. Every defeat this nation has suffered was due to a visionless morality of fools.”
“Bad policies based on a lack of other people’s cultures created hostility against us. Nothing should have been done that would have led others to attack us. Then there would have been no wars.”
“If only everyone in this nation had always felt the way wise Mr. Glass feels, there would have been no wars! Is that right?”
“That’s right. I don’t see anything wrong with the United States being a nation of peace.”
“Just think! Our Founders could have had peace easily by following the Glass Doctrine. All they had to do was not be Founders. The British wouldn’t have gone to war. Keep this territory British. No United States of America. And there would have been peace. President Lincoln could have chosen the Glass Doctrine of peace, settling for two nations; one free, one slave, and he could have saved over one-half million American lives. They would have lived. And there would have been peace. On the Monday morning after December the 7th, President Roosevelt could have invoked the Glass Doctrine, asking the Congress for a declaration of accommodation with what was the Japanese Empire, rather than a declaration of war. And there would have been peace. President Reagan could have ignored Grenada’s government, Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, and El Salvador’s Marxists. The first President Bush, who we call Bush 41 could have said, ‘Let Saddam Hussein take Kuwait.’ President Clinton could have let Bosnia and Kosovo fall to Slobodan Milosevic. And the second President Bush, Bush 43, could have chosen to accept terrorism as unavoidable. Peace is easy to attain, Mr. Glass. Let the enemy win. Glass, I want unity in this facility. Unity. I don’t want anyone around here being a dissenter. Get it?”
“Do you mean you don’t want me to give my opinion? You mean my freedom of speech has been violated? Taken away?”
“Now you got it right! Good man, Glass.”
“But, Mr. Jared, whether you agree with me or disagree with me, wouldn’t you give your life to make sure I retain that right?”
“No. I don’t give one hoot about your opinion unless I ask you for it. When I did ask you for it you gave such stupid answers that I don’t want you blabbing your protest within this facility unless it’s only to me. When there’s a war, your rights and my rights and every person’s rights are second to the nation’s survival. Thomas Jefferson said that ‘self-preservation is paramount to all laws.’ In peace-time I’d give my life for any ignoramus to state his ignorant opinion, but war puts a temporary hold on that. Get it? A lot of people are killing Americans right now. I do not want the Surviving Executive Branch of the United States to be pacifistic. Therefore keep your pacifism solely to yourself. Clear?”
“But Mr. Jared, then what’s the difference between the United States and our enemies? They don’t allow opinion that differs with them, and you don’t allow opinion that differs with you. Same thing, right?”
“Same thing, wrong. Our enemies don’t separate peace from war. We do. During every war in which we’ve fought for our survival, there were freedoms lost for the duration of the war, some of them unthinkable—or would be unthinkable in peace-time. The list included the closing down of newspapers unfriendly to the war effort; the suspension of habeas corpus; the establishment of relocation camps; the imprisonment of those speaking against our involvement; and the registration, monitoring, and arresting of thousands of aliens. But in every case, after every war was done, our liberties were not only restored, they were increased.”
“Like when? Like what?”
“After the Revolutionary War came the U.S. Constitution including its Bill of Rights. The Civil War gave birth to the Emancipation Proclamation as well as the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution codifying the extinction of slavery and requiring the equal protection of the laws.. When World War I was done the Constitution was amended again, this time with the Nineteenth Amendment mandating women’s suffrage. After World War II the armed forces of the United States were desegregated.”
“And after this war, you say all our liberties will come back?”
“All of them. Plus more. It’s always that way.”
“I hope you’re right. Mr. Jared, if I were president there would be no more wars for the United States.”
“I didn’t come here to find out what you would do if you were president. I came here to tell you that we have to have unity here, and I don’t want you lollygagging around disrupting that unity. Get it? You are Acting Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; in this case a trivial position and even that position may be taken away from you—by me, if I have to, so as to retain that unity. No, I’m not serious when I say I’ll kill you but I am serious when I say if you continue to do that I’ll lock you up.”
“You do mean that, don’t you?”
“I know what being a wartime president means. During wars for our survival, wartime presidents would have locked you up. So will I.”
“Everyone in World War II did whatever Roosevelt wanted?”
“I don’t know what was done by everyone but I do remember what was done by such an overwhelming majority that dissent was never an issue. During the projection of newsreels at motion picture theaters, the images of President Roosevelt were always greeted by applause from the audience of democrats and republicans alike. He was our Commander in Chief.
“There was so much unity that every person in the United States was a part of the war effort. No matter their age. I was a little kid in grammar school then, Fairburn Avenue Elementary School, but the war effort dominated even my time and the time of all my classmates. There were constant paper-drives which meant we would bring a week’s worth of newspapers to school to be used for the war effort. And there were what were called scrap drives. We all brought to school any scraps of metal—for the war effort. From empty cigarette packs given to us we would separate the pack’s tin foil from its backing-paper and roll the tin foil into a ball and turn it in—for the war effort. My mother saved grease from her frying pan and I brought it to school—for the war effort. I still don’t know what was done with that grease, making soap I suppose but I never found out for sure, but everything was based on the war effort.
“Vietnam changed all that. Disunity became the routine. Demonstrations against our policy in D.C. were fun, full of drugs and sex away from home. They were spring breaks with a cause. Fun.
“Then this war—this war—this war came along; a war for our own survival; not Vietnam’s survival, but our survival. Same thing. Fools protested. And even some of the non-dissenters didn’t get it.
“Many Americans complained because the price of gasoline had gone up and because we had to remove our shoes before going through security devices at airports. But what a difference from World War II when there were no complaints when gasoline was rationed. And there was no taking off shoes at airports—that would have been luxury. Instead the purchase of shoes called for shoestamps. The material, when there was any, was synthetic. No complaints. Civilian air-raid wardens were given unprecedented authority during blackouts without facing ACLU lawsuits. No complaints. Cash alone was not enough to purchase most foods and clothes. They were sold with ever-present rationing books and different colored stamps and chips and coupons for meat, for butter, for most groceries. Victory Gardens of vegetables and fruits were grown at home; my mother had a Victory Garden.
“And, I should add, on the battlefields far from home, those in the U.S. Armed Forces fought a totally politically incorrect war. Good! Had to. We bombed the enemy to blazes. No restraint. Out of it all, we won. And that generation is today justifiably known as what Tom Brokaw called the Greatest Generation. He was right. It was the Greatest Generation.
“Admittedly, during World War II, at home there were a number of advantages over this war. First, there was no television back then harping on how terribly the war was going, deflating our morale—and at times we were losing. And, thank goodness, there was no United Nations Organization as there was when this war began. If there was a U.N. back in World War II its members would have been writing resolutions until Hitler and Tojo put their flags on American soil just as the Islamist Revolutionaries put their flags on our territory on July the 16th.
“Now the enemy dominates every moment of every life in this nation. It does so because we lost. Our duty here at Sebotus is to try and win back what this nation had. No, Mr. Glass. I will not allow dissent here. I will not allow disunity. You make your choice. Never, never voice one word of disunity except to me alone. If you voice your juvenile, inexperienced opinions to anyone other than me, you will be imprisoned. We do have a prison here and you may well be its first and only inmate. And I mean it. Do you understand?”
“I understand what you’re saying, Mr. Jared.”
“Thank you, Mister Secretary.”