The Philatelist
Page 9
I should add that in 2023 there really was an attempted landing on our island by a force of North Islanders trained and supplied by the U.S. Department of Education in conjunction with the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. This attempted invasion failed utterly, owing to the courage and skill of some few dozen elderly “hoplites,” we call them, four of whom sacrificed themselves in the effort. Since that time, no other attempt has been made against our fortress home.
And all this time the Committee had been steadily at work on our new constitution, or as we call it, our Confession of Sovereign Laws. We had wanted an organic document that would militate unambiguously against consumerism as a lifestyle, against feminism, against globalism and universal rights, but for a high culture making constant war against the ever-present aggressions of the low culture that yearns for tawdriness in all walks of life. Most of all we were adamant against immigration and the racial deterioration consequent thereunto. We wanted a society that preferred quality to equality; indeed, we sought a final termination of the very name and notion of equality, believing as we did that not even sub-atomic particles could be found to be equal in all respects, far less automobiles, or horses, or restaurants, or cultures, or works of music and literature. Equality, we hold, is simply a capitulation to mediocrity and, finally, sub-mediocrity all the way down to the current practice of the decaying U.S.A.
We wanted our philosophy to suffuse the island under the leadership of our best, or anyway our least benighted, citizens. In pursuance of that, we needed penalties that were neither too severe nor yet too lax. In short, we wanted penalties that were just right. For minor crimes—such as littering, loud music, the mistreatment of dogs, loose trousers, and pigtails—we assigned a period of hard labor in reforestation projects, highway clean-up, and the like. For crimes of the middling sort, permanent expulsion was the punishment and the only one. But for the most egregious forms of behavior—treason, rape, book theft, and child molestation—the punishment cannot be described where sensitive people may be present. Save to report that it is related to one of the creatures held for that purpose in the national aquarium.
We called our organization The Node, named after a certain piece of classical American fiction. Our group was to be very, very hard to enter, and easy, very easy to be expelled from. With an income stipulated to be no higher than the island’s average, we removed greed from any possible motive of ours. Nepotism was strictly disallowed, and since decisions were not attributed to individuals, we hoped also to remove the desire for prestige from our members’ motives. We wanted, in short, to behave like experimental philosophers questing for a form of civilization that might prove significantly less awful than any that had gone before.
But is with our national budget that we have most clearly given expression to our intentions. With a population of white people, welfare benefits were seldom needed, and because we had no role in international connections, we had only to pay for a certain tonnage of viral material, together with shotgun shells for our army of old men. Taken all together, our defense budget consumed just 3.2 percent of revenue, a tiny sum compared to the 12.8 percent dedicated to the national library, 9.9 percent for one major and three regional Wagnerian opera houses, 7.4 percent for six publishing firms that were freed by this allocation from having to show a profit, 9.6 percent for a new radio telescope to be set up on Mount Tasman, and 5.1 percent for the new National Gallery of Unpretentious Art. Apart from another 15.5 percent for other basic and required expenses, we were left with 7.4 percent for the education of generic people and 29.1 percent for the gifted, which is to say approximately 2 percent of the island’s population. More than any other country, we specialized in the development of intellectual excellence and the promotion of genius. Five years of this and the island led all international rankings of educational success on a per-capita basis. And though we have but four universities, they have easily supplied us with the sort of men who in course of time will be invited to join the Committee.
And so this is it, ladies and gentlemen, this is what passed through my mind as I waited for the traffic light to change from red to green.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tito Perdue was born in 1938 in Chile, the son of an electrical engineer from Alabama. The family returned to Alabama in 1941, where Tito graduated from the Indian Springs School, a private academy near Birmingham, in 1956. He then attended Antioch College in Ohio for a year, before being expelled for cohabitating with a female student, Judy Clark. In 1957, they were married, and remain so today. He graduated from the University of Texas in 1961, and spent some time working in New York City, an experience which garnered him his life-long hatred of urban life. After holding positions at various university libraries, Tito has devoted himself full-time to writing since 1983.
His first novel, 1991’s Lee, received favorable reviews in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Reader, and The New England Review of Books. Since then, he has published sixteen other novels—including The New Austerities (1994), Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture (1994), The Sweet-Scented Manuscript (2004), Fields of Asphodel (2007), The Node (2011), Morning Crafts (2013) Reuben (2014), the William’s House quartet (2016), Cynosura (2017), Philip (2017), The Bent Pyramid (2018), and Though We Be Dead, Yet Our Day Will Come (2018)—which have been praised in Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, The Quarterly Review, The Occidental Observer, and at Counter-Currents/North American New Right.
In 2015, he received the H. P. Lovecraft Prize for Literature.
Notes
[←1]
On Saturday, March 7, 2015, Tito Perdue read this short story at a banquet in his honor in Atlanta, where he received the first H. P. Lovecraft Prize for Literature.
Table of Contents
Front Matter
Cover
Half Title
Series page
Title page
Copyright
Table of Contents
The Philatelist (main story)
"Good Things..."
About the Author