The Ministry for the Future

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  But still, it was awkward, very awkward. Awkward as hell. Nothing they tried in this effort worked very well. Which meant …

  37

  This is hard to write. I was born in Libya, I’m told, and after my father disappeared, no one knows how or why, my mother took my sister and me to Europe, on a boat that carried mostly Tunisians. They made it to Trieste and were transferred by train to St. Gallen, Switzerland, where we were caught up in the riot there. That’s my first memory— lots of us running into a building and everyone screaming. And my eyes burning from the tear gas. My mom tried to shield us inside her sweater, so I didn’t see very much, but my eyes still burned. A woman and her two little girls, all crying our eyes out.

  I don’t remember much about the days that followed. The Swiss took care of us better than the sailors on the boat had. We were fed and had beds in a big dormitory, with showers and toilets in a compound next to it. It felt good to be clean and dry and not hungry. Mother finally stopped crying.

  Then we were taken to a room and introduced to a group of people who spoke in French to us. Eventually Mother was invited to a refugee shelter just outside of Winterthur, and she eagerly and gratefully agreed to go. My sister and I were scared to move again, but Mother assured us it was for the best, so we got on a train again and said goodbye to the shelter in St. Gallen, which in truth had been the nicest place we had ever lived. But off we went.

  The shelter outside Winterthur was in a beautiful garden. On certain days we could see the Alps in Glarus, very far away. We hadn’t known that the world was as big as that, and at first it made me scared. How could we get along in a world so big?

  Jake was one of the regular visitors to our shelter. His French was slow but clear, and he had a look on his face that right from the start I knew was different. As if he was suffering even more than we were. I wanted to tell him that we were all right.

  He taught English to both children and adults, in different classes. Mornings for children, afternoon and evenings for adults. He spent most of every day there, Sundays included. At lunch he sat with us and ate. Sometimes at meals he sat there looking at us with his eyes moving back and forth, side to side, as if he was tracking a bird or having a thought. He seemed fond of us, and like all the sponsors, he grew to spend more time with particular refugees, greeting us by name and asking how we were doing, in both French and later English.

  That went on for a long time, later I learned it was almost a year, and then Mother told us that she was going to marry Jake, and we would all move in with him in a nearby village. My sister and I had had no inkling that this might happen, and at first we were surprised and uncertain; the shelter was again the nicest place we had ever known, and going off with a single one of our helpers into the unknown struck us as a bad idea. We didn’t know what was going on between Mother and this man with the twitchy eyes, and we suspected the worst.

  But in fact we moved nearby into a little two-story white house with a walled garden beside it, and we settled in quickly and went back often to the shelter to see our friends there. Jake and Mother were always warm and cordial to each other, although they were never openly affectionate in front of us. But we could see that Mother was fond of him, and grateful to him, and he was always very kind to us, and always spoke to us in a mix of English and French, so that it seemed like the two languages were one, and later it took some sorting out on our part to get the two into their separate places in our heads. In that effort, Arabic seemed to slip away.

  So we were a little family for a few years, from when I was seven until I was eleven. We went to school in Winterthur, played with friends from school and from the shelter, and all was well. In those years my mother was happy.

  Then, when I started going to the middle school, I began to see signs that things were not well between my mother and Jake. They would sit in our kitchen after dinner looking at their screens or out the window. Watching them together I saw something that struck me very strongly; even just sitting there doing nothing, they were very different people. My mother is a calm person. She pours herself into a chair and relaxes there like a cat. Her eyes will move, her hands will do some sewing or knitting, but her body is still as can be. This is somewhat her nature. We’re lucky to have her.

  Jake on the other hand would sit there and yet he wasn’t even close to still. Not that he fidgeted, or tapped his foot or anything like that; it was just that you could see that he was spinning inside. It was like you could see all his atoms spinning the way they are said to do. If people could be rated for their spins, like atoms or car engines, then Mother would be almost motionless, while Jake was always spinning, at thousands or even millions of revolutions per minute. RPM ten million, he said once; this whole image I am giving you comes from one of his own ways of assessing people. He would say we are all like quarks, which are the smallest elementary particles, he told us— smaller even than atoms, such that atoms are all made up of quarks held together by gluons. He made us laugh with these stories. And like quarks, everyone had a certain amount of strangeness, spin, and charm. You could rate everyone by these three constants, and our mother was the most charming person on Earth, but not very strange, and with almost zero spin. Jake confessed to having a high spin rate, also strangeness; and we found him charming too. He didn’t agree to that.

  So sometimes he would sit in his chair at the end of a day at the shelter, obviously exhausted, and his eyes would be moving left-right-left-right, which I think takes a lot of effort, and somehow it was clear that he was spinning. There was something dark inside him. Mother said he had done development work in his youth and had seen some bad things. We believed it. Sometimes he would stare at us, and sit hard on the floor and give us a hug: How I love you, he would say, you are such wonderful girls. Other times he would stare at us with his body rigid and his face contorted, clutching the sides of his chair as if preparing to leap to his feet and dash from the room. It was frightening to see that.

  Then times came when he would shout at Mother, and even at us. He would leap to his feet, he would dash from the room; but sometimes first he would shout at her, in English it seemed but we couldn’t understand it, and besides we were too scared to listen, we ran from the room at those times. It was so shocking at first; then it became something that could happen, something we were watchful for, so that when he was friendly, or contrite and remorseful, we would take it with a grain of salt, not knowing if he might turn on us in a second. Volatile people, you can’t trust them, that’s the thing; and they know it. So that even if they feel remorse, it does no good, and they know that too. So they get lonely. And they feel the remorse less and less, maybe. They give up. In any case, he left. One day Mother woke us, she was crying as she told us that he wouldn’t be coming back, that we would have to move again. We all sat on the stairs and cried.

  38

  Today we’re here to discuss potential alternatives to the global neoliberal order, which seems to be in such imminent danger of collapse. Are there any already existing alternatives we can look to?

  China. Obviously.

  But China seems very deeply implicated in the global economy.

  They have a command economy that overrules the free market to bolster Chinese interests.

  That’s so interesting! What could we call such a mysterious new amalgam?

  Socialism.

  Oh my. How very transgressive of you, not to say nostalgic. But I seem to recall that China is always careful to add the phrase “with Chinese characteristics” whenever they use the word socialism, and it seems to many that those Chinese characteristics make for a completely new thing.

  Yes but no.

  You don’t agree?

  No. It’s socialism with Chinese characteristics.

  These characteristics including a huge dollop of capitalism, it seems.

  Yes.

  So might we learn things from them?

  No.

  How come?

  Because we don’t like them.


  Isn’t that rather prejudiced of us?

  They don’t like us either.

  So, no hope of change from that quarter. What about the poor? The four billion poorest people alive have less wealth than the richest ten people on the planet, so they’re not very powerful, but no one can deny that there are a lot of them. Might they force change from below?

  There are guns in their faces.

  What about the so-called precariat, then? Those middle billions just scraping by, what Americans still call the middle class, speaking of nostalgia? Could they rise up and change things by way of some kind of mass action?

  Guns in their faces too.

  And yet we do sometimes see demonstrations, sometimes quite large ones.

  Demonstrations are parties. People party and then go home. Nothing changes.

  Well, but what about coordinated mass action? That sounds like more than partying to me. The so-called fiscal strike that we hear so much about, leading to a financial crash and the subsequent nationalization of the banks, for instance. National governments would then be back in control, coordinating a complete takeover of global finance. They could rewrite the WTO rules, and create some kind of quantitative easing, giving new fiat money to Green New Deal–type causes.

  We call that legislation.

  So again we come back to legislatures! These are usually thought to be features of representative democracies. To the extent that such democracies still exist, if they ever did, their legislatures would have to be voted in by voting majorities, by definition. Fifty-one percent at the least, or more if possible, in all the major countries where such systems obtain. They would all have to join the plan.

  Yes.

  So this seems quite practical! What keeps us from doing that?

  People are stupid. Also the rich will fight it.

  Again this presumption that the rich have more power than the poor!

  Yes.

  But might it also be the case that there would be some kind of systemic resistance to change also, in that all these laws that need to change are intertwined, and therefore can’t be easily disentangled?

  Yes.

  You could even say that money itself would resist this change. Indeed it seems to be the case that there’s simply a kind of inherent, inbuilt resistance to change!

  Constipation is a bitch. Sometimes you just have to sit on the box and push harder.

  Well put! I guess you could call that the story of our decade. Or the entire century for that matter.

  Why stop there?

  Such a trenchant image for history, I must say.

  Tremendous relief when all that shit is out of you.

  No doubt! Well, that about wraps it up for this week. Perhaps it’s time to pull down our pants and have a seat. I invite everyone listening to join us, next week this same time.

  It might take longer.

  39

  Davos is one of my favorite parties. The World Economic Forum, held every year at the end of January. It’s touted as an international gathering of power-brokers, those “stateless elites” who come to congratulate themselves and talk about how their plans for the future will make everything all right, especially for the elites themselves, who sometimes get called “Davos Man,” that newly emergent subspecies of Homo sapiens, eighty percent male and in the top ten percent of the top one percent when it comes to personal wealth among other attributes. All true! And thus of course a great party. Even though some people think the partying itself is kind of sedate, despite the great liquor. Once some years ago Mick Jagger was spotted dancing by himself to a juke box in the corner; he was bored. But most of the people in attendance are happy just to be there and get seen by all the others.

  Davos meets for a week, though few stay for the whole thing. About 2,500 businessmen and political leaders, with a few entertainers added for entertainment purposes; thus Jagger. The days of the conference are devoted to panel discussions and long meals, and all the problems of the day get discussed, mainly variations on the theme of riding herd on an increasingly fractious world by helping those most in need. Charity Inc.! With immense effort the percentage of women there has gone from six percent to twenty-four percent, we were told, and the organizers congratulated themselves on this progress and promised to keep working on the problem, which was difficult to solve, as most wealthy people and most political leaders are just by coincidence male. This may be one reason Jagger was bored.

  Security costs for the conference are shared by the organizers and the Swiss canton of Graubünden, plus the Swiss federal government. Some in Switzerland criticized the cost of this, but then again, if the annual meeting of the rulers of the world wants to be in Switzerland, this probably helps Switzerland hold on to its weird position as one of the wealthiest countries on Earth despite having nothing at all to base that on. Maybe the beauty of the Alps and the brains of its people, but I’m dubious about both. Call me Doubtful in Davos.

  There used to be protests at Davos, but not now. For one thing, the town is hard to get to and easy to defend. For another, the conference is more and more regarded as irrelevant, just a bunch of rich guys partying; which is true, as I said. So protests had mostly gone away. This perhaps represented an opportunity, or so people said afterward.

  At this particular meeting, we had just gathered and gotten down to the serious business of eating and drinking and talking, when the power went off and we were left in the dark. Generators! we shouted merrily. Turn on the fucking generators!

  But not. And the security people were suddenly seen to be not the same security people, these new ones were in masks guarding us in a different sense than we had been guarded before. We all said what the fuck and they ignored us, we all tried to get outside and see what was happening; no luck. Doors all locked. The whole town was physically closed. After a couple of hours, word spread that the Swiss road stoppers, installed the century before to foil Nazi or Soviet tank invasions, had popped up out of the pavement like giant shark’s teeth, all over the valley and up in the few road passes in and out of the valley. And the airport and heliports in the area were all dark and similarly studded with shark’s teeth. Even the Alpine mountain trails into the valley were said to be foamed with some kind of instant concrete that made the trails temporarily impassable. And the security on hand was there to guard us in this new way. They would not respond to us. We could hear the airspace over the town humming with circling drones, and people said they had clustered on a few approaching helicopters and forced them away, including a couple of crashes.

  This thing is finally getting interesting, someone said. But most of us thought it was getting too interesting.

  Announcements over loudspeakers were made to the effect that we would not be harmed, and would be released to the world at the end of the week. Only the schedule of events was being hijacked, we were told, not we ourselves, although obviously this was not true, as we were all quick to point out. But to no one, as all the guards on hand were helmeted with visors down, and not responding to us in any way, unless someone assaulted one, in which case the response was decisive and unpleasant, in the usual fashion seen on news clips. Clubs, pepper spray, dragged off to small rooms to chill; people stopped trying that. And the loudspeakers were not replying to our objections.

  Then the services starting breaking down. In particular the plumbing stopped working, and we had to improvise a system for relieving ourselves. Shit! Poor Davos! There was no recourse but to head out into the woods and do it. So a fair amount of shit was distributed around the town, but quickly we created a system of impromptu sort-of latrines, and made do as best we could.

  Then the taps stopped running, which to tell the truth was kind of scary. You can always shit in the woods, but you can’t live on whisky, much as some people try. Some were pleased to stay hydrated entirely on four-thousand-dollar bottles of wine, of which there were many on hand. But turned out there were also two Alpine streams crashing down through the town in stone-walled ch
annels, sometimes tunnels under streets but often just deep stone-walled channels, so we made use of some buckets someone found, and drank from these streams, either boiling the water or not. It looked clean to me. Snow just hours before.

  Food was provided in boxes, and we were allowed into the town’s various kitchens to cook for ourselves. We coped with that and were proud of ourselves for doing so. It beat just sitting around. Some of us were excellent cooks.

  On the third day we found the town square filled with pallets of chemical toilets, which we assembled and placed in the bathrooms, now re-opened for use, even though there was still no running water. That was a relief, so to speak, as we could go back to relieving ourselves in more or less the usual manner, although it was nasty. It was like being trapped at Woodstock but with no music.

  Water came back on the fourth day, and the boxes of food were never deficient. When we weren’t cooking or cleaning up for ourselves, we were asked to attend what we called the reeducation camp. We figured we must have been captured by Maoists, that only Maoists would have such a naïve faith in propaganda lectures. These bounced right off us, and in fact were a considerable source of mirth, as we were already educated and knew what was what. Still, it was either attend or get locked in rooms where nothing at all happened. So most of us were willing to listen to the propaganda of our captors rather than spend the day stuck in an empty room.

  The educational materials we were exposed to got universally bad reviews. So many clichés! First films of hungry people in poor places. It wasn’t quite like looking at concentration camp footage, but the resemblances were there, and these images were of living people, often children. It was like looking at the longest charity advertisement ever made. We booed and made critical comments, but really the 2,500 most successful people in the world did not get to that status by being stupidly offensive. Often some diplomatic skill had been required and acquired. Also we were pretty sure we were being filmed in order to be later packaged into some kind of reeducative reality TV. So most of us just sat and watched the show and muttered to each other like you do in movie theaters.