Prisoner's Dilemma

by Richard Powers

  Each might have forgiven Dad his illness had either held the other’s point of view. Eddie, hopelessly well adjusted, relied on himself as a model and assumed that everybody was equally capable of happiness. If miserable, they wanted to be. The wince was the wincer’s responsibility. Physical illness would have been okay by him. If Pop’s cells brought on his spells, then that would have been rotten luck, deserving sympathy.

  Artie, on the other hand, would have forgiven Dad so trivial a thing as neurosis. But as he ticked off possible culprits—hypoglycemia, blood clots, Korsakoff’s syndrome, organic dissolution—he grew increasingly resentful of anyone who would stoop to intractable disease. To Artie, blame had less to do with sufferer’s guilt than survivors’ inconvenience.

  Although producing a lengthy list, Artie’s heart wasn’t in the diagnosis. Instead, he found himself marveling at the physics of Eddie’s tossed football. He was appalled at how such a thing could go straight up and still come straight down to Eddie, despite the earth having spun out from underneath it in the interim. He knew it had something to do with inertia, that there was an m1 times m2 divided by r or r2 term in there somewhere. It seemed impossible and morally wrong, nevertheless.

  Artie recalled the Butterfly Effect, that model of random motion describing how a butterfly flapping its wings in Peking propagates an unpredictable chain reaction of air currents, ultimately altering tomorrow’s weather in Duluth. He played Name That Disease, I’ve Got a Symptom, but all the while more intent on imagining the storms Eddie’s harmlessly tossed ball would generate on the far side of the globe.

  In order to get the proper vantage on this rippling storm, Artie projected his view upward in the air, looking back down on the two overage and too-large boys. At first he could create nothing more dramatic than the famous crane shot at the train depot from Gone With the Wind, the one that prompted some die-hard reb at the Atlanta premiere to remark, “If we’d had that many soldiers we’d have won the war.” But gradually he managed a larger pullback, a grander dollying away, a logarithmic jumping out, until, in very few steps, he could no longer see the butterfly, Duluth, Peking, or even the space between.

  He collapsed telescopically back to planet surface when a voice, unmistakably his mother’s, broke in on their reserved frequency. “I’m not disturbing you, am I?”

  Ailene always unintentionally disturbed her children doubly by prefacing her disturbances with the genuine hope that she wasn’t about to be any bother. She doubled each interruption by interleaving every remark with the plea, “I don’t want to take up your time.” When the children were growing up, things had been very different. Mother had been far from deferential, seeming sometimes not to know the limits of maternal indignation. Her spit-moistened thumb, rubbed across churchgoing faces to lift off the dirt of too much playground, frequently lifted off tender skin and raised welts instead. But now the woman overacquiesced to her children, embarrassed at once having had to break them in.

  Like Lily, Mom kept a girl’s paint box in long-term storage at the bottom of the clothes closet. She was that peculiar late-century creature, the unwitting ironist. Born in one of those Oak Hill Park Forest Elm Grove places on Chicago’s North Shore, she had fled to the East Coast to escape the life of dental hygienist that every intelligent, midwestern, not-yet-married urban woman was forced into. Instead, she had collided with Pop outside Paramus. They married, and the man inexorably and against her will edged her back to within sixty miles of the nest she had tried to flee. While she had not yet ended up cleaning teeth eight hours a day, her present emergency employment left her perilously close. Her inability to escape her destiny infused her actions with a certain fatalism. She knew that if her husband’s death did not intervene, she would inevitably have to take up residency in some division or subdivision or supersubdivision in Maple Vale Creek Crest Ridge and even at her advanced age be made to don the little white uniform and clean teeth until she died. “I don’t want to . . . I know you two are . . .” Mom began.

  Eddie sprang to his feet and, with a mock growl of “Get to the point, you mom, you,” shook her by the shoulders. Recalling from some long-lost quarter the ancient phrase “knock the stuffing out of you,” he realized where he had gotten this very gesture, and was shocked to notice how much the woman who had formerly dished it out had shrunk into the woman who now took her own punishment with a polite grin.

  “Your father,” she began, her grin broadening, “has said that he’ll go to the hospital.”

  “He what?” Eddie yelped, then cut his mother off when she tried to answer. “How in the hell did you get him to do that?”

  “I just asked him,” she said, and waited to be told that she had done good. But Eddie, while approving the results, knew that the method used to get them was terribly wrong. Thinking for two, he looked down quickly at his brother. But Artie lay on the ground, waiting for this brief disturbance to disappear in order to get on with the diagnosis–football-chucking game. At last Artie flashed a curious look, one that didn’t get a lot of airplay in his increasingly lean face as of late. The look hung about the bushy area where his massive eyebrows ran into and merged with each other. Eddie recognized his brother’s look as the failed attempt to sidestep Hope: the old damned if Do, doomed if Don’t.

  1940–41

  He is without doubt one of the most universally recognized figures in the world. Millions who couldn’t pick Stalin or Einstein or Chiang Kai-shek or Picasso out of a police lineup know his face. His acclaim is unmatched in recent memory. He is loved more broadly by more strangers than almost anyone who has ever lived, reaching this pinnacle of adoration by remaining an honorable and nice guy, with no personality flaws to speak of. Strangest of all, he has enjoyed this astonishing recognition for his whole life, which in 1940 is just over twelve years old.

  Anyone who has not witnessed it cannot imagine his popularity. But everyone alive has witnessed it. His simple, trustworthy face and figure appear everywhere. Even those exceptional few who have never heard him speak, have never seen his characteristic walk or smile or wave, still own some pennant or article of clothing with his picture on it. His image crops up several times a day without attracting notice. Most countries on the planet carry accounts of his adventures and exploits in the daily newspapers.

  His appeal is nonpartisan and ecumenical, uniting the most disparate men. Eleanor Roosevelt says her husband rarely plans an evening off without requesting his appearance at the White House. The same was true of King George V and the Royal Palace. Hirohito, too, is a great admirer. African tribes refuse to purchase bars of soap without his imprint. He is the toast of intellectuals, the wonder of the working class, the favorite of children.

  He has traveled the globe, pursuing adventures in far-flung places from the South Seas to the Sahara. He has labored at countless professions: explorer, inventor, magician, detective, cowboy, convict, castaway, trucker, tailor, sailor, whaler. He masters every sport. He speaks a dozen languages effortlessly. He is already in Tussaud’s wax museum.

  He is, in short, a world phenomenon. And no one can quite say why. His stepfather attempts, unsuccessfully, to explain:

  Everybody’s tried to figure it out. So far as I know, nobody has. He’s a pretty nice fellow who never does anybody any harm, who gets into scraps through no fault of his own, but always manages to come up grinning.

  This hardly accounts for the gent’s hypnotic hold on the mind of the collective world. More plausible, if unpleasant, is the explanation of the last few years, of 1940. The air of an old planet even now fills with new names: Blitzkrieg, Radar, Dachau. His immense popularity must come from our learning, in a few years, how to ignore things that would have frozen previous generations with total horror. In a world already lost, he is simply the finest provider of escape from the confusing, opaque, overwhelming, paralyzing, deadly serious, irreversible, and appalling times. He alone, free from the killing machine of current events, is untouched by the mass-murderous political impass
e. That is why he’s welcome everywhere. That’s why we put his mug into the time capsule. As an enthusiast declares in an open fan letter, “Let there be one God, one Caesar, one Lincoln, one Napoleon, one Mickey Mouse.”

  The man behind the mouse is not half so well known. Disney supplies the world-renowned, high-pitched squeak, but his own speaking voice goes unnoticed at the other end of a phone. His picture appears in hundreds of magazines and newspapers and newsreels, but always in the company of his creation. Without Mickey by his side, countless unsuspecting admirers for whom he has made the present tenable pass him in the street.

  One photo of Walt, appearing in a popular magazine six years earlier, is remarkable for Mickey’s conspicuous absence. It shows Disney, not in some Never-Never Land but cocked behind a desk, dictating one of his famous Silly Symphonies into a black bullhorn. This is his method of creation. An idea strikes: it goes into the electronic dictation machine. The recording device, his alter existence, is the secret land where he creates the alternate worlds that give the public safe haven.

  But these other worlds, cartoon realities synchronized to music, already make unfortunate brushes with reality. The most popular and successful of the Silly Symphonies, The Three Little Pigs, with its hit song of 1933, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” coincides with Hitler’s appointment as German chancellor and the establishment of the Third Reich. Then there is Disney’s greatest gamble: For four years, he pits the prestige and economic resources of his studio in a make-or-break effort, a ninety-minute fairy tale. When Snow White at last appears in the year of the Anschluss, the war in Manchuria, and the Sudetenland crisis, it breaks all box-office records. But its story—a heroine poisoned by a wicked witch’s apple and resurrected by a prince with the aid of seven small allies—is construed as a thinly veiled political allegory in America’s raging isolationist debate.

  No matter what inspirations Disney spits into the black bullhorn, they emerge infected by outside events. This is nowhere truer than in his second great gamble, 1940’s Fantasia. The film, wedding images to classical music, is one of the screen’s towering achievements, among the most innovative since sound. As never before, Disney combines real figures with painted ones; they talk and respond to one another within the same frame. The dramatic high point of the film, Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain,” animates the final assault of the forces of Evil, only to give way to the apotheosis of Good in the guise of Schubert’s “Ave Maria.”

  But the public, in the guise of young Eddie Hobson, trained by the sparkling futures of World’s Fairs, never doubts the outcome of this Manichaean showdown. Eddie is far more excited about Mickey’s feature debut. Although Fantasia draws mixed reviews and falls far short of Snow White at the box office, Mickey’s role in the film increases his popularity, if such a thing is possible. For young Hobson, the film’s highlight comes when Mickey pulls on Stokowski’s tuxedo tails, so neatly does the meeting refute all distinction between event and invention.

  Later in the film, Mickey has his narrative moment as Dukas’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” Left alone by his master, who departs with prohibitions and grave warnings, Mickey cannot resist the temptation to don the Hat of Power and use it for the most harmless task in the world: to help carry water. He animates a broom, a neat, recursive trick, to do the toting for him. He falls asleep and dreams of great might. He wakes to find the broomstick flooding the study. Grabbing an ax, he splits the broom in two. But the splinters leap up, each mindlessly pursuing the task he set them on but cannot stop.

  If Little Eddie is too innocent to see the contemporary allegory, he still squirms in his seat at the classical dilemma. Each attempt to stop a porter starts two more. Mickey can’t give up and drown, but his intervention only aggravates the crisis. Fortunately for the mouse, master returns in the nick of time, rescuing the hero of millions and saving his movie career.

  Disney, in 1941, develops broomstick problems of his own. He runs his empire as a benevolent dictator, in both bullhorn sense and otherwise. He demands of his employees the loyalty oath invented by his colleague Sam Goldwyn: “I want you to tell me the truth, even if it costs you your job.” Protest over Disney’s tyranny and his insistence on naturalistic drawing results in a mass resignation from his studios, the biggest group walkout in Hollywood history. The manufacturing of enchantment becomes especially tricky under the threat of complete business collapse. The only thing that saves Disney from ruin is the miraculous invention animating the single vote.

  How much can one vote count? That depends on what’s being voted. If it’s the one vote that gets the Draft Act out of joint committee and back onto the Congress’s floor, then one tally means everything—the beginning of the end of isolationist settlements, after a battle unforgettable for anyone who has witnessed it. The Great Debate polarizes the nation. It comes up as frequently and violently as ball scores. The country in 1940 is still willing to confront the subtleties of idealism. The isolationists, among them many powerful single votes including senators and congressmen, Lindbergh, Robert McCormick, and the popular rabble-rousing radio priest, Father Coughlin, stand firm in the long tradition of American moral noninvolvement. But the one vote that keeps the Draft Act alive through a storm of controversy is on the other hand a small enough margin to convince the Japanese that a surprise attack might go unanswered. Pacifism and nonconfrontation actually help draw us into war.

  The power of the lone vote depends on the perils of the issue. This year, the perils are your basic all or nothing: does the beautiful heroine come back to life and triumph over the witch’s poison? Does “Ave Maria” have the last word over “Bald Mountain”? Do we drown faster by standing aside or by picking up the ax? Does the world-famous mouse succeed in preserving a place where mass deportation and extermination do not and cannot happen? The issue being voted is the only issue there is. How much does one vote count?

  If it’s Chamberlain’s vote, returning after the debacle of Munich, waving the signed paper around as proof: not much. But if the vote is Von Braun’s—a future colleague of Disney in a collaborative film enterprise called Man in Space, whose Hollywood biopic will be called I Aim for the Stars but who is currently working on reel one, “First, I Hit London”—one vote erases many. How much does one vote count? To the young Eddie Hobson, that depends on how the other guy votes. And those results are still out.

  When Secretary of War Henry Stimson at last dips his hand into the same bin used to pull draft numbers for the war to end all War, and when the World’s Fair’s “World of Tomorrow” is dismantled to convert the area into a recruiting camp, the era of one vote comes to an end. The scale of things shoots off the top of the graph. The power of the local voice to tip the curve now seems minuscule, insignificant. Unless, of course, the local voice is larger than life.

  Although Admiral Yamamoto himself votes against the move, he plans and executes Japan’s successful attack on Pearl Harbor. We are once more unanimously at war. A majority of the American electorate doesn’t realize that it’s not going to be Teddy Roosevelt or even the romance of Pershing this time. But both legislatures vote unanimously for the declaration with one holdout, Montana’s Jeanette Rankin, the first congresswoman ever, who in a previous act of conscience also voted against our going into the First One. The opposing vote costs her her job. The vote is a remarkable enough “beacon,” as the high school texts call such things, that when the great film finally gets under way, someone suggests devoting ten words of voice-over to this woman’s action.

  Rankin says that she just wanted to show that a good democracy doesn’t always vote unanimously to go to war. But her one vote aside, the tally is unanimous: 82–0 in the Senate and 288–1 in the House for throwing our combined weight into the fray. Roosevelt allocates some number with a lot of zeros after it—50 billion, if memory serves—for guns, and since everybody has been without butter for some time, he gets much the sum he’s after.

  What happened out at Hawaii was bad. But
the common Joe reading the daily papers doesn’t know nearly how bad: pretty much the whole Pacific fleet, counting the other bases bombed that same day. The simple explanation for this ignorance is that the average Joe’s newspapers don’t carry the full story, don’t mention specific losses. The phrase making the rounds is “voluntary censorship.” To coordinate the voluntary, the government establishes an Office of Censorship twelve days after the Hawaii attack, to provide a second line of defense should the newshounds fail to cooperate or should one reporter, fearing that another might break ranks and scoop him, leak a story preemptively. Information becomes the nation’s most valuable and protected commodity, and we can no longer afford to entrust it to individual hands.

  How much does one vote count? It depends on who’s voting. One vote can be a doozy if it’s one Caesar, one Lincoln, one Napoleon, or one God. No sooner has the Great Debate over isolationism and neutrality faded forever and given way to the consolidated war effort than Disney gets a call from Henry L. Stimson, the secretary in charge of coordinating that effort. Stimson recruits the Disney studios into a crucial and unique role in the national mobilization. The request saves Disney from his labor strike and unites his new outfit in a common cause.

  The man who has combined live action and fanciful imagination, who taught the two to co-exist peacefully in the same frame, is, in short, drafted. Stimson lets Disney know that he must now turn out, by the mile, morale raisers, training films, and propaganda. These cartoons, infused with a deadly new seriousness, will be instrumental in winning the most important theater of the campaign: the battle already called the Home Front.

  And why not? The penchant for wishful thinking does not wither in front of a firing squad. Spring fashions do not stop permutating just because of sneak attacks. Perhaps they should. But even on the staging grounds for the final battlefield, the mind needs another place. The troops themselves, most just eighteen, are the first to admit that they need a decent Silly Symphony to see them through.