The Convention had rendered the old capitol building perpetually chaotic, day in and day out, with a constant ebb and flow of people and news media wandering through the Rotunda, in and out of the Convention Hall and the committee and meeting rooms. There were dozens of individual committees of the Convention gathered in various offices, conference rooms, and cubbyholes all around the building, discussing and drawing up reports on everything from the adoption of the metric system (maybe) to soybean production to legally defining homosexuality as a mental illness. The marble-floored Rotunda was littered with cots where delegates and NDF soldiers were sleeping at night, as well as all kinds of detritus from empty Styrofoam coffee cups and pizza boxes to rifles and ammunition leaning in the corners.
Above all, in every corner there were overflowing receptacles ranging from metal wastebaskets to a Waterford crystal punchbowl from the old governor’s banquet service that had been commandeered as public ashtrays. One of the first acts of the Convention had been to repeal all anti-smoking laws in the Northwest that under the United States had demonized tobacco users and turned them into a viciously persecuted minority. “Smoking is a filthy and unhealthy habit, no doubt about that,” Barrow had proclaimed from the rostrum. “You gotta be a real idiot to do it, no argument, comrades. But under ZOG it has also become a statement of political resistance against the liberal régime. Who knows how many men and women would never have joined the NVA if the old order had not added insult to injury, flexing their petty power over the lives of others by perpetually driving them out into the cold and the rain simply to light up? For how many of us did that not become the final straw in our own minds? Fuck second-hand smoke!” This brief speech had received the longest standing ovation yet from the assembled delegates, and the Convention was proceeding in a haze of tobacco fumes. The traditional smoke-filled back rooms of political deal-making in the new Republic were truly smoke-filled.
There were 14 chairs arranged around the long polished mahogany table in the conference room. In the former governor’s chair sat Council of State chairman Henry Morehouse, a spare and mild-looking middle-aged man whom one media personality who interviewed him once described as “an evil Mr. Rogers.” The meeting was about to begin without him when Barrow came in, a tall man in his forties with ash-blond hair and a weathered face. “Hey, Frank, glad you could make it,” called Morehouse. “How’s it going out there?”
“It’s a three-ringed circus, and I feel like a lion tamer whose cats have escaped and are running around in the audience,” said Barrow, taking his seat. “Look, Red, I can’t ride herd on that dog and pony show out there and handle State Security at the same time. You need to relieve me of one or the other, or at least give me some help. I went into it with nothing but a small copy of Roberts’ Rules of Order I found in the old lieutenant governor’s desk drawer.”
“I gave you State Security because of your police and NVA background, and the chairmanship of the Convention because of your brilliant handling of the Longview conference,” said Morehouse.
“Brilliant, my ass! All I did was just shove a single sheet of paper under their noses every day for ten weeks and demand they sign it,” said Barrow with a scowl.
“Which they eventually signed,” pointed out Morehouse.
“Beyond that, my so-called brilliant handling consisted of saying no all the time to everything those assholes threw at us to try and divert us from a sovereign nation. No offense, Walter.”
“None taken,” said Stanhope. “They were assholes. You should have seen and heard them behind closed doors. They finished any doubts I ever had about coming over in public. I swear to God, if I had to listen to Howard Weintraub try to talk us into arresting or killing the NVA delegation by surprise one more time, or hear that ghastly Galinsky woman weep about how we were betraying the Six Million of the Holocaust by even speaking to you, I would have flipped out and started clubbing them with a chair.”
“Red, no kidding, can I at least get somebody to alternate with me on this Speaker of the Convention gig?” pleaded Barrow. “There’s Security stuff I have to get onto. I’ve got a secret police to create. Weintraub is hollering all over the media back in the States that we’re a fascist tyranny. How can we be a fascist tyranny with no secret police, while I sit here fooling around with all this democracy and Constitution crap? What kind of wicked evil right-wing fascist racist Nazi tyrants are we?” There were general chuckles all around the table.
“I would be honored to take the rostrum for tomorrow’s session, Frank, and any other time you need me to spell you,” offered Stanhope. “The Russians are still being coy about recognizing the Republic officially, although they want to go in with us on some kind of worldwide paper and pulp monopoly. Other than them, nobody else is even speaking to us. I’m very much at a loose end.”
“Hallelujah! Praise his name!” shouted Barrow.
“Let me guess, You just came from the Holy Rollers’ caucus,” said Bart DeMarco, the Minister of Transport.
“What’s the latest from the floor?” asked Morehouse.
“We’ve adjourned for the day, although there will be committee meetings and bullshit sessions and little intriguing conspiracies going on in little corners until the wee hours, like there are every night,” he told them.
“What’s the scoreboard looking like, Frank?” asked General John Corbett Morgan, a large black-bearded Kentucky mountain man who had commanded a Flying Column in the Olympic Peninsula during the revolt, before leading the First Army’s assault over the I-205 bridge into Portland. He was now Minister of Defense. “Have the tub-thumpers from Fifth Monarchy and the Sanctified Church of Hootin’ Holler got us all wearing Pilgrim hats yet?”
“Actually, so far the extreme Christians aren’t the problem, at least not as much as we were afraid they’d be,” replied Barrow. “It’s the shithouse libertarians, the bearded dudes from the little cabins in the backwoods who don’t want any laws or government at all. Which would be great, if it were possible. Hell, I think in a lot of ways it would be just the ticket to say never mind the 1950s, let’s go all the way back to the 1850s. Trouble is, that isn’t really on the table so long as we’ve still got ZOG sitting over there in D.C. and Jew York sharpening their daggers for us. You can’t fight off a nuclear threat with hand-loads from a log cabin out in the Sawtooth Range.”
“They’ll be happy once they understand the Federal Reserve and the Trilateral Commission are no longer in the saddle,” said DeMarco. “Until we ask them to pay taxes, of course.”
“Otherwise, despite a lot of squabbling over details and the hundred and one personal hobby horses everybody’s riding, which mostly involve banning something somebody else wants to do, the delegates are following the 2006 draft pretty closely so far,” Barrow went on approvingly. “I was amazed that they were able to wrap their minds so easily around the concept of an institutionalized parliamentary Opposition, the whole point of which is to pick holes in everything the government does. Our version of the two-party system. One speaker out there called the Opposition the people’s defense attorneys, and although we won’t have actual attorneys in the Republic, I think that pretty much nails it.”
“Any major surprises so far?” asked Morehouse.
“Nothing we hadn’t always anticipated,” Barrow told them. “Some guy from Idaho put in a motion that we change the name of the legislature from the National Convention, like it is in the draft, to Parliament, and that seems to have some support among the various cliques. More dignified and all. Parliament is fine with me, if that’s what they want, but personally I think it’s just some mule-headed paleocons and ego monkeys who want to change anything the Old Man wrote just on general principles.”
“The Old Man didn’t write the draft Constitution,” protested Fiona Bonnar from Public Health. “Not all of it, anyway. It was a group effort, including a lot of input from the imprisoned Order men and David Lane himself! That’s bordering on blasphemy!”
“Just what w
e need! Another religious problem!” chortled Gary Bresler from Commerce and Industry.
“I don’t believe the Old Man or the Order guys or anyone involved in the 2006 draft intended it as holy scripture, comrade,” Morehouse admonished her gently. “They always made it clear, it was only a draft. It contains suggestions based on lifetimes of observation of how the old system went wrong. But the final version was always something to be determined by that very mob out there now, whom so many have suffered and died to bring together into that room, so they could decide what they wanted to keep and how they want to live.”
Barrow nodded. “There are a few who still want to go back to the old conservative ways sans niggers, complete with Fourth of July picnics and the Brady Bunch, but they won’t carry the day,” he told the Cabinet. “Time moves forward and not backward. We can’t turn back the clock to 1950, or 1861, or 1776, and the majority of them understand that.”
“So how go the religious wars?” asked Morehouse wearily. “I remember that little speech you gave us before you guys headed out for Longview, Frank, to the effect of yes, I know, but not now. [See A Mighty Fortress.] Trouble is, this is it. The time has come. We’re not going to be able to put it off any more.”
“I notice the government has found something for Bob Gair and Reverend McCausland to do elsewhere,” remarked Morgan. “I thought they were going to pull down on each other on that last day at Longview, over what music to play when the Tricolor flag went up.”
“Don’t I remember?” said Barrow with a wan smile. “Good thing Cathy Frost stepped in and gave us our National Anthem, then. No major uproar yet, largely because nobody has asked for anything that anybody else absolutely refuses to concede. Some Asatru and Wiccan types want the right to designate certain groves and places on ley lines as sacred or spiritual sites, and that went over without too much hurly-burly, although most people don’t know what ley lines are and no specific locations have been mentioned. When we’ll have trouble is when the Odinists want to designate a sacred grove on the same street as the local Pentecostal church. You already know that we got the Christians to quit yelping about the swastika on the NDF eagle by giving them A Mighty Fortress as the national anthem. That’s fine by everybody, because it’s a hell of a song. I think if we’d played Great Big Gobs of Greasy, Grimy Gopher Guts at that moment, those of us who were there would make it our national anthem.
“Right now the various religious types are hollering about teaching evolution and paleontology in the schools,” he continued. “If they really keep on pushing it, we may end up with a school system segregated on religious lines, which as far as I’m concerned is a non-starter, but we’ll see what kind of report the Education Committee comes up with. I personally think we could make do by giving parents a choice of tracks within the system. Fundamentalist parents who don’t want their kids learning evolution or other scientific stuff that contradicts the Bible go to Biology A and study butterflies and dissect frogs, which I think is scripturally safe, and those who want their kids to learn actual science go to Biology B and get the whole nine yards.”
“We can live with that,” said Morehouse. “The problem is they don’t just want their kids not being taught Darwin. The hidden agenda is that they want to make sure nobody else’s kids get taught Darwin, either. They want some kind of endorsement from the state saying that their religion is really the right one, and we’re just kindly tolerating all those eccentrics who believe otherwise, and that they can’t have. That has always been the problem with Christians. They’re mostly good people as individuals, but they cannot and must not ever be trusted with state power in this country, because they always end up trying to impose their own religious beliefs and practices on others.”
Barrow went on, “They also want Christmas but no Halloween in the schools, and they want religion classes, which in theory I don’t object to, but the trouble will come when pagans, Wiccans, agnostics, and just plain anti-Christian fanatics demand equal time.”
“Have classes in all Aryan religions and religious history and let the parents choose which ones they want their children to go to,” suggested Bresler. “Simple and fair.”
“The trouble is, simple and fair has never had much to do with religion, and we have two thousand years of history to prove it,” said Morehouse wearily. “I suppose the antis are screaming at the top of their lungs against the teaching of Christianity of any kind?”
“Like banshees,” confirmed Barrow.
“Jesus is a dead Jew on a stick, and all that crap?”
“But of course.” Barrow shrugged. “We’ve always had that problem. A minority of the people in the Movement have been in it, not to free our people or to implement the 14 Words, but because of a sheer hatred of Christianity that approaches the level of insanity. I think it’s because when they were little, their parents wouldn’t let them watch TV or play video games on Sunday mornings, but made them dress up in scratchy clothes and hard shoes, and go to church where they were bored out of their minds, and scolded by old ladies for farting in Bible class. Hell, I don’t know what goes on in the minds of some of these people who never seem to get that race is what is important. I mean, Jesus Christ on a raft! Pardon the term, but it’s not as if we all won’t find out for ourselves one day what’s on the other side of life.”
“How bad is it likely to get?” asked Joe Jennings, Minister of Science and Technology. “We’re going to need scientists in the Republic who studied something besides the book of Genesis.”
“I’ll make sure it doesn’t completely sidetrack the whole Convention, if I have to call in some of the boys and go upside some people’s heads in a back room,” said Barrow. “But this is an ulcer in our body politic, and it’s going to be with us for a long time. We’re going to have to find a modus vivendi to deal with it. Speaking of religion, Red, I had a brief talk this morning with a priest named Father McEwan or McIan or something. He’s a Tridentine Catholic. You know, the old pre-Vatican II Catholics who still hold the mass in Latin? He made an interesting suggestion. Suppose we recognize the Tridentines as the official Northwest branch of Catholicism, and hand over the churches and cathedrals to them? He figures that will put us on the good side of millions of the more traditional Catholics, almost all of whom are white, and also give us an excuse to boot out these damned left-wing priests and nuns who have been causing so much trouble over the past century everywhere they go, liberation theology and all that crap. Plus, it looks like the next pope in Rome is going to be a nigger, some archbishop from Nigeria. If we can set up a traditional white Pope here in the Northwest, that will be a big draw for contacts and resources.”
“An intriguing possibility,” admitted Morehouse. “Does this Father McWhosis understand that the old religious exemptions are out the window, and they will have to pay any property taxes we decide on non-homestead property for their churches? Also, does he understand that under the Northwest Constitution professional clergy of any kind will be prohibited, and they’re all going to have to get day jobs?”
“He does, and he had a suggestion on that,” Barrow replied. “These Tridentine priests are some of the most educated white men left in the world, as far as the old classical learning goes. Why not let them teach history and Latin and whatnot in the schools?”
“Bloody hell, then not to mention the anti-Christians turning flips, you’ll be having all the Prods frothing at the mouth about letting in the Whore of Babylon,” spoke up Patrick Brennan, the Minister of Race and Resettlement. “I was hoping to leave all that shite behind in Belfast.”
“We will,” promised Morehouse. “Maybe we can let these Tridentine priests pick up a paycheck by teaching at university level and not in the public schools. Frank, when you see this priest again, ask him to submit some kind of official memorandum or position paper in writing from whatever his organization is. It’s got political and cultural potential, if we can find some way to work it without getting all the Holy Rollers bellyaching. Plus, we owe that
poor bastard Mel Gibson a favor, I think. This will come under Culture and Education, but Stepanov is still up in Seattle and Macready is out east shooting up Spokane, last I heard. We’ll lay it on them when they get back. Please continue, Frank.”
Barrow gulped down coffee from a paper Starbucks cup someone had handed him. “The main debates now are centering on just how much authority the central government is going to have, and how that authority will be organized. There are still those who are concerned that us big bad Nazis are going to set up some kind of tyranny where the Bureau of State Security tells everybody what color socks they can put on in the morning.”
“That’s not even close to what Hitler did in Germany!” protested James Salvatore, the new Minister of the Interior.
“You know that and I know that, Jim, but an amazing number of people even from the NVA itself have no idea what the real story on Hitler and National Socialism is,” said Barrow. “You can’t erase generations of lies and disinformation from people’s minds overnight. But it’s actually got more serious overtones than that. A lot of people don’t like the idea of a national police force. They want to elect a sheriff who then appoints his own deputies like during the frontier days.”
“Which opens the door for all kinds of local cliques and corruption, just like in the frontier days,” said Arthur Flowers, the Minister of Justice. “We can’t have a situation arise where local law enforcement are basically just the head-knockers for the community’s wealthy élite. The police have to serve all of the people, and not just the local city council or county commissioners or the local real estate developer or whoever’s signing their paycheck. They also have to serve the interests of the state and society as a whole, not just purely parochial concerns in their own little town or bailiwick.”
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