The Reign of Brainwash: Dystopia Box Set. Эдгар Аллан По

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      And when I get ready to retire I'm going to build me an up-to-date bungalow in some lovely resort, not in Como or any other of the proverbial Grecian isles you may be sure, but in somewheres like Florida, California, Santa Fe, & etc., and devote myself just to reading the classics, like Longfellow, James Whitcomb Riley, Lord Macaulay, Henry Van Dyke, Elbert Hubbard, Plato, Hiawatha, & etc. Some of my friends laugh at me for it, but I have always cultivated a taste for the finest in literature. I got it from my Mother as I did everything that some people have been so good as to admire in me.

       Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.

      Certain though Doremus had been of Windrip's election, the event was like the long-dreaded passing of a friend.

      "All right. Hell with this country, if it's like that. All these years I've worked—and I never did want to be on all these committees and boards and charity drives!—and don't they look silly now! What I always wanted to do was to sneak off to an ivory tower—or anyway, celluloid, imitation ivory—and read everything I've been too busy to read."

      Thus Doremus, in late November.

      And he did actually attempt it, and for a few days reveled in it, avoiding everyone save his family and Lorinda, Buck Titus, and Father Perefixe. Mostly, though, he found that he did not relish the "classics" he had so far missed, but those familiar to his youth: Ivanhoe, Huckleberry Finn, Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, L'Allegro, The Way of All Flesh (not quite so youthful, there), Moby Dick, The Earthly Paradise, St. Agnes' Eve, The Idylls of the King, most of Swinburne, Pride and Prejudice, Religio Medici, Vanity Fair.

      Probably he was not so very different from President-Elect Windrip in his rather uncritical reverence toward any book he had heard of before he was thirty. . . . No American whose fathers have lived in the country for over two generations is so utterly different from any other American.

      In one thing, Doremus's literary escapism failed him thoroughly. He tried to relearn Latin, but he could not now, uncajoled by a master, believe that "Mensa, mensae, mensae, mensam, mensa"—all that idiotic A table, of a table, to a table, toward a table, at in by or on a table—could bear him again as once it had to the honey-sweet tranquillity of Vergil and the Sabine Farm.

      Then he saw that in everything his quest failed him.

      The reading was good enough, toothsome, satisfying, except that he felt guilty at having sneaked away to an Ivory Tower at all. Too many years he had made a habit of social duty. He wanted to be "in" things, and he was daily more irritable as Windrip began, even before his inauguration, to dictate to the country.

      Buzz's party, with the desertions to the Jeffersonians, had less than a majority in Congress. "Inside dope" came to Doremus from Washington that Windrip was trying to buy, to flatter, to blackmail opposing Congressmen. A President-Elect has unhallowed power, if he so wishes, and Windrip—no doubt with promises of abnormal favors in the way of patronage—won over a few. Five Jeffersonian Congressmen had their elections challenged. One sensationally disappeared, and smoking after his galloping heels there was a devilish fume of embezzlements. And with each such triumph of Windrip, all the well-meaning, cloistered Doremuses of the country were the more anxious.

      All through the "Depression," ever since 1929, Doremus had felt the insecurity, the confusion, the sense of futility in trying to do anything more permanent than shaving or eating breakfast, that was general to the country. He could no longer plan, for himself or for his dependants, as the citizens of this once unsettled country had planned since 1620.

      Why, their whole lives had been predicated on the privilege of planning. Depressions had been only cyclic storms, certain to end in sunshine; Capitalism and parliamentary government were eternal, and eternally being improved by the honest votes of Good Citizens.

      Doremus's grandfather, Calvin, Civil War veteran and ill-paid, illiberal Congregational minister, had yet planned, "My son, Loren, shall have a theological education, and I think we shall be able to build a fine new house in fifteen or twenty years." That had given him a reason for working, and a goal.

      His father, Loren, had vowed, "Even if I have to economize on books a little, and perhaps give up this extravagance of eating meat four times a week—very bad for the digestion, anyway—my son, Doremus, shall have a college education, and when, as he desires, he becomes a publicist, I think perhaps I shall be able to help him for a year or two. And then I hope—oh, in a mere five or six years more—to buy that complete Dickens with all the illustrations—oh, an extravagance, but a thing to leave to my grandchildren to treasure forever!"

      But Doremus Jessup could not plan, "I'll have Sissy go to Smith before she studies architecture," or "If Julian Falck and Sissy get married and stick here in the Fort, I'll give 'em the southwest lot and some day, maybe fifteen years from now, the whole place will be filled with nice kids again!" No. Fifteen years from now, he sighed, Sissy might be hustling hash for the sort of workers who called the waiter's art "hustling hash"; and Julian might be in a concentration camp—Fascist or Communist!

      The Horatio Alger tradition, from rags to Rockefellers, was clean gone out of the America it had dominated.

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