Interface: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

“In the 1700s, politics was all about ideas. But Jefferson came up with all the good ideas. In the 1800s, it was all about character. But no one will ever have as much character as Lincoln and Lee. For much of the 1900s it was about charisma. But we no longer trust charisma because Hitler used it to kill Jews and JFK used it to get laid and send us to Vietnam.”

Everybody knew that Earl Strong’s real name was Erwin Dudley Strang, but no one seemed to care, and that was just one of the many things about the man that pissed Eleanor Richmond off. Not that there was anything wrong with changing your name. But political candidates had been crucified in the press for doing far less significant things. Earl Strong/Erwin Dudley Strang seemed to get away with murder. He could have picked something a little less obvious than Strong. To change your name, and then use the name’s double meaning as part of a campaign slogan . . . it was a little much. As if he were nothing more than a new TV series. But even though people knew exactly what Erwin Dudley Strang was doing, they lapped it up like thirsty dogs.

The name of the show was Coming on Strong. Earl Strong kept coming on, week after week, year after year. It seemed that every time she happened to flip past his little program, he looked a little different: he did something about those crooked teeth. Got his chin lengthened. Fixed the nose. Bought a narrower and more conservative set of neckties. Played endlessly with his hairstyle until he found one—close-cropped but carefully sculpted—that worked. Bought himself a chair that did not creak. Moved to a better studio, got a two-camera setup, then a three-camera setup. Got commercial sponsorship from Ty (Buckaroo) Steele, a prominent local purveyor of cut-rate used cars, and made the jump from public-access cable to one of the local commercial stations. And at each step of the process, Eleanor laughed and shook her head, remembering him curled up on the floor in her living room, sucking in short little breaths, and she wondered how long it would take for this man to be found out for the shabby little fraud he really was. Each time he attained a little more success, Eleanor was shocked for a moment, even a little frightened. Then she calmed herself down by reminding herself that the higher he got, the harder he would fall in the end. Surely someone would take it upon themselves to expose this man. But no one ever did. And then, all of a sudden, Earl Strong was running for the United States Senate, he was ahead in the polls, and everyone loved him.

It wasn’t fair. That’s what Dad would say. It wasn’t fair to have other people take all the risk, then reap the benefits after it had become a sure thing.

Still gripping her hand, Senator Marshall shook his head dismissively. “All that Democrat/Republican stuff is bullshit,” he said. “And as far as liberal versus conservative, well, people are very promiscuous in the way they use those words. They don’t really mean anything. Within those two camps there are very wide divisions. And between those two camps, there is a lot more overlap than you think. None of that bullshit really matters. The only thing that matters is values.”

“This that I am saying to you is not abuse. It’s the truth. It’s just that sometimes the truth is so harsh that when people hear it spoken, it sounds like abuse. And one of the problems we got in this country, not just among black people but with everyone, is that everyone is so easy to offend nowadays that no one is willing to say the things that are true. Now, I just told you what to do. You go and do it. And if you have to go out and get a gun to protect you from that son of a bitch that raped your daughters, you damn well better do it, because that’s your responsibility, and if you can’t handle it, then you don’t deserve to have those two little angels that are a precious gift from God.”

“Americans may be undereducated, lazy, and disorganized, but they do one thing better than any people on the face of the earth, and that is watch television. The average eight-year-old American has absorbed more about media technology than a goddamn film student in most other countries. You can tell lies to them and they’ll never know. But if you try to lie to them with the camera, they’ll crucify you.

“I’m not sure how we use all of this stuff to communicate,” Zeldo said. “It’s all impressionistic stuff. Nothing rational.” “Well,” Cozzano said, “it’s a new communications medium. What is necessary is to develop a grammar and syntax.” Zeldo laughed and shook his head. “You lost me.” “It’s like film,” Cozzano said. “When film was invented, no one knew how to use it. But gradually, a visual grammar was developed. Filmgoers began to understand how the grammar was used to communicate certain things. We have to do the same thing with this.” “I should get you together with Ogle,” Zeldo said. “You should have studied more liberal arts,” Cozzano said.

If, though unjust, I acquire the reputation of justice, a heavenly life is promised to me. Since then, as philosophers prove, appearance tyrannizes over truth and is lord of happiness, to appearance I must devote myself. I will describe around me a picture and shadow of virtue to be the vestibule and exterior of my house; behind I will trail the subtle and crafty fox . . . But I hear someone exclaiming that the concealment of wickedness is often difficult; to which I answer, nothing great is easy. . . . With a view to concealment we will establish secret brotherhoods and political clubs. And there are professors of rhetoric who teach the art of persuading courts and assemblies; and so, partly by persuasion and partly by force, I shall make unlawful gains and not be punished. Plato, Republic

Americans participated in bar fights for exactly the same reason they had joined, with such gusto, in the Civil War: because they had values and considered violence and mayhem a small price to pay.

They were willing to have their legs shot off in Pennsylvania because principle, to them, was more important than flesh. This was what made America such an ethereal society.

“I’m stuck in a party that was once for the individual, and now it’s dedicated to controlling the individual. The Bible thumpers and the single-issue people and all of those other control freaks have no idea of what the United States is all about. And they are going to win. But I will make my contribution. And here it is.”

The one thing I noticed in forty-eight years of public service, forty-four up here, is that the rarest thing in life is a person who speaks the truth. The most dangerous thing in life is a person who constantly refers to ‘values.’ If I was going to write down my testament, that is it. None of us has the right to tell anyone else how to live. None of us has the right to hold back anybody else for any reason—race, religion, income, or what have you. The rest of life is an open field, a crap shoot. The role of government is to make it an equal crap shoot for everybody. Not real profound, but real effective.”

He had pale blue eyes that were turned down at the corners, giving him a sad and bedraggled appearance, and his skin was flushed and glossy under the blaze of an electronic flash. This was not a posed shot. It had been taken from a low angle as Floyd Wayne Vishniak rode down an escalator at a shopping mall somewhere. He was staring down into the camera with a blank and baffled expression that had not yet developed into surprise.