This is the twenty-third installment of an exploration of
some of the possible futures discussed on this blog, using the toolkit of
narrative fiction. On his last full day in the Lakeland Republic, our narrator
pays a visit to industrial magnate Janice Mikkelson and gets a different
perspective on the Republic and the lessons of its history...
***********
The next morning I was up early, and walked to Kaufer’s News
while the sky was still that vague gray color that won’t tell you yet whether
it’s clear or overcast. The Blade had done the smart thing and printed
extra copies of the morning paper—the stack in the bin was almost as tall as I
was—and I watched three other people buy copies as I walked up the street to the
newsstand. The Lakeland Republic flag snapped in a brisk wind from the flagpole
out in front of the Capitol, and lights already burned in the windows. The
Republic’s government had a long day ahead of it, and so did I.
Back in the hotel, I settled down in a chair and spent a few
minutes checking the news. Most of the front section was about the war down
south, of course; both sides’ naval forces were still duking it out with
long-range missiles, and the Confederate advance toward Dallas-Fort Worth had begun
to slow as Texan forces reached the war zone and flung themselves into the
struggle. The presidents of Missouri and New England and the prime ministers of East and West Canada and
Quebec had joined Meeker in calling for an immediate ceasefire and a negotiated
settlement of the dispute over the Gulf oil fields; back home, outgoing
President Barfield and president-elect Montrose would be holding a joint press
conference later that day to announce something of the same sort. That last
story made my eyebrows go up. The Dem-Reps had been sore losers in a big way
since their landslide defeat a few weeks back; if Barfield had loosened up enough
to appear on a stage with his replacement, things might have shifted, and not
in a bad way.
There was more—another attempt at a ceasefire in the Californian
civil war, another report by an international panel on the worsening phosphate
shortage, another recap of the satellite situation that ran through a roster of
collisions, and estimated that the world had less than three months left before
all satellite services in the midrange orbits were out of commission for the
next dozen centuries or so—but I folded the paper after a glance at each of
those and tossed it on the desk. I had a little over a day left to spend in the
Lakeland Republic before catching the train back home, and part of that would
be spent with Janice Mikkelson. In the meantime, I had decisions to make that
would affect the lives of a lot of people I’d never meet.
You learn to get used to that if you’re in politics, but if
you get too used to it you land in trouble really fast. Half the reason the
Dem-Reps had been clobbered in our elections a few weeks back is that they’d
gotten into the habit of thinking that the only people who mattered politically
were the people who had the money and connections to show up at fundraisers and
get their interests represented by lobbyists—and much more than half the reason
why Montrose’s New Alliance swept the legislative races and put her into the
presidency with the strongest mandate in a generation was that she’d had the
sense to look past the lobbyists and fundraising dinners, and reach out to
everyone whose interests had been ignored for the last thirty years. I’d played
a certain part in that strategy, and the choices ahead of me might also play a
certain part in determining whether Montrose’s victory would turn out to be a
long-term gamechanger or a flash in the pan.
So I sat there in my room for what seemed like a very long
time, listening to the faint clop-clop of horsedrawn taxis and the clatter-and-hum
of electric streetcars on the street outside, sometimes paging through my
notes, and sometimes staring at nothing in particular while following a train
of thought right out to its end. Finally I happened to glance at the clock, and
saw that I had just about enough time to grab something to eat for lunch before
I caught a taxi for Ottawa Hills, where Mikkelson lived.
So I made sure I was presentable, headed downstairs to the
hotel restaurant, and got soup, sandwich, and a cup of chicory coffee. Sam
Capoferro was playing his usual lunch gig on the piano, and he gave me a nod
and a grin when I came in and another one when I went out. Half an hour after
leaving my room I was tucked into the cab of a two-wheel taxi, heading
northwest from the Capitol district through
one mostly residential neighborhood after another. I’d gotten used to
Lakeland habits by then, and so it didn’t surprise me that the houses looked
sturdy and old-fashioned, with flower beds out front that would be blazing with
colors come spring; that trees were everywhere; that there were little retail
districts at intervals, close enough that people could walk to do most of their
everyday shopping; that the schools didn’t look like prisons, the libraries
didn’t look like prisons—in fact, I passed something I’m pretty sure was the
county jail and even that didn’t look like a prison.
The houses got bigger as we went up out of the Maumee River
valley into the hills beyond. None of the trees looked more than thirty years
old—I recalled from some half-forgotten history vid that there was a major
battle west of Toledo during the Second Civil War—and all the houses looked
better than a century older than that, even though I knew they were all recent
construction. Finally the taxi turned off a winding road onto a circular
driveway, and brought me up to the door of a genuine mansion.
The place was the sort of big half-timbered pile that makes
you think of ivy-covered English aristocrats and nineteenth-century New York
robber baron industrialists. I gave it a slightly glazed look, then paid the
cabby and went to the door, and I kid you not, it opened right as I got there.
The doorman asked my name and business in the sort of utterly polite tone that
sounds ever so slightly snotty, which amused me, and then handed me over to
some other category of flunkey in formal wear, who took me up one of the
grandest grand staircases I’ve ever seen, down a corridor lined with the kind
of old-fashioned oil paintings that actually looked like something, and into a
big windowed room with a grand piano near one wall, an assortment of tastefully
overpriced furniture, and Janice Mikkelson.
We shook hands, she asked about my preferred drink, and then
sent the flunkey off to get a couple of martinis while we walked over to the
windows. Down below was a formal garden, with a crew of gardeners doing
whatever it is that gardeners do in late November; further off were the roofs
of other houses not quite as fancy as the one I was in; further still was the
Toledo city skyline, with the half-finished Capitol dome rising up over
everything else, the bridges over the river beyond that, and green and brown
landscape stretching off to the east.
“Quite a place,” I said.
She chuckled. “Thank you. I try to set an example.”
I gave her a startled look, but just then the flunkey came
back in with the martinis. Mikkelson thanked him, which was another surprise,
and then we took our drinks and waited while he vanished.
“I’d like to talk business first, if you don’t mind,” she
said then. I’m not in the habit of arguing with the very rich, and so I agreed
and we spent half an hour discussing the prospects of selling Mikkelson
locomotives, rolling stock, and streetcar systems to the Atlantic Republic.
“I’ve got one requirement,” she said, emphasizing the number
with a sharp gesture. “If other transport modes get a subsidy, rail and
streetcars get an equal subsidy. If rail and streetcars don’t get subsidized,
neither does anything else. Are you at all familiar with the way they handled
funding for different transport modes back in the old Union?”
“Not to speak of,” I admitted.
“Roads, highways and airports got huge subsidies from
federal, state, and local governments, and so did car and airplane
manufacturers. Rail? Pennies on the hundred-dollar bill, and then the
politicians yelled that rail was a waste of public funds and should get its
subsidies cut even further. I won’t enter a market that’s run on those
terms—it’s like gambling in a crooked casino. Equal subsidies for all modes, or
no subsidies for any, I’m fine with that.”
“Do you do a lot of export on those terms?”
“A fair amount.
Missouri’s gone to a no-subsidies system, the same as we have, and
they’re buying my locomotives and rolling stock as funds permit. Quebec treats
urban transit as a public utility, which works for me—I’ve sold three streetcar
systems there since the borders opened, and my people and theirs are
negotiating two more. East Canada? The car manufacturers still have too much
clout to allow parity for rail, so no dice. The Confederacy’s still sore about
the way the ‘49 war went, so they buy from Brazil.” She shrugged. “Their loss.
Our products are better.”
“I don’t happen to know about the subsidy regime back home,”
I said.
“Don’t worry about it. You’ve got some highway and airport
subsidies and a lot of public funding for roads, but no domestic auto or
aircraft industries and no subsidies for buying those from overseas. If
Montrose’s people are willing to negotiate, we can work something out—and from
what I hear, your urban transit is a disaster area, so her administration could
get even more popular than it is by getting streetcar systems up and running in
half a dozen of your big cities.”
All in all, it wasn’t exactly hard for me to figure out why
she was the richest person in the Lakeland Republic; we talked over the
possibilities, I agreed to discuss the matter with Ellen Montrose when I got
back home, and the conversation strayed elsewhere.
When we got to the third martini each, I asked, “You said
you try to set an example. I’m still trying to parse that.”
That got me an assessing look: “I was the first of our
homegrown millionaires here in the Lakeland Republic—there’s a good dozen of us
now, and there’ll be more in due time, but I was first through that particular
gate.” She gestured around at the
mansion. “Quite a place, as you said.
During the Second Civil War, my brother and I—we were the only two of
our family who survived the bombing of Toledo in 2025—we lived in the basement
of a wrecked house in a suburb thirty miles south of here. We ate a lot of rat,
and were glad to get it, and so I decided then and there that if I survived, I
was going to live in the biggest house in the state of Ohio, and all I’d have
to do is snap my fingers and somebody would bring me a roast turkey, just like
that.” She laughed reminiscently. “I got so sick of roast turkey.”
I laughed along with her, but I knew that she meant it. ‘Did your brother survive the war?”
“Fortunately, yes—he’s younger than I am, and wasn’t old
enough to be drafted by either side until the war was over. He’s a professor of
political science at Milwaukee these days—he came out of the whole business
wanting to know why it is that nations do dumb things. Me, I just wanted to get
rich.” She sipped her martini. “And fortunately I learned an important lesson
on how to do that and survive. Do you mind hearing an ugly story?”
“Not at all,” I said, wondering what she had in mind.
“This was right after the war, when I was working any job I
could get, trying to put aside enough cash to start my first business. I got
hired as day labor to do salvage on what was left of a gated community, west of
here a ways. It was one of the really high-end places, where the very rich
planned to hole up when things came crashing down; it had its own private
security force, airstrip, power plant, farms, the whole nine yards.
“Now here’s the thing. There were sixty big houses for the
families that lived there, and every single one of them was full of what’s left
when you leave dead people lying around for four years. As far as we could
tell, right after the old federal government lost control of the Midwest, the
security guards turned off the alarm systems one night and went from house to
house. They shot everyone but the domestic staff, took all the gold and goodies
they could carry, and headed off somewhere else. That wasn’t the only place
that happened, either.”
“I heard some really ugly stories from the Hamptons back in
the day,” I said.
“I bet you did. The thing that really made an impression on
me at the time, though, is that they didn’t shoot the domestic staff. All the
skeletons were up in the family quarters. That told me that it wasn’t just
about the money. There was a grudge involved—and if you know how the rich used
to treat everyone else in the old Union, you know why.” She sipped more booze.
“Rich people only exist because the rest of society tolerates us, you know.
Have you ever considered why they do that?”
I shook my head, and she went on. “Part of it’s because we
give them a place to anchor their unused dreams. Poeple here daydream about the
rich the way that people in Britain
follow the doings of their royal family. They’ll put up with the most astonishing
things from the people they idolize, the people they allow to get rich and stay
rich, so long as the rich keep their side of the deal. I could get by with a
quarter of the staff I have here; I could get by without the four-star dinners
with a big tip for everyone right down to the dishwashers, the big donations to
every charitable cause in sight, the private railroad car with its own fulltime
chef, for God’s sake—but that’s my side of the bargain.”
“It gives everyone else something to dream about,” I
guessed.
“Yes, and it also pays one hell of a lot of wages and
salaries.”
I took that in.
“They tolerate me because I live out their dreams for them,”
Mikkelson said. “They can afford to tolerate me because I don’t let myself
become too expensive a luxury, and they want to tolerate me because their
sister’s best friend got a hundred-buck tip the last time I had dinner at the
restaurant where she waits tables, and their cousin’s husband works in the
garden down there for a good wage and a big bonus come Christmas, and a guy
they know from high school just got promoted off the shop floor at the
Mikkelson factory and is getting a degree in engineering on my nickel.”
“As I recall,” I said, “You get some pretty fair tax
benefits from that last one.”
“Of course.” She smiled. “And I lobbied like you wouldn’t
believe to get that into the tax code. Partly because I don’t mind being paid
to do the right thing, and partly because I knew it would keep my work force
happy. Half the reason Mikkelson
products are better quality than anybody else’s is that all my people know that
if the company wins, they win. There’s a stock ownership plan, bonuses based on
the annual profit, plenty of opportunity
to move from the shop floor to better-paying jobs. All of it gets me a break on taxes, but it
also means that I and all my limited partners do better in the long run, and so
do my employees and the union.”
I gave her a puzzled look. “I didn’t know you still had
unions here.”
“Couldn’t get by without them. Of course we have binding
arbitration on contracts—if my people and the union can’t reach an agreement,
the Department of Labor sends in an arbitration team and they decide what the
new contract will be—but the union does a lot of the day-to-day management of
the work force. When I need to sort something out with my factory employees, I
can pick up a phone and call the local president here in Toledo, say, and
settle it in ten minutes or less. They know their jobs depend on the company
making a profit, and the union funds have a big stake in Mikkelson stock and
seats on the board, so it’s in our interest to work together.”
She turned toward the windows, looked out over the Toledo
skyline. “That was what nobody seemed to be able to figure out in the old
Union,” she said. “You can cooperate and compromise, share the gains, and keep
things going for the long term, or you can try to grab everything for yourself
and shove the poor and the weak to the wall, and watch it all come crashing
down. In world politics, the United States tried to grab everything; in domestic
politics, the executive branch tried to grab everything; in the economy, the
rich tried to grab everything—and down it came.” She glanced back at me over
her shoulder. “I wonder if anyone thinks about that in Philadelphia.”
It was a hell of a good question, and I didn’t have an answer for it.
