Jean-Luke Swanepoel

...in the back of his mind was Carlisle - and the Cosmopolite, and what a hell of a shape this country was in to permit such things, and that there was a Carlisle in every town in the country, but that millions upon millions were too stupid to care, and that it was that way all over the world: millions upon millions of people who believed Hitler and Mussolini were great fellows, not knowing (or caring) that they were madmen beating on drums, poor diseased bastards, driving a lot of cattle (these same stupid millions upon millions) to slaughter, and that they would surely suck us into it (Hemingway was right about the radio in the next war when he said you can imagine what that will do for hysteria): thinking we should nip all these Carlisles and Hitlers and Mussolinis right now: oh yes, everything is peaches and cream in this superb, marvellous, wonderful paradise called the United States of America, the only country where the radio is free and uncensored, and the press is free and uncensored, and speech is free and uncensored - oh yes, a man can say what he pleases, any time he pleases - the hell he can - you try it, and you get your magazine taken away from you.

When the United States of America, which was meant to be a Utopia for all, was less than a century old, Noah Rosewater and a few men like him demonstrated the folly of the Founding Fathers in one respect: those sadly recent ancestors had not made

When the United States of America, which was meant to be a Utopia for all, was less than a century old, Noah Rosewater and a few men like him demonstrated the folly of the Founding Fathers in one respect: those sadly recent ancestors had not made it the law of the Utopia that the wealth of each citizen should be limited. This oversight was engendered by a weak-kneed sympathy for those who loved expensive things, and by the feeling that the continent was so vast and valuable, and the population so thin and enterprising, that no thief, no matter how fast he stole, could more than mildly inconvenience anyone.

Noah and a few like him perceived that the continent was in fact finite, and that venal office-hold-ers, legislators in particular, could be persuaded to toss up great hunks of it for grabs, and to toss them in such a way as to have them land where Noah and his kind were standing.

Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America.
Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.

E pluribus unum is surely an ironic motto to inscribe on the currency of this Utopia gone bust, for every grotesquely rich American represents property, privileges, and pleasures that have been denied the many. An even more instructive motto, in the light of history made by the Noah Rosewa-ters, might be: Grab much too much, or you'll get nothing at all.

Happiness is not a state to whoch Muriel aspired. She thought itnoverrated and believed the quest for it was doomed to result in didappointment and worse. For what could you do with happiness once you had found it? Hang on to it? Aspire to be even more happy?