Political Pressure

9

The White Hand Book had something to say about a grassroots political campaign: it had to look like it was grassroots. If it looked planned or organized or prefabricated, it would have no credibility.

If the White Hand Book had one golden rule it was this: perception is everything.

Orville Flicker understood that rule. He had been born understanding it. He had meditated on its meaning for more hours than a philosopher considered the meaning of existence.

After all, existence was less important than perception. Without perception, existence was meaningless. On the other hand, perceiving something existed was the same as that thing actually existing for as long as the perception continued.

Flicker understood this when he was a little boy and he believed all the lies told to him by grown-ups, which meant his mother. He was allowed contact with no other grown-ups, or children. He invented his friends, a dragon named Hobbs and a cow named Whom, and spent hours playing with them.

When Flicker started school it was a small, home- based private class with only five other children. Five other children were more than enough to permanently scar his psyche, and it happened the very first day. Not long after he enthusiastically introduced the children to Hobbs the dragon and Whom the cow, he was ridiculed until he cried. He cried until his mother came and took him away from those awful children.

That night, Hobbs the dragon unceremoniously tore the meat off Whom the cow and ate her alive, only to get worms from the uncooked meat. Hobbs was dead by morning.

In his mind, for months, Flicker still saw the rotting dragon carcass and the scattered, moldering bones of the cow, which amazed him, because he was smart enough to know now that he was seeing an illusion created by his own mind.

He began to wonder how he could make other people believe in what he wanted them to believe, whether it was true or not. This sort of thinking led inevitably to a career in politics.

Perception was the only thing in politics and advertising. Nothing else mattered. Flicker knew it. Every smart politician knew it. Flicker's uncanny understanding of what perception was, why it was important and how to create it got him far.

But all it took was one serious lapse in his good judgment to ruin his career in an instant.

That was in the past and best forgotten. If people didn't forget, then you made them forget. You washed the past out of their minds with illusions of the present and dreams of the future.

Lucky for him, some memories were too entrenched to be forgotten, such as the reputations of the reigning political parties. In the United States of America there were two choices: bad and worse. The political parties that monopolized elections had been around so long that nobody truly believed there was an alternative. Orville Flicker was about to conjure an alternative out of thin air.

But it couldn't look conjured. It couldn't look like the product of planning or strategy. It had to be perceived as spontaneous. The people had to believe this new party was their creation, like a mythical bull springing into existence full-grown from the brow of a deity. The new party would appear to come into being in just that way, and all the people who joined it would never know how carefully Orville Flicker had been planning to use them to take over the U.S. government.