All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [238]
I went back to my hotel and had a meal in the coffee shop, having left word at the desk to page me if a call came. But none came. So I dawdled in the lobby with the evening papers. The Chronicle had a long editorial lauding the courage and sound sense of the handful of men in the Senate who were making a fight against the administration’s tax bill, which would throttle business and enterprise in the state. There was a cartoon opposite the editorial. It showed the Boss, or rather, a figure with the Boss’s head but a great swollen belly, dressed in a Buster Brown suit with the little pants tight above great hairy thighs. On one knee the monster balanced a big pudding and from the gaping hole in the top had just plucked a squirming little creature. The pudding bore the label The State and the squirming little creature the label Hardworking Citizen. From the mouth of the Boss’s head came one of those balloons of words the comic-strip artists use to indicate the speech of their characters. It said: “Oh, what a good boy am I!” Under the cartoon was the caption: Little Jack Horner.
I read on down through the editorial. It said that our state was a poor state, and could not bear the burden thus tyrannically imposed upon it. That was an old one. Every time the Boss had cracked down–income tax, mineral-extraction tax, liquor tax, every time–it had been the same thing. The pocketbook is where it hurts. A man may forget the death of the father, but never the loss of the patrimony, the cold-faced Florentine, who is the founding father of our modern world, said, and he said a mouthful.
This is a poor state, the opposition always screamed. But the Boss said: “There is a passel of pore folks living in it and no mistake, but the state isn’t poor. It is just a question of who has got his front feet in the trough when slopping time comes. And I aim to do me some shoving and thump me some snouts.” And he had leaned forward to the crowd, with the shagged-down forelock and the bulging eyes, and had lifted his right arm to demand of them and of the hot sky, “Are you with me? Are you with me?” And the roar had come.
More money for graft, the opposition always screamed. “Sure,” the Boss had said, lounging easy, “sure, there’s some graft, but there’s just enough to make the wheels turn without squeaking. And remember this. There never was a machine rigged up by man didn’t represent some loss of energy. How much energy do you get out of a lump of coal when you run a steam dynamo or a locomotive compared to what there actually is in that lump of coal? Damned little. Well, we do a hell of a lot better than the best dynamo or locomotive ever invented. Sure, I got a bunch of crooks around here, but they’re too lily-livered to get very crooked. I got my eye on ’em. And do I deliver the state something? I damned well do.”
The theory of historical costs, you might put it. All change costs something. You have to write off the costs against the gain. Maybe in our state change could only come in the terms in which it was taking place, and it was sure due for some change. The theory of the moral neutrality of history, you might call it. Process as process is neither morally good nor morally bad. We may judge results but not process. The morally bad agent may perform the deed which is bad. Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good.
The theory of historical costs. The theory of the moral neutrality of history. All that was a high historical view from a chilly pinnacle. Maybe it took a genius to see it. To really see it. Maybe you had to get chained to the high pinnacle with the buzzards pecking at your liver and lights before you could see it. Maybe it took a genius to see it. Maybe it took a hero to act on it.