“Why do you speak of repayment? When I am forever in your debt?”
I chose to be obtuse. “Do you truly feel that you owe me something? Just for last night?”
“Yes. You were adequate.”
I gasped. “Oh!”
He answered, unsmiling: “Would you rather I had said inadequate?”
I refrained from gasping. “Georges. Take off your clothes. I am going to take you back to bed, then kill you, slowly. At the end I am going to squeeze you and break your back in three places. ‘Adequate.’ ‘Inadequate.’
He grinned and started unzipping.
I said, “Oh, stop that and kiss me! Then we are going to San Jose. ‘Inadequate.’ Which was I?”
It takes almost as long to go from Bellingham to San Jose as it does to go from Winnipeg to Vancouver but this trip we had seats. We emerged above ground at fourteen-fifteen. I looked around with interest, never having visited the Confederacy capital before.
The thing I first noticed was the amazing number of APVs bouncing like fleas all over the place and most of them taxicabs. I know of no other modern city that permits its air space to be infested to this extent. The streets were loaded with hansom cabs, too, and there were slidewalks bordering every street; nevertheless these power-drive pests were everywhere, like bicycles in Canton.
The second thing I noticed was the feel of San Jose. It was not a city. I now understood that classic description: “A thousand villages in search of a city.”
San Jose does not seem to have any justification save politics. But California gets more out of politics than any other country I know of-utter unashamed and uninhibited democracy. You run into democracy in many places-New Zealand uses it in an attenuated form. But only in California will you find the clear-quill, raw-gum, two-hundred-proof, undiluted democracy. The voting age starts when a citizen is tall enough to pull the lever without being steadied by her nurse, and registrars are reluctant to disenfranchise a citizen short of a sworn cremation certificate.
I did not fully appreciate that last until I saw, in an election news story, that the corpsicles at Prehoda Pines Patience Park constituted three precincts all voting through preregistered proxies. (“Death, be not proud!”)
I will not try to pass judgment as I was a grown woman before I encountered democracy even in its milder, nonmalignant form. Democracy is probably all right used in sparing amounts. The British Canadians use a dilute form and they seem to do all right. But only in California is everyone drunk on it all the time. There does not seem to be a day when there is not an election somewhere in California, and, for any one precinct, there is (so I was told) an election of some sort about once a month.
I suppose they can afford it. They have a mellow climate from British Canada to the Mexican Kingdom and much of the richest farm land on Earth. Their second favorite sport (sex) costs almost nothing in its raw form; like marijuana it is freely available everywhere. This leaves time and energy for the true California sport: gathering and yabbering about politics.
They elect everybody, from precinct parasite to the Chief Confederate (“The Chief”). But they unelect them almost as fast. For example the Chief is supposed to serve one six-year term. But, of the last nine chiefs, only two served a full six years; the others were recalled except that one who was lynched. In many cases an official has not yet been sworn in when the first recall petition is being circulated.
But Californians do not limit themselves to electing, recalling, indicting, and (sometimes) lynching their swarms of officials; they also legislate directly. Every election has on the ballot more proposed laws than candidates. The provincial and national representatives show some restraint-I have been assured that the typical California legislator will withdraw a bill if you can prove to her that pi can’t equal three no matter how many vote to make it so. But grassroots legislation (“the initiative”) has no such limitation.
For example three years ago a grassroots economist noticed that college graduates earned, on the average, about 30 percent more than their fellow citizens who lacked bachelor’s degrees. Such an undemocratic condition is anathema to the California Dream, so, with great speed, an initiative was qualified for the next election, the measure passed, and all California high-school graduates and/or California citizens attaining eighteen years were henceforth awarded bachelor’s degrees. A grandfather clause backdated this benefit eight years.