5 -- ...the entire genealogy and economic development of the Cozzano clan, and of twentieth-century Illinois, which amounted to the same thing.
6 -- [John Cozzano borrows money from Shmuel Meierowitz, violating the taboo against dealing with Jews. The transaction is a success, and Cozzano borrows again.]
7 -- Everyone who laid eyes on the new baby [William Anthony Cozzano] predicted that he would one day be President of the United States.
8 -- [William Cozzano and Mel Meyer:] ...they also knew that they were the eldest sons of families that had accumulated much and that if they screwed up and lost it, it would be no one's fault but their own.
9 -- [Cozzano's Vietnam war: dress blues and battle photo. Two tours, many medals, including two purple hearts and a silver star.]
10 -- [Photos of Cozzano with Bush, Clinton, and "the current President."]
11 -- [Cozzano watches State of the Union with inset Comedy Channel. Failure to lead. Debt at $10 trillion.]
12 -- [President's bombshell; quotes Raputin: "Great sins demand great forgiveness." "Declaration of Fiscal Independence."]
13 -- ["Current President," in his State of the Union:] "Let us now forgive ourselves, so that we may go forth into the brave new world of the third millennium with a clean slate and a clear conscience." [Making this 1998? 1999?]
14 -- [Cozzano's stroke.]
15 -- ...and becoming President, which he was going to do before the year 2000. But he wasn't sure if he really wanted that awful job anyway.
15-16 -- [Otho and Otis Simpson in their lead mine. Handling $30 trillion for "the network," which includes Lady Guenevere Wilburdon. The control capsule.]
18 -- [Otho:] "America used to have citizens. Then its government put it up for sale. Now it's got investors. You and I work for the investors."
18 -- ["Senator Wright" previously proposed debt forgiveness, and he "died in a plane crash." Hmm.]
19 -- [Otho's options: (1) pull out of U.S. and invest in former Soviet Union; (2) do nothing and hope things get better; (3) "Intervene directly in American politics in order to return it to a certain sort of stability and to insure our long-term investment in the debt..."]
19 -- [Lady Wilburdon's order to Otho:] "Put your country back in working order."
20 -- If the Network planned carefully and wasn't too obvious about it, it could go far beyond managing the outcome of this one election. It could actually erect a system that would enable America's investors to have a permanent say int he management of their assets.
20-21 -- The United States of America had served its purpose. It was time to cash her in. Like a big creaky old corporation, her individual parts, intelligently liquidated, were worth more than the whole. She still had the best damn military money could buy, as the Iraqis had discovered during the Gulf War, and she still came up with new ideas better than anyone. Under new, fiscally responsible management, she could still perform well, pay her debts, and provide a tolerable standard of living for her citizens. Otho needed to make sure that that management was provided by the Network and not by one of the other entities with which the Network competed.
21-22 -- [Otho to Otis:] "Well you know, this country once worked real well, when we had values that people believed in." ..."What do you mean by values?" "They were code words like honesty, hard work, self-reliance... myths, actually, to motivate people to accept the natural inequities found in a market system. In the old days, contract was sacred: divorce, bankruptcy, fraud were taboos for the average people. The rogues of course, the robber barons were beyond that. We have to return the country to those values so that there won't even be a thought to renege on the debt."
22 -- [Otho's thoughts on Mr. Salvador and the likely outcome of the grand conspiracy: either he'll be killed, or he'll be improved by the experience.]
22 -- ff. [Aaron Green meets Cy Ogle. IMIPREM.]
28-29 -- [Ogle describes capitalism in terms of underfed predators gathered around a zebra leg. Green:] "That's a depressing image." "It's a depressing country. It's not like that in other countries where people save more money. But it's like that here, now, because we don't have values that encourage savings."
29 -- [Green's amateur logo gives him away as a competitor not destined for survival.]
32 -- [Ogle describes his field as "political biophysics."]
33 -- [Eleanor Boxwood Richmond. The humiliations of the football phone.]
34 -- [Eleanor's husband, Harmon, reduced from engineer to fry cook. McJobs.]
34-35 -- [The Richmonds' savings soaked up by less motivated relatives.]
35 -- [Richmonds can't move because their house has become valueless after real estate market around Denver collapsed.]
36 -- [Eleanor thinks of her Denver house as "The White House," partly because it seems so white-middleclass.]
37 -- [Crazy relatives; house owned by R.T.C.]
38-39 -- [The door jamb. Harmon's suicide.]
56 -- [Cozzano's version of women's liberation: the world should not be unfair to his daughter; so he provides her with locks and weapons.]
58 -- [Mel Meyer as "eschatological counselor" to the Cozzano's -- willing to become cannon fodder, if need be.]
59 -- [Cozzano does his own oil changes, as the freezing reporters watch.]
63 -- [Neurology pure detective work -- neurologists good at figuring out what is wrong with patients, but without much ability to effect cure.]
68 -- [Mel proposes that Cozzano run for President.]
71 -- [How Dr. Radhakrishnan becomes corrupt: watching his father's honesty punished by obscurity.]
72 -- Radhakrishnan had a total of fifteen grad students: four Japanese, two Chinese, three Korean, one Indonesian, three Indian, one Pakistani, and one American. They had learned to work together well at times such as this, even the American.
74 -- [Naming an experimental baboon "Mr. President."]
77 -- [Mr. Buckminster Salvador is in possession of the tape from Cozzano's office.]
79-80 -- [Calyx, the parallel-processed successor to UNIX, invented by Kevin Tice of Pacific Netware.]
80 -- [Programming the cerebral interface chip: this is done by remote radio. Salvador:] "Fascinating. Utterly fascinating."
83 -- [Cy Ogle relates better to Goofy.]
85 -- [Ogle's Oakland operation.] "We figured we'd leave the big CADILLAC up on the roof... to attract Republicans."
85 -- [Ogle described as "a cross between Machiavelli and Zefirelli."]
87 -- [Cy Ogle to Aaron Green:] "In the 1700s, politics was all about ideas. But Jefferson came up with all the good ideas. In the 1800s, it was all about character. But no one will ever have as much character as Lincoln and Lee. For much of the 1900s it was about charisma. But we no longer trust charisma because Hitler used it to kill Jews and JFK used it to get laid and send us to Vietnam."... "So what's it about now?" Aaron said. "Scrutiny. We are in the Age of Scrutiny. A public figure must withstand the scrutiny of the media."
88 -- [Ogle:] "I paint a depressing picture here. But we, you and I, are like the literate monks who nurtured the flickering flame of Greek rationality through the Dark Ages, remaining underground, knowing each other by secret signs and code words, meeting in cellars and thickets to exchange our dangerous and subversive ideas. We do not have the strength to change the minds of the illiterate multitude. But we do have the wit to exploit their foolishness, to familiarize ourselves with their stunted thought patterns, and to use that knowledge to manipulate them toward the goals that we all know are, quote, right and true, unquote. Have you ever been on TV, Aaron?"
88-89 -- [Why some people's eyes appear to bulge on TV; it's because of television cameras' "gamma curve."]
89 -- [Ogle on the likely consequences of HDTV:] "All of the politicians currently in power will be voted out of office and we will have a completely new power structure. Because high-definition television has a flat gamma curve and higher resolution, and people who look good on today's television will look bad on HDTV and voters will respond accordingly. Their oversized pores will be visible, the red veins in their noses from drinking too much, the artificiality of their TV-friendly hairdos will make them all look, on HDTV, like country-and-western singers. A new generation of politicians will take over and they will all look like movie stars, because HDTV will be a great deal like film, and movie stars know how to look good on film."
90 -- [Ogle renames IMIPREM "PIPER" -- poll instantaneous processing, evaluation, and response. Or Piper as in "Pied."]
90-91 -- [Green doesn't understand how you can "respond" to a poll instantaneously. Ogle doesn't want to let him in on the whole show.]
95 -- The wind chill was thirty below zero and these guys were standing out on the prairie without hats. That said everything about their fitness to be president.
97-98 -- [Cozzano plans his suicide attempt.]
102 -- It caused Mel to wonder, as he skimmed across the prairie on I-57m its four lanes straight as banjo strings, paralleling the equally straight Illinois Central railway line, whether downstate had some magical feature that might expose another network, a network that had, so far, so perfectly hidden its workings in the complexity of the modern world that Mel wasn't even sure it existed.
103 -- [Mel:] "You were going to blow your brains out, weren't you?" [Cozzano:] "You win the Camaro!"
104 -- [Mel reports on "feelers" from the Coovers -- De Wayne Coover; a fellow multi-millionaire.]
105-106 -- [GODS -- Global Omnipresent Delivery System: this novel's answer to Pynchon's W.A.S.T.E. system. Great routine about G.O.D.S. packaging and services.]
110 -- "ROBERT J. COOVER BUILDING, RADHAKRISHNAN V.R.J.V.V. GANGHADAR INSTITUTE OF BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH -- CALIFORNIA BRANCH"
112 -- [Dr. Radhakrishnan's brother thinks Macintyre Engineering, which is doing the construction work on the Institute, is the "right hand of the CIA." But Dr. R. is inclined to think that Macintyre is scarier without government connections.]
113 -- [Arun Radhakrishnan compares scale of construction to the Manhattan Project.]
114 -- [Dr. Radhakrishnan:] "They have no values of any kind.... Nothing means naything to them. The Taj is just a construction project, a particular manipulation of assets. And whatever they're doing on the Ashok Theatre site is more of the same."
116 -- [Corporate interlocks -- Genomics of Seattle bought out by Gale Aerospace. Mr. Salvador calls it "diversification."]
117 -- [Mr. Salvador has sent "generous" samples of two human brains.]
118 -- [Cabin amenities on Dr. R's corporate-jet flight to India include "Marla."]
120-21 -- ["Zeldo," the "chiphead from Pacware."]
123 -- [Honda generators for the setup at the Institute, so that the American researchers won't have to put up with the third world.]
125 -- [Mohinder Singh has a positive attitude, thinks Mr. Salvador; "not a whiner. He reminds me of the chap in the States." I.e. Cozzano.]
130 -- [Mel expatiates on the clever feelers he has been receiving from the Network about the experimental chip-in-brain treatment for brain damage.]
134 -- [Dr. Radhakrishnan on the conflicts of religion and modern life (as a good Hindu, is he allowed to touch his low-caste patients? to touch a Comanche?] In the meantime, like everyone else, he had to translate the arcane precepts of his ancient religion into a somewhat looser and vaguer set of rules called ethics, or values.
134-35 -- [Radhakrishnan refuses to slow down experimental program in order to accommodate Zeldo's reservations about the software.]
137 -- [First implantation operations are "debacle." Dr. R. says "I may shoot myself."]
139 -- [Core of Radhakrishnan's institute -- the operating theatre -- is being made operational before the rest of the building is complete.]
139-40 -- Brain cells didn't grow. But the connections between them did. The network of linkages was constantly shifting and reconnecting itself in a process that was usually described as "learning." Dr. Radhakrishnan did not really care for this terminology because it contained a value judgment. It implied that everyt time new sunapses were formed inside a person's mind it was because they were memorizing Shakespeare or being taught how to integrate transcendental functions. Of course, in reality most of the internal rewiring that went on in people's brains took place in response to watching game shows on television, being beaten up by family members, figuring out the cheapest place to buy cigarettes, and being conditioned not to mix plaids with stripes.
140-41 -- [Actual "interface" -- the chip and its plastic connector.]
141 -- [The patients, Mr. Easyrider and Mr. Scatflinger, are "media entities" to the researchers, who study them on screens and readouts.]
143 -- [Mr. Scatflinger's chip goes into total glitch: WUBBA WUBBA etc.]
144 -- ff. Lady Wilburdon arrives and, among other things, gets Mr. Easyrider's brains all over her hands.]
146 -- [Interesting revelations about Mr. Salvador and the Lady Wilburdon School for Spoiled Boys.]
152 -- [Salvador on Lady Wilburdon:] "She is a freak of nature."
153 -- [Dr. R. on Mr. Scatflinger:] "Send him off to the hinterlands. He can found his own religious sect."
155 -- "Jeez," Zeldo said, walking into the place, "all we need is a skylight and some lightning rods."
157 -- [Mr. Salvador:] "...we are go for launch."
159 -- [Cozzano's word for people: "femelhebbers"]
161 -- [The hackers want to take the brain-chip technology to its next logical extension -- augmenting human intelligence with microprocessors.]
162-63 -- [Mary Catherine detects the Potemkin Village effect at the Radhakrishnan Institute in California.]
164 -- [Mel scents conspiracy in the Radhakrishnan affair. Coover, Tice.]
165 -- [Cozzano:] "Better a dead pioneer than a live feeb."
167 -- [Mel proposes to print bumperstickers saying "Femelhebbers for Cozzano."]
169 -- [Eleanor Sleeping in "the Annex" -- the busted Datsun outside the trailer.]
170 -- [Eleanor on the presidential primaries:] It was like a nursery school, she thought, full of lonely kids who were always punching each other, running with sharp objects, and sticking pencils up their noses -- anything to draw attention to themselves. The TV producers, like overburdened nursery-school teachers, cut frantically from one three-second shot to another, trying to keep track of them, and all their little activities.
172 -- [Eleanor discovers family values:] When money got short and times got hard, you stopped worrying about all the superficial nonsense of modern life and you got down to basics. The basic thing that a parent did was to protect her family. that is why Eleanor Richmond felt more comfortable, and slept much more soundly, in her silverized glass bubble with a loaded gun six inches away. Whatever else was going wrong, she knew that if anyone tried to get into her house and hurt her family, she would kill them. She had that one base covered. Everything else was details.
175 -- [Eleanor and Detective Larsen:] "Well, why are our presidential candidates running around having sex with bimbos and sticking pencils up their noses when we have people growing up in Denver, Colorado, with no values?" Detective Larsen was looking progressively more bewildered. "Presidential politics aren't my specialty, ma'am." "Well, maybe they ought to be."
177 -- ff. [Story of Eleanor and the cable installer, Erwin Dudley Strang, a.k.a. Earl Strong]
178-79 -- [White trash with a power drill. Incompetent service.]
180 -- [Strang lights up at mention of Germany.]
181 -- [Can't report Strang to the company, because he's just an independent contractor; and anyway, he'll find some other company to work for.]
181-82 -- She knew it was crazy to be arguing this with him. She should just throw him out of the house. But her parents had raised her to talk things out. They had worked their fingers to the bone paying for an expensive Catholic education so that the nuns could teach her to be a rational, intelligent citizen. She could not get over the impulse to make Erwin Dudley Strang see reason.
182 -- [Strang plays the Anita Hill card; Mrs. Richmond kicks him in the nuts.]
183 -- [Then, some years later, Strang (now Strong) comes up on the TV:] It was creepy and ironic to be flipping through the channels cursing the bad reception, cursing that man who had installed it, and suddenly to have him show up on screen, in full talking head shot, wearing a business suit.
184 -- [Strong's progress: better studios, better cameras, better suits.] Surely someone would take it upon themselves to expose this man. But no one ever did. And then, all of a sudden, Earl Strong was running for the United States Senate, he was ahead in the polls, and everyone loved him.
185 -- [Eleanor discovers that she has become a bag lady; but by an act of will, she transforms herself into a shopper.]
186 -- [Strong makes disparaging remarks about Martin Luther King, titillating his white male crowd.]
186-87 -- People were so easy to understand, when you were a mom. Eleanor could see their guilt a mile away, see them trying to delude themselves, like kids who believed that they could make unpleasant things go away just by wishing. The only thing they needed, she realized, was a good talking-to.
188 -- ff. [Eleanor destroys Earl Strong; a cable installer is "a burglar with pretensions." "...a pencil-neck Hitler with a face from Wal-Mart"]
189 -- "I won't shut up because I'm hurting you on television, and you don't have the brains or the balls to stop me."
191 -- [Spontaneous anti-Strong demonstration breaks out, and Eleanor is the clear victor.]
192 -- [Aaron Green goes back to R&D, where he's happier.]
192 -- [Ogle:] "You want to see a hell of a thing?" "What is it?" Aaron said. "The first female president of the United States," Ogle said. "I didn't realize they had held an election." "Mark my words. I will lay money on it."
196 -- [Earl Strong destroyed by the camera.]
197 -- "Let's go down there and represent her," Shane Schram said. "What's she running for?" Morris said. "Nothing. She's a bag lady," Ogle said. A look of ecstatic fulfillment came over Morris's face. "No!" he said. "Yes," Ogle said.
198 -- "We haven't heard a word the woman's said," Aaron said. "I mean, she could be a raving lunatic." They all brust into dismissive scoffing noises. "Screw that," Shane Schram said. "Look at her face. She's solid." "Fuck that shit," Morris said. "That's what writers are for."
199 -- The out-of-power party had their front-runner (Norman Fowler, Jr.), their runner-up (Nimrod T. ["Tip"] McLane), and their plucky underdog (the Reverend Billy Joe Sweigel). And just to make things interesting, they also had a popular favorite: Governor William A. Cozzano, who wasn't even running.
200 -- [Mary Catherine detects Jimmy's fraud in the famous arm-wave from the hospital window.]
206 -- [Ogle, during lunch with Mary Catherine:] "...the major parties haven't learned how to handle media yet. And they never will." "Why not?" "Because of their constitution. The parties were formed in the days when media didn't matter, and formed wrong. Now they are like big old dinosaurs after the comet struck, thrashing around weakly on the same old ground. Big and powerful but pathetic and doomed at the same time." "You think the parties are doomed?" "Sure they are," Ogle said. "Look at Ross Perot. If Bush's psy-ops people hand't figured out how to push his buttons and make him act loony, he'd be president now. Your father has everything going for him that Perot did -- but none of the negatives."
207 -- [Mary Catherine:] "...what exactly are we talking about?" [Ogle:] "Surfing." "Surfing?" "Media is like a wave," Ogle said. "It's powerful and uncontrollable. If you're good, you can surf on it for a little bit, get a boost from it. Gary Hart surfed on that wave for a few weeks in 1984, after he won New Hampshire from Mondale. But by the time the Illinois primary came around, he had fallen off the surfboard. The wave broke over him and swamped him. He tried again in 1988 but that time he just plain drowned. Perot rode the wave for a month or two in '92, then he lost his nerve."
210 -- ["Ogle" was originally Oglethorpe, as in Georgia, but shortened because of bastardy.]
215 -- [James, languishing in his father's shadow.]
217-18 -- [James's new job with Ogle.]
220 -- [Senator Caleb Roosevelt Marshall; the extremist of conservatives, who went to fight for the fascists in Spain and who called Barry Goldwater a "pinko." But who still more than a little resembles Goldwater.]
221 -- He had come down on the side of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, and delivered a gutsy and profane speech in her defense on the Senate floor, using it as an occasion to lament the total implosion of American values.
223 -- [Senator Marshall hates affirmative action but stands squarely for civil rights:] "The basic fact is that all people should be trated the same, as specified in the Constitution, and everything else is bullshit."
225 -- "Eleanor Boxwood Richmond," [Marshall] said, "you and I got exactly the same politics. Only thing is, you don't know it yet." "How can you say that? I've been a liberal Democrat all my life." Still gripping her hand, Senator Marshall shook his head dismissively. "All that Democrat/Republican stuff is bullshit," he said. "And as far as liberal versus conservative, well, people are very promiscuous in the way they use those words. They don't really mean anything. Within those two camps there are very wide divisions. And between those two camps, there is a lot more overlap than you think. None of that bullshit really matters. The only thing that matters is values." "Values?" "Values. I've got 'em. You've got 'em. Earl Strong doesn't"
232-33 -- [Eleanor chews out the woman whose daughters have been raped, but who refuses to report the offense.]
234 -- [Marshall:] "Anyway, nice to see you changed your position on gun control."
237 -- [More corporate interlocking -- Green Biophysics bought out by Ogle Data Research, which was in turn absorbed by a consortium including Macintyre Engineering, the Coover Fund, Gale Aerospace, and Pacific Netware. Ogle's new bosses order him to liquidate Green's company, which he does by handing all the employees golden parachutes.]
240 -- [The "spontaneous ground-swell department" at Ogle Data Research.]
241 -- [The "metacampaign" -- "The struggle for the hearts and minds of the media, and of big contributors."]
242 -- But Ogle hadn't chosen this building because it was new, sleek, or convenient. As he told Aaron repeatedly, he liked for one reason and one reason only: you got into the place by walking through a mall. The point was not that Ogle liked shopping malls. The point was all in the symbolism of the thing. Rooted in a goddamn shopping mall. The ultimate symbol of the American middle class. The very people that Ogle made his money and staked his reputation on.
244 -- ff. [FGI stereotypes: "Mall-Hopping Corporate Concubine. Debt-Hounded Wage Slave. Bible-Slinging Porch Monkey. First-Generation Beltway Black. Forsty-Haired Coupon Snipper. Depression-Haunted Can Stacker. Mid-American Knicknack Queen. Activist Tube Feeder. Trade School Metal Heads. Stone-Faced Urban Homeboys. 400-pound Tab Drinkers.]
246 -- ff. [The Focus Group scam -- testing Green's responsometer, getting a baseline reading on all possible emotions.]
253 -- "All the same," [Ogle] said, "they all react the same. The hunchback, the shooting, the pornography, and they all reacted differently. But when they're pissed off, they all look alike. And that's why self-righteousness is the most powerful force in politics."
255 -- [Cozzano proves his recovery by programming a VCR; but Zeldo, who has written half the Calyx OS, can't program a VCR...]
258 -- [All candidates appear to be brain-damaged.]
265 -- [Myron Morris, Ogle's film-and-video man:] "Americans may be undereducated, lazy, and disorganized, but they do one thing better than any people on the face of the earth, and that is watch television. The average eight-year-old American has absorbed more about media technology than a goddamn film student in most other countries. You can tell lies to them and they'll never know. But if you try to lie to them with the camera, they'll crucify you. Which is why, when we shoot home movies of your father, we use exactly the same machine that Joe Sixpack uses when he sends a tape of his dancing Dalmatian to America's Funniest Home Videos...." [Mary Catherine:] "Are you sure about this?" "Reagan did it in '80. I believe he made out okay."
270 -- [Mel drops out of the picture, pro tempore, because "Markene Caldicott" of "RNA" is out to pillory him -- read: Cokie Roberts and NPR.]
274 -- ff. [Zeldo and Cozzano work on developing extra-normal abilities using the new chip.]
276-77 -- "The whole point of this exercise was to figure out a way to use this chip in your head for communication," Zeldo said. Cozzano laughed. "You're right. I had forgotten about that." "I'm not sure how we use all of this stuff to communicate," Zeldo said. "It's all impressionistic stuff. Nothing rational." ""well," Cozzano said, "it's a new communications medium. What is necessary is to develop a grammar and syntax." Zeldo laughed and shook his head. "You lost me." "It's like film," Cozzano said. "When film was invented, no one knew how to use it. But gradually, a visual grammar was developed. Filmgoers began to understand how the grammar was used to communicate certain things. We have to do the same thing with this." "I should get you together with Cy Ogle," Zeldo said. "You should have studied more liberal arts," Cozzano said.
278 -- [Eleanor Richmond identifies the problem with Americans as a sense of entitlement, or self-righteousness.]
280 -- ff. [The story of Bianca Ramirez.]
287 -- [Ray del Valle:] "Hundreds of people are on the road today, all over the High Plains, because some cattle got hungry," Ray said. "And I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were several more cases of carbon monoxide poisoning in the backs of pickup trucks that we haven't heard about yet."
291 -- [Eleanor looks like she's "plotting an assassination."]
301 -- [Shad Harper undoes himself by seeking immediate confrontation -- betrayed by youth and hormones.]
302 -- [Eleanor:] "What is terrible is to live in a time when saying things is considered to be worse than doing them..."
302-303 -- [The people of Colorado are all welfare queens; Colorado couldn't exist without Federal largesse.]
303 -- [Eleanor:] "Because these people who come north across the border may not have gel in their hair and they may not have ostrich-hide cowboy boots, but unlike you, they have something a lot more important. They have values."
307 -- [Senator Marshall's analysis -- the white settlers who came west worked hard and sacrificed indeed, but they couldn't have made it without "cowboy socialism."]
311 -- [Genealogy and heritage of Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane -- James McLane the Okie; his sons, Elvis and Purvis.] Purvis later obtained a sinecure of sorts, as a founding member of the Hell's Angels."
312-313 -- Nimrod McLane, who among other distinctions had a Ph.D. in philosophy from Notre Dame, despised liberal hand-wringing types who were always whining about America being a violent society. These people had read too many poorly written accounts of bar fights that turned grisly.... Nimrod McLane had seen a lot of these altercations as a child. After his voice changed he participated in a few. He had a pretty clear understanding of how bar fights started and why they turned ugly. Americans participated in bar fights for exactly the same reason they had joined, with such gusto, the Civil War: because they had values and considered violence and mayhem a small price to pay.
314 -- ["Tip" McLane's triage: Odessas, Elvises, and Purvises: dumb and mean, dumb and reactive, or smart and mean. McLane is a Purvis all the way.]
314 -- Representative Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane [had?] values.
314-15 -- [Norman Fowler, Jr. gets shot from the race because of his encounter with Goofy at Disneyland; McLane's consultant, "Zeke" Zorn, thinks it must be Ogle himself in the Goofy suit.]
315 -- [McLane as Yosemite Sam.]
325 -- [Zeke Zorn thinks that Ogle set up Karl Fort's heart attack.]
326 -- [In which McLane becomes the Invisible Man -- see epigraph to this section of the book, from the Republic.]
328 -- [McLane slashes Fort's ambulance tires.]
333-34 -- [Senator Marshall indicates his disgust with the G.O.P.:] "I'm stuck in a party that was once for the individual, and now it's dedicated to controlling the individual."
337 -- [Marshall:] "The most dangerous thing in life is a person who constantly refers to 'values.' If I was going to write down my testament, that is it. None of us has the right to tell anyone else how to live. None of us has the right to hold back anybody else for any reason -- race, religion, income, or what have you. The rest of life is an open field, a crap shoot. The role of government is to make it an equal crap shoot for everybody."
338 -- [First introduction of Floyd Wayne Vishniak, in the database of the PIPER 100.]
340 -- During the past year he [Vishniak] had barely managed to earn his weight in dollars.
340-41 -- [The All-American PIPER 100. An interesting list.]
342-43 -- [F.W. Vishniak observes Aaron Green using the coat hook in his rental car; and becomes angry; demonstration of Vishniak's critical acumen.]
438-49 -- [Vishniak objects that his emotional responses are not the same as his opinions. He settles the issue by proposing the write letters.]
351 -- [The Eye of Cy; reading the color codes; the GODS truck.]
354-55 -- [The I/O setup with Cozzano -- coded responses; Cozzano as Argus, the 100-eyed monster.]
357 -- [Sponsors of the 1st presidential debate: Macintyre Engineering, GODS, Pacific Netware, Gale Aerospace, the Coover Fund.]
358 -- [Hunter P. Lawrence, political analyst talk show host, at 1st debate:] "Our federal leadership works only in response to pollsters and spin doctors; the sheer mediocrity at the executive, legislative, and judicial levels has driven away the most talented civil servants.
"The only sign of life is at the level of state government, and these officials are burdened to the point of paralysis by the albatross of Washington.
"The values that made this country what it once was -- hard work and honesty, or as Emerson put it, 'self-reliance' -- have, like our finances, gone to hell."
359 -- [Lawrence's history lesson: U.S. in 1990's is same as U.S. in 1890's -- divided, unjust, controlled by foreign interests, corrupt, unruly.]
362 -- [Cozzano clams up rather than bumble into the debate; Ogle:] "I have just invented a new form of political rhetoric: don't say a damn thing."
362 -- [Cozzano:] "I have certain values that I am not willing to play games with... One of the things I value is dignity and self-respect. These things are our birthrights. Some squander them. Once you have lost them, you can't get them back. And one way to squander your dignity and self-respect is to whine and carp and beg.... My attitude is that I don't care how unlevel the playing field is. I'm going to play by the rules anwyay."
363 -- "Huh. That's interesting," Ogle said. "The appeal to pride seems to work. But it's not old-fashioned jingoism. It's a question of personal, individual pride. Core values."
364 -- [Cozzano challenges "Tip" McLane to step outside.]
365 -- [Ogle feeds Cozzano a cue and he zings McLane about his draft deferment for Vietnam.]
366 -- [Ogle:] "We have to suppress that urge to philosophize."
367 -- [Ogle:] "This is good material. Reaganesque in its cloying nostalgia -- with the metaphorical punch of Ross Perot before he went batshit."
367 -- [Ogle's pollsters are able to project electoral-vote outcomes seconds after the first debate closes.]
370 -- [Cozzano claims to be unaware of the inputs coming from the Eye of Cy during the debate.]
371-72 -- [Cozzano rambles off into stream of consciousness, then jumps out of his car and takes off across a corn field; the seizures are caused by microwaves.]
374 -- [F.W. Vishniak's first letter -- berating himself for enjoying Cozzano's appeal to violence. "You will be hearing again from me soon, I am sure."]
377 -- ff. [Mels' rendezvous with Mary Catherine in the fields; filling her in on the plot.]
382 -- [Mel:] "Let's call it the Network." [How does he know the name?]
383 -- [Mel:] "My god, it's just like the Agency."
384 -- [Mel: Cozzano after the chip implantation is not the same man. Body snatchers (or brain snatchers); puppet masters.]
385 -- [Mary Catherine points out that Cozzano is mixed-brain dominant, giving him the ability, possibly, of functioning without the chip.]
391 -- Ronald Reagan had been an actor. At times, William A. Cozzano had begun to seem like a special effect.
399 -- [The parachute anecdote, and its inconsistencies; the Meyers factored out of the story.]
400 -- The man she'd [Mary Cartherine] just been watching on the TV set wasn't her dad. Everything he'd just said was an out-and-out fabrication. And Dad would never tell a lie. It wasn't her father. Mel was right.
401 -- [Proposal to work on hats with EM shielding.]
403 -- [Zeldo drops the word "Argus" in his conversation with Mary Catherine.]
405 -- [Vishniak's letter:] When he was in that debate in Decatur, Illinois, he spoke about his dad's parachute factory and how important it was to the men on D day standing in the open door of the plane. But today, he told a whole story about a bunch of paratroopers and how one of them came to personally thank his dad. This is a strange discrepancy, don't you think?
My opinion: something got scrambled up inside Cozzano's head when he had those troubles. And now, either he has memory troubles or else he can't tell right from wrong. So don't expect me to vote for him.
You will be hearing again from me soon, I am sure.
406 -- ff. [Mel Meyer as gumshoe -- tracking the Network, with the help of a bribeable GODS employee in Joplin MO.]
408 -- [Mel's credit cards have been canceled.]
411 -- [Mel] stopped half a mile short of Cacher, turned directly north onto a section line road, and drove north at a hundred miles an hour, turning up a roostertail of yellowish lead-saturated dust. Mel prided himself on being a rational man. Usually that meant controlling his fear. Today it meant giving in to it.
The faster he drove, the more frightened he became, and as the crossroads flashed by every six miles, he did not look either way. He was convinced that he was being pursued, and not until he crossed the Kansas line did he begin to slow down. His heart was pounding dangerously and his forehead was stiff from sweat, which poured out of his body and was dried to a crust by the air conditioner running full blast.
411 -- [Mel has been in the sights of Otis Simpson's 9 mm automatic pistol.]
412 -- [Otis wonders why Mel hasn't been killed. Otho's reply:] "That's not what this is about.... This is not violence, son. It's not war. It's not espionage. The whole point here is to get this country back to basics: contracts, markets, keeping your promises, meeting your responsibilities. Meyer's an honorable man and if we killed him we'd cut the ground out from under our feet."
418 -- [Vishniak transformed from ne'er-do-well into adviser to presidential candidate; corresponding change in behaviors.]
420 -- [Vishniak watches TV in the cornfields.]
423 -- [Vishniak's letter: detecting the lie about Lucullus Campbell.] Maybe things aren't completely fixed inside of his head. Maybe his brain's memory banks have been scrambled. Maybe that new chip or whatever that they used to fix up his brain is actually playing tricks with his memory!
425-26 -- [Chase Merriam, high-metabolism world dominator, has a car accident:] The side of your head always whacked into something. And that's where all of the good stuff was. The front of your head held your personality, and if the rim of the steering wheel happened to punch through it at sixty miles per hour, the worst you could expect was maybe a divorce and then you had to throw out your ties and buy new ones. Big deal. A personality change, after all these years of having the same old one, would be kind of interesting. But the side of your brain held all the good stuff. That's where you did your thinking. The left side, which was the one at risk during a side impact, contained your logical, rational, spatial capabilities, and if you got a hunk of imploding door frame jammed into that, you'd be out of a job. You'd have to start taking pottery classes.
434 -- [Chase Merriam's PIPER watch falls to Mae Hunter, intellectual bag lady, who warmly endorses the choice of Eleanor Richmond as VP.]
436 -- Mae Hunter knew all about [Eleanor Richmond], she had followed her career in the discarded pages of The New York Times. She was a modern-day hero. Mae pushed her way out through the buses and went onto the broad open bank of the Hudson to watch her girlfriend Eleanor.
438 -- [Eleanor:] "The fact that many black people nowadays aren't getting educated has nothing to do with how much money we spend on schools. Spending money won't help. Neither will writing educational software to run on your home TV set. It's just a question of values. If your family places a high value on being educated, you'll get educated, even if you have to do your homework on the back of a shovel. And if your family doesn't give a damn about developing your mind, you'll grow up stupid and ignorant even if you go to the fanciest private school in America.
"Now, unfortunately, I can't give you a program to help develop people's values. Personally, I'm starting to think that the fewer programs we have, the better off we are."
438 -- [Reminder that Cy has predicted Eleanor as first female president of the U.S.]
441 -- In some deep, remote part of her soul, Eleanor knew that she was achting just like the winning contestants on the game shows that she uysed to watch when she was unemployed. But she didn't care. Come to think of it, it wasn't a bad analogy. She had gone on the biggest quiz show of all time and won the penultimate prize.
441 -- [Cy's "metapundits" -- actors playing newscasters and analysts.]
444 -- [Ogle: Eleanor Richmond may have been a mistake, but since she has been chosen, she is from now on the right choice.]
444 -- [Vishniak's Eye of Cy screen goes from red to green; Ogle and Salvador assume that he's been in a bar fight and has just decked his opponent.]
445 -- [Vishniak's shift from red to green is really caused by his successful passage through the metal detectors at the Chicago convention site. See also 448.]
446 -- [Vishniak interprets the highways of Illinois:] The whole world was set up for the benefit of rich folks. That interstate, four beautiful lanes of pavement cutting straight across the state of Illinois, had been put there just to ferry the wealthy and privileged into Chicago so that they could go to conventions and meet with others of their kind and plot new conspiracies to keep the common man in his place: on the bottom.
446 -- [Vishniak identifies himself with U.S. Grant.]
448 -- [More Vishniak paranoia:] Looking up, he could see into the underside of McCormick Place's huge flat overhanging roof, which was supported and stiffened by a latticework of black girders. Laced through the structural members was a barely perceptible network of thin red lines -- a system of pipes carrying water to the automatic sprinkler system. As Vishniak worked his way down the steps, swept along by the eager Cozzano supporters, he wondered whether anyone else ever bothered to look up in the air and take notice of these things, these hidden connections and networks that were laced imperceptibly through the structure of everything.
450 -- [Vishniak takes the name "Sherman Grant."]
451 -- [Vishniak's mission: to protect Cozzano from the conspirators who are attempting to control him.]
452 -- [Vishniak finds the GODS truck containing the Eye of Cy.]
455 -- ff. [Eleanor Richmond is busted by hotel security in Chicago.]
457 -- [Eleanor's vindication: "Look at the TV."]
458 -- [After spontaneous protests break out over Eleanor's arrest, she is hustled off to the boonies. Giving her the message.]
460 -- [Cozzano takes to wearing homburg hats, reversing JFK's refusal to wear a hat.]
461 -- [Vishniak's TV reception isn't so good on the wrist unit:] That was okay. Images were all fakery and manipulation cobbled together by the evil gnomes of Ogle Data Research, who had their secret headquarters just a short distance away, in the mysterious place called Pentagon Towers. What counted was words. So when Cozzano stepped to the mircophones to make the formal campaign kickoff speech, Vishnak emptied his Fleischacker into a hapless beer can, set the safety, put the gun into the shoulder holster under his QUAD CITIES WHIPLASH windbreaker, and sat down on the tailgate of his pickup to listen to the murmuring of the stream and the speech that William A. Cozzano was delivering to him and the rest of the American people.
463 -- [Cozzano:] "What we need is to educate our children. But not just to cram their heads with facts and figures -- to teach them values as well, values of hard, steady work."
463 -- [Vishniak suspects that Cozzano is being fed his own, personal brain waves.]
464 -- [Vishniak goes to Pentagon Towers, armed and intent on mayhem... and gets a job.]
468 -- The purpose of this trip was not to develop new career paths. The purpose was to put bullets in the heads of the top management stratum of Ogle Data Research and then destroy as much of their high-tech brain-wave equipment as he could get into his gunsights before he himself was gunned down by the SWAT teams that showed up, so inevitably, at these kinds of events.
471 -- [Bent on impersonating a "Post-Confederate Gravy Eater," Vishniak decides he should call himself "Lee Jackson" or something similar.]
474 -- [Vishniak's paranoid reading of the White House, which seems much more complex and threatening on personal inspection than it ever does on TV.]
475 -- [Monitoring Vishniak's readouts during his time at Ogle Data Research:] "Incrdible cortex activity," Aaron [Green] said, scrutinizing the readout.
"What does that mean?" [Shane Schram]
"It means his mental gears are spinning at a million rpm. He's thinking way too hard about everything."
"Can't have that. We'll just throw out his results."
476 -- [As Vishniak goes on his shooting spree, Cozzano is making a speech to "a convention of gun nuts in Tulsa" -- of all states]
477 -- [Cozzano says "here I am" to the assembled gun nuts -- just as Vishniak announces himself, pyrotechnically, to Shane Schram. Vishniak shoots Schram, and the noise is dismissed as another of Schram's terror-experiments.]
480 -- [Cream of the irony: Vishniak's strong positive responses are interpreted as coming from Cozzano's gun-control speech, when they are in fact from actual mayhem.]
480 -- He had gone almost completely deaf from the blasts of the Fleischacker and couold barely hear the voice of William A. Cozzano coming from his PIPER watch... [and that voice is saying:] "Our retriever Lover would accompany us, often staying well back because he had learned that the blasts of the shotgun hurt his ears."]
483-84 -- [Vishniak's letter to the PostÊafter his raid on ODR -- he calls himself "Floyd Wayne Vishniak, esq."]
484 -- WAKE UP, AMERICA! The so-called election of the president is a SHAM controlled by the MEDIA MANIPULATORS who have turned Cozzano into a ROBOT by planting a CHIP IN HIS HEAD that receives secret coded transmissions from SATELLITES. These same MEDIA MANIPULATORS have also put BRAIN WAVE MONITORS on average people's wrists disguised as DICK TRACY WRISTWATCHES.
485 -- [Cozzano gives renewed meaning to the phrase, "great man," in sharp contrast to the other candidates.]
487 -- [Coded letter from the right side of Cozzano's brain.]
488 -- [The letter decoded.]
490 -- [Zeldo offers Mary Catherine instructions for a microwave interference device.]
491-92 -- [Historical analysis of Washington, D.C., a historically black city colonized by the federal government.]
492 -- [The Lady Wilburdon Gunshot Wound Institute.]
494 -- [Lady Wilburdon spills the beans to Eleanor Richmond: "We have solved the problem of elections."]
494-95 -- "It's all relative," Lady Wilburdon said. "It's all part of a long-range strategy."
"How long-range?"
"Centuries."
"Centuries?"
"There are only five entities in the world with sufficient wisdom to pursue consisten strategies over periods of several centuries," Lady Wilburdon said. "These entities are not national or governmental in nature -- even the best governments are dangerously unstable and short-lived. Such an entity is self-preserving and self-perpetuating. A world war, or the rise and fall of an empire or an alliacne such as the USSR or NATO, is no more serious, to it, than a gust of wind buffeting the sails of a clipper ship."
495 -- [The 5 Entities: the Catholic Church, Japan, " a loose network of shtetls," a mysterious fourth entity in Central Asia, and the Network itself. The Network is the evolutionary product of the East India Company, the Hudson's Bay Company, the American railroads, Standard Oil, and the high-techs of the late 20th century.]
495 -- [Eleanor:] "So you're saying that the Network is going to take over the United States?"
"The Network wouldn't want it," Lady Wilburdon said. "Governments, as I mentioned, are dodgy. All the Network wants is to stabilize the return on its investment in the national debt."
496 -- [Lady Wilburdon applies the analogy of business liquidation. Selling off the assets, restructuring affairs, getting the business back into competitive shape.]
497 -- [Jeremiah Freel, the Prince of Darkness, arrives in the book.]
499 -- [Freel breaks loose and heads straight for the Watergate.]
504 -- [The Mary Catherine Death Scare prank, sprung on Cozzano in Boston.]
508 -- ff. [Cozzano's big slide in the polls: from 59% on October 22 to 32% (behind Tip McClane) on October 28, to 29% on October 30.]
517 -- [Ogle neutralizes Freel by exposing him (literally) to the press.]
518 -- [Friday, November 1, "four days before Election Day:" the final Presidential debate -- but the first Tuesday in November, 2000 is the 7th; it's the 5th in 1996. Hmm.]
523 -- [Ogle's masterstroke -- Cozzano opts out of the campaign debate in order to change his oil.]
525 -- ["I am no longer interesting in campaigning for president of the United States."]
526 -- [Politics and motor oil.]
528 -- [The "important announcement" in Cozzano's address is for his son's book.]
531 -- [The Speaker of the House suffers a sudden stroke and is treated at the Radhakrishnan Institute.]
532 -- No one knew that the plan [for Cozzano's administration] was, beyond the endless evocation of the return to values, and its fiscal corollaries: cut the deficit, pay back ever penny of the debt.
535 -- He played [Scrabble] so often that even the Secret Service folks and the people at control stopped noticing it.
543 -- "Argus is not receiving any inputs.... Repeat: Argus is on his own."
549 -- [Two sets of documents, white (Cozzano lives) and black (Eleanor takes over. Eleanor asks -- black is bad, white is good? No, says Mel, white is Cozzano, black is Eleanor.]
553 -- [Vishniak passes Cozzano on the street, and asks about his brain waves.]
554 -- [Mary Catherine:] "That man didn't show any of the external symptoms of an active psychotic. But he sure talked like one."
556 -- [The stun gun to the rescue -- Cozzano fries his chip.]
557 -- [Mel asks Cozzano if he feels like being President today.]
561 -- [Vishniak recognizes Ogle from NYT Magazine and Time.]
562 -- [Vishniak lifts elite invitation from Ogle and then walks out of his life.]
563-64 -- [Cozzano's inauguration: his first act after taking office is to declare martial law in D.C.]
566 -- Vishniak had come to an astonishing realization as he had listened to Cozzano's speech: he was too late. Cozzano was lost.... Cozzano was staging a doup d'etat. He was turning America's great democratic system into a dictatorship. Right before Vishniak's eyes.
567 -- [The fatal shot. Teflon bullet.]
568 -- [Vishniak killed by a hand blow from Rufus Bell.]
570 -- [Eleanor Richmond nearly assassinated by Althea Coover, DeWayne Coover's granddaughter.]
571 -- Anyone wearing white tie or a formal gown was now viewed with intense suspicion by the Posse. Mary Catherine and Eleanor found themselves dead center in the Rotunda, surrounded by Posse members facing outward, as the remaining guests were herded toward the outside of the room.
573 -- [Death of Cozzano, after having been President for a little over an hour.]
575 -- [Ogle arrested on the charge of turning the Attorney General's best friend into a degraded slave; "You'll be with people much like yourself."]
577 -- [Ogle reunited with Jeremiah Freel.]
578 -- [Otho Simpson dead; Otis Simpson decamps and begins to walk south.]
578-80 -- [Downfall of Dr. Radhakrishnan: the revenge of the WUBBA WUBBA man.]
580-81 -- [Zeldo escapes from the Radhakrishnan Institute in California, shortly before it is taken out by a stealth cruise missile.]
582 -- [Eleanor:] "I know what you're thinking.... This can't be happening. This bitch can't possibly be our president. It won't last. Well, it is happening. I am the President. And I will continue to be for the next eight years. You'd better get used to it."
582 -- [Eleanor sets up her door jamb in the Oval Office.]
583 -- [Finis -- Eleanor to Mary Catherine:] "Would you like to come over to my place and help me unpack?"