Page 101 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons
P. 101

One Born Every Minute

          “Garfield,  with  the  physically  limited  Arthur  as  running-mate,
        barely won the election. Garfield was a dignified man who stayed
        home  during  electioneering;  his  was  not  the  last  so-called  front
        porch campaign in the nineteenth century, but he did not have a
        front man like McKinley had in Mark Hanna to do the active work
        for  him.  With  Barnum,  however,  in  this  story  of  what-if,  he  was
        handed the best person in the country to stir up interest, creating
        ballyhoo  and  presenting  Garfield—in  absentia,  of  course—as  the
        people’s  choice  instead  of  the  war  hero  Winfield  Hancock.  In
        reality,  Garfield  barely  had  a  majority  of  the  popular  vote;  with
        Barnum out stumping for him, it would have been a landslide.”
          “And that is the background for ‘One Born Every Minute’. As
        you are all aware, Garfield was assassinated barely four months into
        his term of office. That would give Barnum the presidency for more
        than three-and-a-half years. What then? Would he prove either as
        noble or as corrupt as any of his predecessors in the Oval Office?
        Impeachment?  Re-election?  Given  all  the  ambiguities  and
        ambivalences of his prior very public life, what would become his
        goals or pet projects? How would the electorate or the rest of the
        government  react  to  him?  So  many  ways  to  go  with  this!  How
        would you present this alternate and very divergent history?”
          “It seems to me,” said Brad Razeberry, “that something big has
        to be effected:  that’s how  these  things usually go. In fact,  that is
        their  raison  d’être.  You  have  effectively  played  a  wild  card,  an
        applecart-upsetter in the genteel world of elite politicians ahead of
        describing  the  applecart.  That  somehow  seems  backward  to  me.
        You should have decided what you want changed first, then find
        the usually small tweak in affairs that would lead to it. But I’m not
        the right guy to supply a suggestion anyway: I don’t think alternate
        history  is  or  should  be  considered  science  fiction,  on  the  same
        grounds that time travel and anything else violating the rather well-
        established  laws  of  physics  should  be  relegated  to  fantasy,  pure
        imaginaries. There really are two kinds of ‘what-if’—extrapolations
        of  possibility,  no  matter  how  remote,  and  this  kind  of  second-
        guessing  of  what  cannot  be  altered  and  is  therefore  impossible.
        They are not the same thing.”

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