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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