Fantastic Metropolis

1. NOON

“There is this same anti-Semitism in America. I hear the swirl and mutter of it around me in restaurants, at clubs, on the beach, in Washington, in New York, and here at home. No basis exists for the statements that accompany it. ‘The Jews,’ people say, ‘own the radio, the movies, the theaters, the publishing companies, the newspapers, the clothing business, and the banks. They are just one big family, banded together against the rest of humanity, and they are getting control of the media of articulation so that they can control us. They have depraved every art form. They are doing it simply to break down our moral character and make us easy to enslave. Either we will have to destroy them, or they will ruin us.’”

—Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers, New York, 1942

“Let a Jew into your home and for a month you will have bad luck.”

—Moroccan proverb

“Let an American into your home and soon he will own your family.”

—Lebanese proverb

“We call them ‘sand niggers’.”

—Coca-Cola senior executive in private conversation

“A nation without shame is an immoral nation.”

—Lobkowitz, Beyond the Dream, Prague, 1937

“THEY APPEAR TO have broken another treaty.” Jerry Cornelius frowned and removed something like a web from his smart black coat. Slipping his Thinkman into his breast pocket he fingered his heat. His nostrils burned. There was a wired, cokey sort of feel to the atmosphere. Probably only gas.

“Pardon?” Trixibell Brunner, dressed to kill with a tasteful U.N. armband, was casting about in the dust for something familiar. “So fill me in on this one. Who started it?”

“They did, naturally.” The UN representative was anxious to get the interview over. They had staked him into the ash by way of encouragement and the desert sun was now shining full on his face. His tunic flashes said he was General Thorvald Fors. The Pentagon had changed his name to something Scandinavian as soon as he got the U.N. appointment. It sounded more trustworthy. He had already explained to them how he was really Vince Paolozzi, an Italian from Brooklyn and cursed with a mother who preferred his cousin to him. His familiar family reminiscences, his litanies of favourite foods, the status of his family’s ethnicicity, his connections with the ultra-famous, his mafiosities, the whole pizza opera, had finally got on their nerves and for a while they had given him a shot of novocaine in the vocal chords. But now they were exhausting the miscellaneous Sudanese pharmaceuticals they’d grabbed at random on their way through Omdurman. The labels were pretty much of a mystery. Jerry’s Arabic didn’t run to over-the-counter drugs.