Plain Speaking/More Political Wisdom

(I wanted an image of Caesar and remembered that he appeared in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman but we didn't need a caption with arrows. The boy is Augustus.)

Poul Anderson, Shield, XI.

Nathan Abrams, a director of General Atomics, has political influence comparable to that of a US Senator. Jan Trembecki, Abrams' confidential secretary, speaks truth to power:

Caesarism has arisen in the US in response to the problem of survival in a thermonuclear age;

Caesar should not be overthrown at the price of a weakening civil war;

disruption of precariously balanced social forces could cause economic chaos, opening the way for dictatorship;

the popular will wants a strong man because freedom is not worth starvation;

(Marcus, director of Military Security, seems to be the "Caesar" in question);

Marcus has many admirers because Abrams' kind have failed to solve "'...foreign enmity, overpopulation, maldistribution, educational lag and social vacuums.'" (p. 86);

the American upper classes falling out like Marius and Sulla would make things worse.

As Manse Everard of the Time Patrol, "Everardus the Goth," said to another historical Roman general:

"'There, was that plain-spoken enough?'"
-Poul Anderson, "Star of the Sea" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 467-640 AT 16, p. 606.

I agree with Trembecki's list of problems except "overpopulation." If we have four people and three lunch packs in a car, then we say that there are too few lunches, not that there are too many people. There is indeed "maldistribution" of food but every extra mouth to feed is an extra pair of hands to produce food or something else to exchange for it.

Trembecki sounds like Anderson's Chunderban Desai. This book is an sf thriller - and a political treatise.