Cheering for the Rockets

A Jerry Cornelius Story

by Michael Moorcock

‘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 theatres, 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 Thinkmanä 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 UN 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 UN 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.

‘I see you decided to settle out of court.’ Jerry stared at the general, trying to recognise him. There was a memory. A yearning. Gone. ‘Are you on our side?’

‘What we say in public isn’t always what we mean in private?’ The general’s display of caps seemed to be an appeal.’

‘A legalistic rather than a lawful country, wouldn’t you say? That’s the problem with constitutional law. Never has its feet on the ground.’

Lobkowitz came to look down at the general. He was behaving so uncharacteristically that for a second Jerry was convinced the old diplomat would piss on Fors. The handsome soldier bureaucrat now resembled a kind of horizontal messiah.

The prince fingered his fly. ‘Nowadays, America’s a white recently pubescent baptist festooned with an arsenal of sophisticated personal weaponry. Armed and ignorant. Don’t cross him. Especially if you’re a girl. Captain Cornelius, we’re dealing with Geronimo here, not Ben Franklin. Geronimo understood genocide as political policy. He knew what was happening to him. Somehow inevitably that savage land triumphed over whatever was civilised in its inhabitants. They are its children at last.’ Prince Lobkowitz turned in the rubble to look out at the desert, where the Egyptian Sahara had been. His stocky fatigue-clad body was set in an attitude of hopeless challenge. His long grey hair rose and fell in the wind. His full mouth was rigid with despair. He was still mourning for his sons and his wife, left in Boston. For the dream of a lifetime. For peace. ‘Our mistake.’

Jerry sniffed again at the populated air. ‘Is that cordite?’ He touched his lips with his tongue. ‘Or chewing gum.’ He had pulled on a vast white gelabea, like a nightshirt, and a white cap. His skin had lost some of its flake. He wondered if he shouldn’t have brought more power. He’d only come along for the debris.

‘All that informal violence. Out of control. Reality always made yanks jumpy.’ Shaky Mo licked his M18’s mechanisms, feeling for tiny faults. ‘They’re good at avoiding it, of forgetting it. If it can’t be romanticised or sentimentalised it’s denied. Fighting virtual wars with real guns. That’s why they export so much escapism. It’s their main cash crop. That’s why they’ve disneyfied the world. And why they’re so welcome. Who wants to buy reality? Fantasy junkies get very aggressive when their junk is threatened. You all know that sententious American whine.’ He tasted again. He was hoping to identify the grade of his oil. He had become totally obsessed with maintenance.

‘If I were Toney Blurr I would stick a big missile right up Boston’s silly Irish bottom. Where the republican terrorist’s paymasters live. Remind them who we are. Bang, bang. And it would make the protestants feel so much better. People in the region would understand. They admire that kind of decisive action. CNN-ready, as we say. Such a precise, well-calculated single, efficient strike would cut off the terrorist’s bases and supplies and lose them credibility with their host nation. Bang. Bang. Bang.’

Everyone ignored the baroness. Behind her yashmack her mad old eyes glared with the zealotry of a recent convert. Since her last encounter with Ronald Reagan she had become strangely introspective, constantly trying to rub the thick unpleasant stains from the sleeve of her business suit. Not that she had been herself since three o’clock or whenever it was. There was a lot to be said for the millennial crash. It had questioned the relevance and usefulness of linear time.

‘Universal altzheimers,’ said Jerry. ‘Where?’

‘Eh?’ said Lady B’s wizened fingers roamed frantically over her ice-blue perm. ‘Would you say it was getting on for four?’

‘Water...’ General Fors moved pointlessly in his bonds, the stakes shifting in the ash, but holding. His uniform was in need of repair. His cheeky red white and blue UN flashes were offensive to eyes grown used to an overcast world. Even his blood seemed vulgar. His skin was too glossy. They hadn’t been able to get his helmet off easily so Mo had spray-painted it matt black. General Fors was also mainly black. His face gleamed and cracked where the paint had already set. ‘Momma...’

‘You’re coming up with an unrealistic want list, pard.’ Jerry was the only one to feel sorry for him. ‘Anything more local and we’ll happily oblige.’

‘Home...’

‘You are home. You just don’t recognise it.’ Mo’s guffaw was embarrassing. ‘Home of the grave. Land of the fee. You discount everything you have that’s valuable. You sell it for less than the traders paid for Manhattan. Now all that’s left are guns and herds of overweight buffalo wallowing across a subcontinent of syrup. They don’t hear the distant firing any more. Or see the clouds of flies.’

‘Fries?’ said General Fors.

Prinz Lobkowitz had now relieved himself. His hopeless eyes regarded the general. ‘You had a vital, successful trading nation reasonably aware of its cultural shortcomings. Which everyone liked. We liked your film stars. We liked your music. Your sentimental cartoon world. And then you had to take the next step and become an imperial power. Burden of empire. Malign by definition. Hated by all. Including yourselves. You’re not a country any more, you’re an extended episode of The X-Files.’

‘Missiles!’ The general tried a challenge. His head rolled with the fear of it.

‘All used up now, general. Remember? HQ filled them with poisoned sugar and wacoed them into your own system. The bitterness within. Double krauted. Flies? You think this is bad. You should see California.’ Babbling crazy, Mo appeared to take some personal pride in the decline.

‘You told him this was California.’ Any hint of metaphor made Trixibell uneasy and simile got her profoundly aggressive. ‘Is that fair?’ She cleared her throat. She patted her chest.

‘Lies...’ said General Fors. His big brown eyes appealed blankly to heaven. The sun had long since disabled them.

‘I call it retrospeculation.’ A goat bleated. Professor Hira came waving out of the nearest black tent. With their vehicles, the Berber camp was the only shelter in a thousand miles. The plucky little Brahmin had an arrangement with the sheikhh. He was still wearing his winter djellabah. He had his uniform cap on at a jaunty angle. Behind him, above the dark folds of heavy felt the tribe’s cycling satellite dish forever interpreted the clouds. ‘Anyway. What does geography mean now?’

‘Lies...’

‘Too right. You dissed the whole fucking world, man. Then you ojayed it. But not forever. You were neither brave, free nor respectful. Once we couldn’t use your engines what could you offer us except death?’ Shaky Mo stepped in the general’s lap, crossing to the useless desert cruiser and climbing slowly up the camouflage webbing to his usual perch on the forward gun tower. ‘Not that I approved of everyone leaving the UN.’

‘We are the UN,’ explained General Fors. ‘At least let me keep my Ferraris.’

‘Your mistake was to get up the Mahdi’s nose, mate. A poor grasp of religion, you people. And what’s worse, you have bad memories.’ Pulling down the general’s shades, Mo set himself on snooze. Gently, his equipment fizzed and muttered, almost a lullaby. He swung slowly in his rigging. From his phones came the soothing pounding of Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes.

To be fair, General Fors had got up all their noses. Leaving old Lady Brunner wandering about in the dried-up oasis, the rest of them moved into the desert leviathan’s shade. They felt uneasy if they wandered too far from the huge land-ship Her Kirbyesque aesthetics were both comforting and stunning. But her function left something to be desired. The General Gordon had been breaking down ever since they’d fled Khartoum. The vehicle had been the best they could find. At a mile to the gallon it wasn’t expensive to run. The world was full of free gas. From somewhere inside the ship their engineer, Colonel Pyat, could be heard banging and cursing at the groaning hydraulics and whispering cooling systems. Sometimes it was hard to tell the various sounds apart. The machine had its own language.

Jerry wondered at the sudden sensation in his groin. Was he pregnant?

He paused and looked up at the pulsing sky. At least they’d had the sense not to fly.

* * *

Last winter, in the first precious weeks of war, our Senate used three of them to argue the moral turpitude of one member. That is as sad a sight as this democracy has seen this century.
Philip Wylie, ibid.

We kept reporting to our officers that there were large number of Germans all around us, together with heavy transport and artillery, but the brass told us we were imagining things. There couldn’t be Germans there. Intelligence hadn’t reported any.
Survivor, The Battle of the Bulge.

For some weeks after their arrival in Bosnia the Americans spent millions of dollars in a highly-publicised bridge building exercise. The whole time they were building it local people kept telling them there was an easy fording place about half a mile downriver. Intelligence had not reported it.
Survivor, Bosnia

You have to tell the White House and the Pentagon what they want to hear or they won’t listen to you. That’s how we got blamed for the Bay of Pigs after we’d warned against it.
Ex-CIA officer.

WE DON’T DIAL 911
Commercial Texan home signboard painted on silhouette of a sixgun.

‘Everything’s perfectly simple,’ General Fors had rid himself of his various stigmata and had repainted his helmet a pleasing apple green. His attempts at Arabic lettering were a little primitive, but showed willing, even if his crescent looked like a sickle. ‘It’s just you people who complicate everything. We were so comfortable.’

They had made him security officer and put him near the revolving door. The hotel was deserted. Through the distant easterly windows guttered a wasteland of wrecked cars and abandoned flyovers, a browned world.

‘Too many, you know, darkies.’ Jillian Burnes, the famous transexual novelist, was the only resident now. She was reluctant to leave. She had been here for six months, she said, and made a little nest for herself. She had come on a British Council trip and lost touch for a while. Her massive feet up on the Ark of the Covenant, she was peeling an orange. ‘This operation was aimed at thinning them out a bit.’

‘So far it seems to have firmed them up a bit.’ Jerry was helping the general buckle his various harnesses together. He dusted off his uniformed back. ‘All this red plush is a natural sand trap.’

In the elegant lobby, its mirrors almost wholly intact, they had piled their booty in rough categories - domestic, religious, entertainment, military, electronic, arts - and were resting at the bar enjoying its uninvaded largesse. Even the sky was quiet now. The customers had all fled on the last plane. And the last plane had gone down in the rush. They could have been in New York or Washington. Had there still been a New York or Washington.

Giving the general a final brush, Jerry wondered why so much of Jerusalem was left.

The other British Council refugee was dwarfish Felix Martin, son of the famous farting novelist, Rex. A popular tennis columnist in his own right and virtual war face for the breakfast hit Washington Toast, Felix dabbed delicately at his dockers and looked tragically up at Trixibell.

‘Baby?’ said Trix.

‘Have you been over here before? Is that blood, do you think?’

* * *

But, until man is willing to pay the cost of peace he will pay the price of war, and, since they must be precisely equal, I ask you to consider for how many more ages you think man will be striking balances with battles? ... But recollect that, to have peace, congresses will be compelled to appropriate for others as generously as they do now for our armies, and the taxpayers will have to pay as willingly, and as many heroes will have to dedicate their lives to the maintenance of tranquillity as are now risking them to restore it.
Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers.

Man is still so far from considering himself as the author of war that he would hardly tolerate a vast paid, public propaganda designed to point out the infinite measure of his private dastardliness and he would still rather fight it out in blood than limit the profitable and vain activities of peace in order to study his personal conscience.
Philip Wylie, ibid.

Once you get it (your market economy) in place, you’ll take off like a rocket.
Bill Clinton to the Russian Duma, 1^st September 1998.

‘They must have felt wonderful, bringing the benefits of German culture to a world united under their benign flag.’ The three had strolled out to what was probably the Reichstag or possibly a cinema. The set, so spectacular in its day, had received one of the first strikes specifically aimed at Disney. Jerry picked up a fluffy dumbo.

‘These aren’t Germans,’ Trixibell tucked everything back in. ‘These are Americans.’ She remassaged her hair.

‘Did I say Americans? They loved the Nazis, too. I remember when I worked for Hearst in 38. Or was it CBS? Good old Putzi. A Harvard man, you know. Or Ford? Or Goebbels? Or 49? Uncle Walt admired the artwork and slogans, but he thought he could make the system function better over here. And they were, indeed, far more successful. Still, the patterns don’t change.’

‘You have to take the jobs where you find them.’ Trixibell, in sharp black and white, pouted her little mouth. In her day she had firmly enjoyed the ears, tongues and privates of cardinals and presidents. She was a prettier, modern and more aggressive version of her old mum, who had been bought by a passing trader.

‘It’s what the fourth estate is all about. It’s what the public says. It’s what we say. I mean, this is what we say, right?’ Felix was having some trouble getting his sentence going. He didn’t like the look of Mo’s elaborate ordnance. ‘Are those real guns?’ His melancholy nose twitched nervously above prominent teeth, a glowering dormouse. Tough cotton shirt, serviceable chinos, jumper, jacket, all bearing the St Michael brand. Marks guaranteed middle-class security. Lands End. Eddie Bauer. Oxfam gave him the shudders. He was strict about it. His life was nothing if not exclusive.

He withdrew into his clothing as if into a shelter. It was all he had left of his base. ‘Oh bum. Oh piss. Oh shit. Oh bum.’

‘Hallelulla,’ said Jerry. He was beginning to feel his old self. ‘Or is that Hallelujah?’

‘Bum again?’ Trixibell scented at the wind. ‘Was that Felix. Or you?’

‘Childish bee. Where’s the effin loo, lovey?’ Jillian Burnes hefted her magnificent gypsy skirts and stepped lushly into the shaft of light coming through the roof. ‘Must be the Clapham Astoria.’ For years she had survived successfully on such delusions. ‘I used to be the manager here.’ She swung her borrowed mane. She fluttered her massive lashes. She smacked her surgical scarlet lips. ‘This is what comes of moving south of the river. What actually happened to the money?’

‘Computers et it.’ Mo was admiring. He had found some more glue. ‘The Original Insect et it. Millennium insect. Ultimate bug. Munch munch. Bug et everything. Chomp. Chomp. Chomp. Et the time. Et the dosh. Et the info. Et the control. Et the entire lousy dream. The house of floss. It all went so quickly. Gobbled up our world and all its civilisation and what do we have to show for it?’

‘Some very picturesque ruins,’ she pointed out. ‘Heritage sites. Buy now while they’re cheap. Especially here at the centre of our common civilisation! Imagine the possibilities. Yes. Yummy.’

‘Yum, yum, yum,’ said Jerry.

‘Yummy. That’s so right,’ said Trixie.

‘Fuck all,’ said Mo. ‘I mean fuck off.’

‘How?’ Jillian swung like a ship at anchor. Then she remembered who she was. She sighed, as if making steam, and continued her stately progress across the floor. Mo traipsed in her wake.

‘Lies,’ said the general.

Jerry whacked at the old soldier’s head with a sympathetic slapstick. ‘Those aren’t lice. They’re locusts.’

* * *

To maintain our low degree of vigilance we had to adopt the airy notion either that nobody was preparing for war or else (since almost everybody was) that the coming war could not touch us. We necessarily chose the latter self-deception.
Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers.

The news out of Jonesboro, Ark., last week was a monstrous anomaly: a boundary had been crossed that should not have been. It was a violation terrible enough to warrant waking the Presidentof the U.S. at midnight on his visit to Africa, robbing him of sleep till daylight.
TIME, April 6 1998.

It is our goal to teach every school child in Texas to read.
George W. Bush Election Commercial.

‘Faid-bin-Antar’ touched his cup to the samovar and his servant turned the silver tap. Amber tea fell into the bowl. Listening with delight to the sounds it made, the old sheikhh seemed to read meaning into it. His delicate, aquiline face was full of controlled emotion. Behind the RayBans his eyes held a thousand agonies.

Brushing rapidly at his heavy sleeve, he stared through the tall ornamental window to his virtual garden where Felix Martin’s head, its bushy brows shading uncertain eyes, continued to present his show. His body had been buried for twelve days. His ratings were enormous. The virtual fountain continued to pump. The antique electronics flickered and warped, mellow eccentricities. Sepia light washed over Jerry’s body, giving it strange angles, unusual beauty. Jerry was flattered. He was surprised the generator had lasted this long.

‘We who work so hard for peace are insulted by every act of aggression. When that aggression is committed by individuals, whatever cause they claim, we are outraged. But when that aggression is committed in the name of a lawful people, then we have cause to tremble and fear the apocalypse.’

The sheikh sighed and looked carefully into Jerry’s painted features. He turned his head, contemplating the dust. ‘For fifty years I have struggled to bring understanding and equity to North and South. I have brought fanatics to the discussion table and turned them into diplomats. I have overseen peace agreements. I have written thousands of letters, articles, books. I have dissuaded many men from turning to the gun. And all that has been destroyed in a few outrageous moments. Making diplomats into fanatics. To satisfy some pervert’s personal frustration with the United States and to make an impotent president and his overprivileged, under-informed constituency feel good for an already forgotten second. The very law they claim to represent is the law they flout at every opportunity.’ Sheikhh Faid was still waiting for news of his daughters.

Jerry took a handfull of pungent seeds and held them to his nose before putting them in his mouth. ‘They’re trying.’ But the sheikhh was throwing a hand towards his glowing, empty screens. His voice rose to a familiar pitch.

‘As if any action the Americans ever attempted didn’t fail! They never listen to their own people. Those officials are all swagger and false claims. True bureacrats. When will it dawn on them that they have lost all these phoney wars. When will they be gracious enough to admit failure? How can they believe that the methods which created disaster at home will somehow work abroad? They spread their social diseases with careless aggression. It’s a measure of their removal from reality. There was a time, sadly, when the U.S. people understood what a farce their representatives made of things. They used their power to improve the world.’ He beamed, reminiscent. For a heartbeat his eyes lost their pain.

‘I used to enjoy those Whitehall farces when I was a student. Do they still run them? Brian Rix’s trousers fell as regularly as the sun set. Simpler satisfactions, I suppose.’

‘Failure,’ Jerry said. ‘They don’t know the meaning of the word. Imperialism’s no more rational than racism. That’s why they fly so well together.’

‘Well, of course, you know all about imperialism. You’ll enjoy this.’ With both hands the sheikh passed Jerry the intricate cup. ‘The English love Assam, eh? Now, what about these Americans?’

Jerry shrugged.

He reached beyond the carpet to run his gloved hand through the ash. It was fine as talc. You could powder a baby with it. ‘We’re defined by our appetites and how we control them They’ve made greed a virtue. What on earth possesses them?’ He tasted and returned the glittering cup.

Folding his slender old fingers around the bowl’s delicate ornament, Sheikh Faid savoured his tea. He considered it. He scented at it.

Jerry wondered about watching a video.

After a while, Sheikh Faid began to giggle softly to himself. Behind him the endless grey desert rose and fell like an ocean. The wind cut it into complex arabesques, a constantly changing geometry. Sometimes it revealed the bones of the old mosque and the tourist centre, but covered them again rapidly, as if disturbed by memories of a more comfortable past.

Soon Sheikh Faid was heaving with laughter. ‘There is no mystery to how those Teutons survive or why we fear them. It is a natural imperative. They migrate. They proliferate. Like any successful disease. It’s taken them so little time. First they conquered Scandinavia, then Northern Europe and then the world. And they wonder why we fear them. That language! It reminds me of Zulu. It buzzes with aggressive intelligence. It cannot fail to conquer. What a weapon! Blood will out, it seems. Ah, me. It costs so much blood. The conquest of space.’

As if remembering a question, he reached to touch Jerry’s yielding knee. Signalling for more tea, he pointed to the blooming horizon.

‘It is their manifest destiny.’

Philip Wylie (1902-1971) wrote Gladiator (1930), the direct inspiration for the Superman comic strip. As well as the co-author of When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide (1933 and 1934) he wrote a number of imaginative and visionary stories including ‘The Disappearance’ (1951). His non-fiction, such as Generation of Vipers, is relevant today. His essay ‘Science Fiction and Sanity in an Age of Crisis’ was published in 1953. His work was in the Wellsian rather than the US pulp tradition and remains very lively. He scripted The Island of Lost Souls (Dr Moreau) (1932) and The Invisible Man (1933). Other books included Finnley Wren, Corpses At Indian Stones and Night Unto Night. Much of his work was a continuing polemic concerned with his own nation, for whom he invented the term ‘momism’ to explain how sentimentality and over-simplification would be the ruin of American democracy.