To which the President supposedly replied with a bland, unhesitating smile, “I always say there’s no hard feelings if no one’s defeated. Well, sir, no one’s defeated in a fight where the referee can’t make a decision.”
Apocryphal though it may have been, this remark expressed the mood of Abnegite America perfectly. “As pleasant as a no-decision bout” became part of everyday language.
Certainly as apocryphal as the George Washington cherry-tree legend, but the most definite Abnegism of them all was the one attributed to the President after a performance of Romeo and Juliet. “ It is better not to have loved at all, than to have loved and lost,” he is reported to have remarked at the morbid end of the play.
At the inception of Abnego’s sixth term—the first in which his oldest son served with him as Vice-President—a group of Europeans reopened trade with the United States by arriving in a cargo ship assembled from the salvaged parts of three sunken destroyers and one capsized aircraft carrier.
Received everywhere with undemonstrative cordiality, they traveled the country, amazed at the placidity—the almost total absence of political and military excitement on the one hand, and the rapid technological retrogression on the other. One of the emissaries sufficiently mislaid his diplomatic caution to comment before he left:
“We came to America, to these cathedrals of industrialism, in the hope that we would find solutions to many vexing problems of applied science. These problems—the development of atomic power for factory use, the application of nuclear fission to such small arms as pistols and hand grenades—stand in the way of our postwar recovery. But you, in what remains of the United States of America, don’t even see what we, in what remains of Europe, consider so complex and pressing. Excuse me, but what you have here is a national trance!”
His American hosts were not offended: they received his expostulations with polite smiles and shrugs. The delegate returned to tell his countrymen that the Americans, always notorious for their madness, had finally specialized in cretinism.
But another delegate who had observed widely and asked many searching questions went back to his native Toulouse (French culture had once more coagulated in Provence) to define the philosophical foundations of the Abnegite Revolution.
In a book which was read by the world with enormous interest, Michel Gaston Fouffnique, sometime Professor of History at the Sorbonne, pointed out that while twentieth-century man had escaped from the narrow Greek formulations sufficiently to visualize a non-Aristotelian logic and a non-Euclidean geometry, he had not yet had the intellectual temerity to create a non-Platonic system of politics. Not until Abnego.
“Since the time of Socrates,” wrote Monsieur Fouffnique, “Man’s political viewpoints have been in thrall to the conception that the best should govern. How to determine that ‘best,’ the scale of values to be used in order that the ‘best’ and not mere undifferentiated ‘betters’ should rule—these have been the basic issues around which have raged the fires of political controversy for almost three millennia. Whether an aristocracy of birth or intellect should prevail is an argument over values; whether rulers should be determined by the will of a god as determined by the entrails of a hog, or selected by the whole people on the basis of a ballot tally—these are alternatives in method. But hitherto no political system has ventured away from the implicit and unexamined assumption first embodied in the philosopher-state of Plato’s Republic.