The Britannula Spectator/ The President's Trollope
Caldwell, Christopher
The President's Trollope by Christopher Caldwell t is one thing to read the literary classics as if they were timeless; quite another to hold that they were written specifically for today....
...Gabriel Crasweller, the popular farmer who is scheduled to be the first 'Oxford , 186 pages, $8.95 (paper...
...Then, Neverbend attacks his opponents on conflict-of-interest grounds: they oppose the scheme because they're afraid to die...
...To his anti-Fixed Period wife, he is a tut-tutting Michael Kinsley ("And she does not, in truth, mean a tenth of what she says...
...The Fixed Period is narrated in first person by President Neverbend, a radical who has somehow become a mainstream politician in the former British colony of Britannula, whose young inhabitants, fleeing a deficit crisis in New Zealand, preoccupy themselves with building their country's infrastructure...
...t's ironic that, while Trollope generally appeals because of the timelessness of his obsession with love-in-society, this overtly ideological jeu d'esprit speaks to us through its very topicality...
...He adds, as an afterthought, "And the cremating furnace must be removed...
...To his anti–Fixed Period son he is a Kennedy ("Have you no love of country, no patriotism, no feeling at any rate of what has been done for the world's welfare by your own family...
...No second term...
...But now, when the idea was represented to my mind's eye, I acknowledged to myself that it would be impossible that she should be left there for the occasion...
...I was immune to such post-facto allegorizing of the classics until I read The Fixed Period,1 Anthony Trollope's futuristic novel of politically correct euthanasia, written in 1881 but set a hundred years later...
...Villains are always better drawn then heroes, and when you run down the years from the Celestina to Lady Macbeth to Madame Defarge, you realize that reading the classics in light of contemporary politics is like going on a six-century-long date with Hillary Clinton—an argument for euthanasia if I've ever heard one...
...James's 1940s rereading of MobyDick, in which the Pequod is "industrial society," Ahab the Hitlerite "executive" class, Starbuck the bourgeois-moralitydrugged proletariat, and Ishmael the Marxist intellectual vanguard...
...The latter is most often a failing of the left, and comic examples abound—like the Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R...
...Not every age is one of blockheaded reform like our own, but the early 1880s were...
...C rasweller and his allies ("a scum of the population . . . men who knew nothing of progress and civilisation") are motivated primarily by the desire to keep providing for their families, so Neverbend stipulates that old people spend their last year in a "college," where "the mind may be weaned from the ignoble art of moneymaking...
...The aged are to be not executed, but "deposited...
...Which pretty much settles it: 'Though to me the politico-economical view of the subject was always very strong, the relief to be brought to the aged was the one argument to which no reply could be given...
...killed, balks...
...Unfortunately, "the people for whose welfare I had done it all" do not see it the same way...
...To that end, Neverbend comes up with the "Fixed Period," a combination health plan/industrial policy, which will enrich the state by rationing health care to the old in the most efficient way possible—by killing them at the age of 68...
...Still, I'm not sure I approve of extending this topicality-mongering exercise to Trollope's other books, or to literature in general...
...Neverbend wins over "the more quickly intelligent inhabitants of Britannula," and gains support from a Loser Bloc, who actually want to die, and petition for the age of dispatch to be lowered...
...And John Major did give Clinton a copy of Trollope's The Way We Live Now last March...
...That is, there are never any moral problems with the plan, only logistical ones: When Crasweller's daughter anticipates the horror of her father's execution, Neverbend treats it as a practical difficulty: "I had not in truth thought of it...
...I had loved [Crasweller] the better because I had endeavoured to commence my experiment on his body...
...I had felt a vicarious regard for the honour which would have been done him, almost regarding it as though I myself were to go in his place...
...Besides, it couldn't be murder, since "this thing was to be done by the law...
...Religion is brought in," and extremists begin to call the practice murder—which word Neverbend bans as "revolting to the majesty of the people...
...Once you start identifying novel characters with contemporary politicians they infect everything—much as you can't help seeing the actor if you've seen the movie before reading the book...
...7I...
...That is, while there is a universality to the reform impulse, not every generation will find The Fixed Period as terrifying as ours ought to...
...What...
...Christopher Caldwell is assistant managing editor of The American Spectator...
...And they're afraid to die because "they have not been instructed in matters of good and evil...
...Neverbend is a one-man anthology of contemporary political prejudices: To the reader, he is Kirkpatrick Sale, bringing up "so-called civilisation" at least once a paragraph...
...To the condemned he is like Marian Wright Edelman or any other poverty hustler, extolling the people in whose name he has aggrandized himself...
...I finished it on the day Hillary Clinton announced that she and the co-president were drawing up a "living will"—a written agreement that life-support systems be shut off in any illness where either of them loses his mental faculties...
...Even after he has been removed, by a British fleet sent by the "Secretary of Benevolence," Neverbend sees the problem as "not that the doctrine of the Fixed Period was in itself wrong, but that it was impracticable because of the horrors attending its last moments...
Vol. 26 • December 1993 • No. 12
