Once, on a fact-finding tour through LA, I sat in the back of a reeducation lecture. The trainees had all held lofty positions in the entertainment industry, a melange of agents, managers, “creative executives,” whatever the hell that means. I can understand their resistance, their arrogance. Before the war, entertainment had been the most valued export of the United States. Now they were being trained as custodians for a munitions plant in Bakersfield, California. One woman, a casting director, exploded. How-dare they degrade her like this! She had an MFA in Conceptual Theater, she had cast the top three grossing sitcoms in the last five seasons and she made more in a week than her instructor could dream of in several lite-times! She kept addressing that instructor by her first name. “Magda,” she kept saying, “Magda, enough already. Magda, please.” At first I thought this woman was just being rude, degrading the instructor by refusing to use her title. I found out later that Mrs. Magda Antonova used to be this woman’s cleaning lady. Yes, it was very hard for some, but a lot of them later admitted that they got more emotional satisfaction from their new jobs than anything closely resembling their old ones.

I met one gentleman on a coastal ferry from Portland to Seattle. He had worked in the licensing department for an advertising agency, specifically in charge of procuring the rights to classic rock songs for television commercials. Now he was a chimney sweep. Given that most homes in Seattle had lost their central heat and the winters were now longer and colder, he was seldom idle. “I help keep my neighbors warm,” he said proudly. I know it sounds a little too Norman Rockwell, but I hear stories like that all the time. “You see those shoes, I made them,” “That sweater, that’s my sheep’s wool,” “Like the corn? My garden.” That was the upshot of a more localized system. It gave people the opportunity to see the fruits of their labor, it gave them a sense of individual pride to know they were making a clear, concrete contribution to victory, and it gave me a wonderful feeling that I was part of that. I needed that feeling. It kept me sane for the other part of my job.

So much for “talent.” “Tools” are the weapons of war, and the industrial and logistical means by which those weapons are constructed.

[He swivels in his chair, motioning to a picture above his desk. I lean closer and see that it’s not a picture but a framed label.]

Ingredients:

molasses from the United States

anise from Spain

licorice from France

vanilla (bourbon) from Madagascar cinnamon from Sri Lanka cloves from Indonesia wintergreen from China pimento berry oil from Jamaica balsam oil from Peru

And that’s just for a bottle of peacetime root beer. We’re not even talk’ ing about something like a desktop PC, or a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.

Ask anyone how the Allies won the Second World War. Those with very little knowledge might answer that it was our numbers or generalship. Those without any knowledge might point to techno-marvels like radar or the atom bomb. (Scowls.) Anyone with the most rudimentary understanding of that conflict will give you three real reasons: first, the ability to manufacture more materiel: more bullets, beans, and bandages than the enemy; second, the natural resources available to manufacture that materiel; and third, the logistical means to not only transport those resources to the factories, but also to transport the finished products out to the front lines. The Allies had the resources, industry, and logistics of an entire planet. The Axis, on the other hand, had to depend on what scant assets they could scrape up within their borders. This time we were the Axis. The living dead controlled most of the world’s landmass, while American war production depended on what could be harvested within the limits of the western states specifically. Forget raw materials from safe zones overseas; our merchant fleet was crammed to the decks with refugees while fuel shortages had dry-docked most of our navy.

We had some advantages. California’s agricultural base could at least erase the problem of starvation, if it could be restructured. The citrus growers didn’t go quietly, neither did the ranchers. The beef barons who controlled so much prime potential farmland were the worst. Did you ever hear of Don Hill? Ever see the movie Roy Elliot did on him? It was when the infestation hit the San Joaquin Valley, the dead swarming over his fences, attacking his cattle, tearing them apart like African driver ants. And there he was in the middle of it all, shooting and hollering like Gregory Peck in Duel in the Sun. I dealt with him openly and honestly. As with everyone else, I gave him the choice. I reminded him that winter was coming and there were still a lot of very hungry people out there. I warned him that when the hordes of starving refugees showed up to finish what the living dead started, he’d have no government protection whatsoever. Hill was a brave, stubborn bastard, but he wasn’t an idiot. He agreed to surrender his land and herd only on the condition that his and everyone else’s breeding stock remained untouched. We shook on that.

Tender, juicy steaks-can you think of a better icon of our prewar artificial standard of living’ And yet it was that standard that ended up being our second great advantage. The only way to supplement our resource base was recycling. This was nothing new. The Israelis had started when they sealed their borders and since then each nation had adopted it to one degree or another. None of their stockpiles, however, could even compare to what we had at our disposal. Think about what life was like in the prewar America. Even those considered middle class enjoyed, or took for granted, a level of material comfort unheard of by any other nation at any other time in human history. The clothing, the kitchenware, the electronics, the automobiles, just in the Los Angeles basin alone, outnumbered the prewar population by three to one. The cars poured in by the millions, every house, every neighborhood. We had an entire industry of over a hundred thousand employees working three shifts, seven days a week: collecting, cataloging, disassembling, storing, and shipping parts and pieces to factories all over the coast. There was a little trouble, like with the cattle ranchers, people not wanting to turn over their Hummers or vintage Italian midlife crisis mobiles. Funny, no gas to run them but they still hung on anyway. It didn’t bother me too much. They were a pleasure to deal with compared to the military establishment.

Of all my adversaries, easily the most tenacious were the ones in uniform. I never had direct control over any of their R D, they were free to green light whatever they wanted. But given that almost all their programs were farmed out to civilian contractors and that those contractors depended on resources controlled by DeStRes, I had de facto control. “You cannot mothball our Stealth bombers,” they would yell. “Who the Blank do you think you are to cancel our production of tanks?” At first I tried to reason with them: “The M-l Abrams has a jet engine. Where are you going to find that kind of fuel ? Why do you need Stealth aircraft against an enemy that doesn’t have radar?” I tried to make them see that given what we had to work with, as opposed to what we were facing, we simply had to get the largest return on our investment or, in their language, the most bang for our buck. They were insufferable, with their all-hours phone calls, or just showing up at my office unannounced. I guess I can’t really blame them, not after how we all treated them after the last brushfire war, and certainly not after almost having their asses handed to them at Yonkers. They were teetering on the edge of total collapse, and a lot of them just needed somewhere to vent.