philip_k_dick_-_the_man_in_the_high_castle

'Didn't they have swell theater in those days? That's what I heard. Now it's the same as the movie
industry; it's all a cartel in Berlin. In the thirteen years I've been in New York not one good new
musical or play ever opened, only those — '
'Let me read,' Juliana said.
'And the same with the book business,' Joe said, unperturbed. 'It's all a cartel operating out of
Munich. All they do in New York is print; just big printing presses — but before the war, New
York was the center of the world's publishing industry, or so they say.'
Putting her fingers in her ears, she concentrated on the page open in her lap, shutting his voice
out. She had arrived at a section in The Grasshopper which described the fabulous television, and it
enthralled her; especially the part about the inexpensive little sets for backward people in Africa
and Asia.
. . . Only Yankee know-how and the mass-production system — Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, the magic
names ! — could have done the trick, sent that ceaseless and almost witlessly noble flood of cheap onedollar
(the China Dollar, the trade dollar) television kits to every village and backwater of the Orient. And
when the kit had been assembled by some gaunt, feverish-minded youth in the village, starved for a chance,
for that which the generous Americans held out to him, that tinny little instrument with its built-in power
supply no larger than a marble began to receive. And what did it receive? Crouching before the screen, the
youths of the village — and often the elders as well — saw words. Instructions. How to read, first. Then the
rest. How to dig a deeper well. Plow a deeper furrow. How to purify their water, heal their sick. Overhead,
the American artificial moon wheeled, distributing the signal, carrying it everywhere . . . to all the waiting,
avid masses of the East.
'Are you reading straight through?' Joe asked. 'Or skipping around in it?'
She said, 'This is wonderful; he has us sending food and education to all the Asiatics, millions of
them.'
'Welfare work on a worldwide scale,' Joe said.
'Yes. The New Deal under Tugwell; they raise the level of the masses — listen.' She read aloud
to Joe:
. . . What had China been? Yearning, one needful commingled entity looking toward the West, its great
democratic President, Chiang Kai-shek, who had led the Chinese people through the years of war, now into
the years of peace, into the Decade of Rebuilding. But for China it was not a rebuilding, for that almost
supernaturally vast flat land had never been built, lay still slumbering in the ancient dream. Arousing; yes,
the entity, the giant, had to partake at last of full consciousness, had to waken into the modern world with its
jet airplanes and atomic power, its autobahns and factories and medicines. And from whence would come
the crack of thunder which would rouse the giant? Chiang had known that, even during the struggle to defeat
Japan. It would come from the United States. And, by 1950, American technicians and engineers, teachers,
doctors, agronomists, swarming like some new life form into each province, each —
Interrupting, Joe said, 'You know what he's done, don't you? He's taken the best about Nazism,
the socialist part, the Todt Organization and the economic advances we got through Speer, and
who's he giving the credit to? The New Deal. And he's left out the bad part, the SS part, the racial
extermination and segregation. It's a utopia! You imagine if the Allies had won, the New Deal
would have been able to revive the economy and make those socialist welfare improvements, like
he says? Hell no; he's talking about a form of state syndicalism, the corporate state, like we
developed under the Duce. He's saying, You would have had all the good and none of — '
'Let me read,' she said fiercely.
He shrugged. But he did cease babbling. She read on at once, but to herself.