C.B. Murphy  .:. Writer

 

“Hello, everyone. My name is Mummar. Obviously, I look like a Muslim.” He looked around. “There might be others here, but none so obviously in the young male category which makes me important.” He chuckles. “I only mean important in that so many of you think the troubles of the world are the fault of my people, or people like me. Unemployed angry Muslim youth. No? Am I right? Yes, I am right, I can see it in your faces.”

“Jackson tells us to stretch beyond who we are, to come up with solutions that are beyond what any one of us would ever imagine. He thinks that since we are anonymous, this will help us do this. It is like an exercise at a new age health spa, in California—no? Yes. Here is my stretch.

“I was watching an HBO show, one called Rome. This would not be allowed in my country, but I am a student of the west so I can do these things. Rome is a world before Christianity. Before Islam. There were Jews, of course, though I don’t think this gives them any special status because they are—and this is documented—an older religion.” He shook his head like he was getting distracted.

“So, you’re anti-Semitic?” Marion asked mainly to give him a hard time.

“No. Yes. I mean, it’s not supposed to matter here,” Mummar looked toward Jackson in the back of the room who seemed preoccupied on reading his PDA or whatever it was. “They said it was OK to be anything you want.”

“I think they meant,” Vinnie said, winking at Marion, “that whatever you are or pose to be, it’s fine but they didn’t say there wouldn’t be consequences.”

Marion had half expected him to say, “wouldn’t be no consequences” but then maybe his New Jersey mobster thing was all a put-on.

“Fine,” Mummar said, “fine. I didn’t want to talk about Jews anyway.”

“Romans, then,” Eartha said from the front row. She looked like she wanted to take notes.

“What I wanted to say was that we have to be open-minded about history. I mean, we can’t think we know what the final form if there is such a thing—of history—would look like.”

“I can tell you it ain’t gonna be no Caliphate,” Vinnie said. Again his correct pronunciation surprised Marion.

“You shut up!” Mummar said aiming a finger at Vinnie who did a high schoolish gesture that clearly read: I ain’t afraid of you.

Jackson raised his hand in the back of the room. Marion almost burst out laughing. Like that nerd was gonna keep them from killing each other. Mummar ignored him anyway.

“In Rome, the HBO series anyway, it’s clear that they believed that the strongest person had a right to win. Strength determined right, not morals. If you were capable of subjugating someone, you did it. You enslaved their people, killed their warriors, and took their goods. What I wanted to bring up was I think we all—and hear this—I include my own faith in this—might be laboring under a false premise, that human survival is only worthwhile if we survive with our moral system intact.”

The fierce though diminutive Chinese woman (Marion hadn’t been introduced she just looked Chinese, mainland Chinese) stood up. “He is right!” she practically screamed at the rest of the room. “You are right!” she pointed what looked like an accusing finger at Mummar. “We have to think beyond good and evil.”

“Dr. Nietzsche,” Marion said quietly, “please call your office.” Vinnie laughed. If he knew who Nietzsche was he had to have gone to college. Community college maybe but some college.

“You shut up, too!” the Chinese woman yelled at Marion.

“Please,” Jackson said from the back of the room. “If we don’t follow some common courtesy here we won’t be able…”

“To save the world!” Ward, the Native American-like professor, said.

Jackson walked to the front of the room. Just like an ineffective substitute teacher Marion thought. “Listen people,” he said. “We have to consider lots of things that might piss us off.”

The Chinese woman, still standing, looked confused. “Merde,” the Frenchman said. She looked shocked but sat down.

“We anticipated that it would be very hard to hear ideas that, well, we might find out of bounds, but that’s why we’re here. And your pseudonyms are meant to protect you. So don’t think of yourselves as the person you really are and will be again. Here you are a Master of the Universe, an entity outside of time. Think of yourself as a…”

“Demigod,” Vinnie said. “A minor diety—am I right Mr. Jackson?”

Jackson frowned. “It’s not Mister, just Jackson. I don’t know. I suppose. You’re referring to the classical gods of ancient Greece and Rome, creatures with foibles and powers, imperfect yet…”

“Powerful,” Vinnie said.

“Ok, but…” Jackson started, but Vinnie interrupted him.

“Let the man finish,” Vinnie said in a commanding voice. Again, Jackson looked confused but took a step backward. Mummar moved back to the podium. “Thanks, Mr. Vinnie.”

“Just Vinnie,” he said. “As you were saying…” Vinnie made a hand gesture as if giving the floor back to Mummar.

“We have to consider the possibility that certain truths we might hold in common, say, that slavery is a bad thing, or that the goal of society should be a kind of egalitarian classlessness, that these ideas are time-dependant, history-dependant. They might not be the best thing for the future of the human race. That’s all I wanted to say.”

“May I speak?” the Frenchman in the beret stood up. If he had on a striped shirt, Marion thought, he’d look like mime. “My name is Jacques.”

Marion instinctively looked at Vinnie who was silently laughing with her. She tried to look at Jacques without giggling. The old Kurt Vonnegut line came to her, more profound than ever: Life is like high school.

“Let us say there are a number of things that go wrong. We all know the list and the probabilities. If one of them happens, say a worldwide plague then of course the probabilities are kaput. Several could happen at once. Nuclear war, biological war, the breakdown of civilization as we know it. We’ve all seen the movies. It could happen.” He looked around as if ready to be challenged. “I propose we consider how we could recommend the immediate construction of one or several bunker cities, powered by nuclear or whatever, but repositories of what we have, what we know. They’d have to have strict guidelines as to who would be allowed in them.”

“Your classic ‘who gets in the shelter’ scenario,” Ward said.

“Excusez-moi?” Jacques said.

“Like when people were building bomb shelters in the 1950s against at the time, excuse me Nikola, the Russian threat of nuclear war. I don’t know what it was like in the old Soviet Union, but here in the States lots of people were building bomb shelters. And the issue came up, over and over, in conversation as well as in science fiction, how do you protect yourself from either people breaking in? Or worse—innocent people wanting to get in. You see them on the video monitors, children maybe. You have to let them die.”

“That’s what I mean,” Mummar said. “We have to be prepared to let our morality die, too.”

“But don’t we have to consider the cost of survival?” Marion said suddenly on familiar ground. “If we have to beome inhuman to survive, maybe the cost is too high. Maybe it’s better to die out as a noble species than live as a degraded one.”

“That is nonsense,” the Chinese woman said. “Utter nonsense. That’s what makes the west so vulnerable. You are too ready to die. What if I said to you, the Chinese race should survive, we are the ones that best represent the future.”

“I’m not sure what you mean, Chan is it?” Marion suddenly remembered the woman’s name from the list. “I can entertain the possibility that you bring up that one ‘race’ as you call it, and I don’t consider Chinese a race, but never mind, considers themselves worthy of becoming the sole representative of the surviving human species. And I can even see your logic that we westerners as you call us would be easily eliminated due to our readiness to self-destruct, but how do you propose the resources are allocated between those ‘races’ that feel they deserve to be the sole survivor?”

“That’s easy,” Chan said. “We make several cities of survival. They are not integrated, not a ‘UN,’ but a representing the best of each surviving group.”

“So in your mind,” Jackson said, “I’m just clarifying—let’s say the Chinese, the Arabs, the, oh I don’t know—“

“Russians,” Dimitri said.

“OK, Russians. Maybe the EU. All these civilizations that have access I have to say to some stream of resources on their own, would build their own cities.”

“Well I see a few problems,” Indira said. “Obviously, this is a racist idea, no matter how you express it. It is merely survival of the richest. The second and third worlds, and I don’t mean India, we might be able to do it, but others, Africa, for example, they would die out. Kaboom.”

“Kaboom, yes!” Mummar said. “I can not be alone in thinking this, call it what you will. But if a civilization has not as they say gotten it together by this point in history they are indeed failures. Beautiful worthy people, yes, but failures as civilizations. They are expendable.”