by Aaron Thier
“Send me your contact info, will you?” Li Wei says to Murphy. She is genuinely interested in the trash mountain resort. Innovative thinkers are always looking for new ways to use garbage. “Or wait! Let me show you our new app. You’ll love this. Give me your phone?”
Murphy produces his phone, which is a smooth dark phone-size piece of wood. He’s been carrying it in his pocket this whole time.
“Very beautiful,” she says, turning it over in her hand.
“Now let me ask you something. This has been bothering me for a long time. Under what circumstances does destroying an artificial intelligence count as murder?”
“My thinking is that if the artificial intelligence has been designed in such a way as to render it humanlike, which means educated with human educational materials and infused somehow with human values and human instincts, then yes, it’s murder to destroy it.”
“That’s what you believe?”
“It also seems like murder to kill a thing that knows what it is.”
“Like trees. Like an octopus.”
“Like practically everything.”
Eight o’clock in the morning. Murphy and his copanelists sit together in a little sunlit room and prepare to express their thoughts and opinions on the vexed subject of The South. Murphy is wearing some of his new clothes and he has trimmed his beard, but an attempt to subdue his hair has been unsuccessful. He watches Bill Cruncher, copanelist number one, out of the corner of his eye. Cruncher’s hair, charred after last night’s mishap, has also come unfastened. More significantly, this timber baron is drinking whiskey from an aftershave bottle. With a conspiratorial wink, he tells Murphy that no one knows it’s not aftershave. The third panelist is a man whom Cruncher addresses as “Boomer,” and apparently he’s already known to Pierce, so Murphy has no opportunity to learn his real name, if he has one. Right now he’s embroiled in a discussion with a demented drifter who has inexplicably been granted admission to this exclusive event. The man is asking him, “What’s gonna happen when you have diarrhea? What’s gonna happen when you have diarrhea?” Boomer doesn’t possess the strength of will to free himself from this dialogue and acknowledges with sadness that “it could happen any time.”
Murphy and Boomer and Cruncher make a dissolute and uninspiring trio, and very few guests have gathered to hear what they have to say, preferring instead to listen to Leon Lemieux, CEO of FutureNOW, who is discussing the colonization of Mars in the main auditorium. That’s where Eva is too, at Yahweh’s insistence, because Yahweh is anxious about the colonization of Mars. Murphy, an imposter with a broken foot, is in exile out here in this provincial conference room, and despite his earlier resolution to be the best Pierce he can be, he’s tired this morning and he’s in a bad frame of mind.
With an abrupt flourish, like a superhero stripping off his civilian clothes, the drifter steps up to the lectern and introduces himself as Professor Arnaux Ramirez, moderator of today’s discussion. Boomer laughs and shakes his head. “You got me,” he says. Ramirez ignores him and addresses the audience, which consists of seven people, none of whom are sitting closer than the fifth row. “I’m sure our guests are sorry to have kept all of you waiting,” he says. There’s a frosty note in his voice. He pauses to blow his nose into a McDonald’s bag and then reads the turgid biographical notes like a judge reading a sentence.
Murphy, alas, fails to listen to the introduction and doesn’t hear Boomer’s real name or Ramirez’s first question. Now Cruncher is speaking, whether in response to that first question or in an extemporaneous manner who can say. There’s something comforting in his mad loquaciousness. The audience does not at any point register interest or understanding.
“The economic argument,” he says. “The economic reality. You talk about an industrial versus an agrarian economy. Urban versus rural. North versus South. But there’s the cultural aspect too. Economic systems are part and parcel of the religious and moral credos that define a people. You have your mode of governance, your manners, your unique food and drink, and all of it composes a way of life that’s linked to that economic system.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” says Murphy.
“Oh boy,” says Boomer. “Isn’t that telling?”
“I don’t know if you’re talking about now or then. Are you talking about slavery?”
Cruncher ignores these interruptions and continues, “When any part of this socioeconomic system experiences a rupture, it throws the rest off-kilter. What you’ve got then is a way of life that’s not matched any longer to the system that’s given rise to it, so you have civil strife, you have poverty. It’s all interlinked. It’s a social ecosystem.”
“Drug addiction,” Boomer says.
“Hospital closures,” says Cruncher.
“Brain drain. Skyrocketing death rates.”
“Goodbye to Main Street.”
Murphy interrupts: “You’re talking about the situation today. You’re not talking about slavery.”
“Jobs,” says Cruncher. “Jobs, jobs, jobs.”
“But you’re right,” says Boomer. “It’s important to understand the cultural problem. I think of all the talk about coal. The miners sang those songs about how hard it was down in the mines, and now that the mines are closing, they just want to go back underground. That’s culture. They’ve got themselves to where they can’t act in their own interest. There are other jobs to do, my friends! Let me talk to you about a diversified local economy!”
Alexis de Tocqueville, that clever Frenchman, was puzzled by the same kinds of contradictions as he traveled through the new American republic. He wondered if democracy itself was responsible. “In the United States,” he wrote, “the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.” And elsewhere: “I know of no country in which there is so little true independence of mind and freedom of discussion as in America.” And still elsewhere: “I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.”
Murphy has his own explanation. “Everything is fucked,” he says, “but I think it was fucked from the beginning, because of slavery. This is the one point I’d like to make.”
“I’ll thank you to watch your language,” says Ramirez.
“That’s the original contradiction. Liberty and bondage. We live in a former slave society. The deep structures are racist. There’s always someone trying to make it illegal for black people to vote.”
“The president is getting bad advice,” Cruncher allows.
“The president has more in common with Idi Amin than with his American predecessors.”
Boomer smiles. “New South, old problems. I’ve been saying why don’t we jettison the Deep South. I’m saying this as a Mississippi man.”
“We’re not talking about just the South,” says Murphy.
“Jettison the South?” says Cruncher, himself an Alabama man. “Jettison the South?”
“Only the Deep South.”
“It’s not a North-South thing,” says Murphy. “Are you even listening? It’s an urban-rural thing. And it’s a white versus nonwhite thing. And you can’t jettison the South anyway because then the black people down there would be even more fucked than they are now. It’s the same reason you can’t let the South secede in 1860 and 1861. If you let those states secede, you’re abandoning the slaves.”
Boomer shakes his head. “That’s not what I mean. To me it’s an economic issue. If you’d let me explain.”
“And to me,” says Cruncher, uncapping his aftershave bottle, “it’s about the integrity of the Union. I must be an American patriot.”
Let’s pause and consider a quotation from a letter by Alexander von Humboldt, one of the smartest men of the past millennium, for
whom most plants, animals, and geographical features are named. He was writing before Tocqueville, before everything, and yet the problems he saw in the infant United States are problems we have not solved. Who’s really free? Who’s in charge? What’s the point?
“[The] whole there presents to my mind the sad spectacle of liberty reduced to a mere mechanism in the element of utility,” he wrote, “exercising little ennobling or elevating influence upon mind and soul, which, after all, should be the aim of political liberty. Hence indifference on the subject of slavery. But the United States are a Cartesian vortex, carrying everything with them, grading everything to the level of monotony.”
A painful condemnation! Thank heavens we don’t quite know what he’s talking about.
Meanwhile, Murphy is discussing patriotism. From a certain perspective, he argues, the “whole point of America” is that our institutions are mutable and our constitution is susceptible to amendment. Unexamined allegiance to anything—to America too—is therefore un-American. The truly patriotic thing is a refusal to be satisfied with the way things are.
“Dissent is patriotic,” he says. “I’m an American patriot. It’s Cruncher who has the Tory mentality.”
He makes an analogy with sports fandom. If you always root for the home team, you’re declaring an unconditional allegiance to a group with a changing membership. That’s a dangerous proposition. Maybe they’re nice guys one year and maybe they’re “sociopathic cretins” three years later. You have to make a new determination each year. The same goes for one’s country.
“Jefferson thought each generation should write its own constitution,” he says. “Flag waving leads to murder. Rooting for the home team is un-American and it breeds fascism.”
Ramirez is eating a cold Hot Pocket. Boomer is writing something down. Cruncher says, “But by your argument, Lincoln should have let the South secede after all. Southerners were dissatisfied and they wanted change.”
“They wanted it all to stay the same. And they made their choice because of slavery, so it doesn’t matter anyway. Human rights are more important than politics.”
Now he embarks on another sweeping condemnation of the United States. It’s a familiar routine by now: mass shootings, the electoral college, etc. From here he moves to a condemnation of human beings—“the cruelest animal”—and their gods—“even crueler than human beings.”
“I’m the American patriot here,” he says again, “because I hate this country. Freedom died at Wounded Knee.”
Then he succumbs to despair and falls silent. And no wonder. When you think about slavery, when you think about the Nez Perce, when you think about the president and his hair, it’s hard to escape the idea that a sense of hopeful possibility obtains only at this level of abstraction, and only because time, or the illusion of time, or the high probability of heat exchange, prevents us from knowing to a certainty that nothing will change. Unlike Eva, who’s been trying to gaze up the avatar ladder toward the fullness or nothingness from which goodness flows, Murphy fears that the struggle between good and evil is a fiction and the worst outcome is assured. If we’re avatars, that is, maybe we’re the manifestation of injustice, or chaos. Maybe we are the evil in Yahweh. Or maybe Yahweh has nothing to do with it and we bear all the blame. Or maybe, horrible thought, maybe Yahweh is just an avatar of the worst in us. And nothing matters anyway because climate change is going to destroy our civilization. How could he and Eva have chosen to bring a baby into such a world?
He slips the poem out of his pocket and rereads it. Baby with hot sauce on his lips and belly. Then he looks out the window at the glowing mountains and the radiant blue sky. Love versus God. There must be another perspective available, even if he doesn’t know what it is. The world is a narrow bridge, and the important thing is not to be afraid.
Boomer is describing his own American idea. The Deep South, he reminds them, is by far the poorest region in the United States, and has been since the Civil War. Pick any metric. Access to health care, education, due process, you name it. It’s a scandal. And yes, he concedes, this is the legacy of the slave system.
“So what do we do?” he says. “We jettison the Deep South.”
It isn’t that its institutions can’t be reformed. It’s that it has no vital institutions. It hasn’t ever been part of the modern continental American republic. The sooner we admit it, the better. Take it from him. He’s a Mississippi man.
“So I’m talking about a paradigm shift,” he says. “I’m actually talking about a great possibility. We could treat the Deep South like what it is—what economists call an ‘extractive state.’ ”
It turns out that his real ambition is to turn the Deep South into a kind of colony. How much would it cost, he asks, to bring Mississippi into the twenty-first century? Too much. But consider the benefits of its programmatic marginalization. If you strip it of its moribund democratic institutions, you might see regrettable consequences in the short term, but ultimately you have a chance to make something new. Its resources can be extracted at little cost and with little restraint. Business will boom. Everyone benefits. Mississippi could be a new Bangladesh.
“I’m thinking factories. Shoes and underwear. Even microchips. And all on our own terms.”
“Pierce will tell you that you can’t abandon the poor,” says Cruncher.
“The cost of living in Bangladesh is tiny. You transform Mississippi into Bangladesh and all those poor people will be able to live like kings. It’s the unwieldy democratic bureaucracy that makes their lives so expensive now. The welfare state actually makes them poorer.”
Cruncher, overtaken by a gust of drunkenness, says, “You’re a madman. You’re a dangerous lunatic, Boomer. You’re crazier than Pierce. This reminds me of the one about the three farmers and a cow, or wait, I know this, a rabbi and a congressman walk into a discount shoe store …”
The discussion quickly unravels after this. Cruncher embarks on a textureless drunken monologue. Ramirez eats another cold Hot Pocket. Boomer folds his arms across his chest and, incredibly, falls asleep. It looks like the panel will slide quietly to its conclusion, like a toboggan crumpling neatly against the tree at the bottom of the hill.
But no: There is one more surprise in store. While Cruncher pauses to enjoy a lusty draft from his aftershave bottle, the door opens and in walks John Ransom Pierce, heir to a Carolina textile fortune, senior partner at Byzantium Capital, husband of Jane Pierce, and bosom friend of P. F. Barnum “Barney” Gaines. He too is on crutches.
“I’m so sorry to be late,” he says. “I was here last night, but they wouldn’t accept my identification and I couldn’t raise Barney on the telephone. There’s been some kind of mix-up.”
In the main auditorium, things have taken a different course. Idealism prevails. Human achievement seems boundless. We will send a team to Mars, says Leon Lemieux. They may die—almost certainly they will die—and then we will send another. They too may die. No matter. We will send a third. Lemieux has faith in this project. He clicks through his high-resolution images of the Martian surface and talks about habitat modules, water reclamation, nitrogen, soil bacteria. There’s something wonderful about the insanity of the project. We will do all of this because we can. We will found an extraterrestrial colony that will never know slavery or its complex legacy. The colonists will die. But so will we all.
Eva is struggling with the spirit of the Lord, and we know very well how these struggles come out. She is flesh; he is the neutrino wind. And so, as Leon Lemieux talks about radiation shielding—Mars, alas, has no magnetosphere—she rises and makes for the stage. No one stops her. Maybe Yahweh casts a spell on the security guards, but maybe not, who knows. There they stand in their distinctive yellow jackets, with their forbidding jowls, and they do nothing.
She walks to the center of the stage and raises a hand in greeting, preparing to speak of ostriches and Liliths. And then, who knows why, the fog lifts and she feels perfectly sane. For the first time in wee
ks, she knows just who she is. She is a progressive young woman who believes in fermented food and renewable energy and a single-payer health care system. She’s going to be a mom. She thinks of her child, a real child and not a hallucinatory poem-child, and her face lights up like an emoji with hearts for eyes.
But she’s already up here on stage, so she turns to Lemieux and says, “May I say a few words?”
As long as the security guards do nothing, Lemieux doesn’t have much choice. He isn’t going to drag her from the stage himself.
“I’m sure you all know that math and Hinduism are the same,” she says. A few people nod. “They’re just exactly the same. You can prove it with algebra. And it follows that theology and cosmology are the same too. Therefore all disciplines and branches of learning are the same. Therefore everything is the same. Do you see what I mean? The colonization of Mars is the same as a breakfast of peas and cherries. All fruits are cherries. And so on.”
“Okay,” says Lemieux.
“Put it this way: How do you stay compassionate in a world where God exists? Think of earthquakes and hurricanes and cholera. The sun causes cancer. And also, another example, why does Yahweh send us a stress fracture when he knows we’re only joking? So much malice. Why should a god like that get to make choices about life and death? How can you accept it and go on living? But I think it’s possible that when we talk about him, we’re only talking about what he does on this rung of the ladder, and if he has his main existence on a rung above the flow of time, then we can’t grasp his purposes because there’s no cause and effect in the place where his thoughts happen. There’s no direction for logic to flow. That’s why we can’t connect his actions to his motives. Do you understand? That’s the whole thing. You can prove this algebraically.”