I Am The Root of All Evil

I am everywhere: I infect your daily life; I appear at nearly every turn, at every transaction. My power is immense: I make decisions for you; I determine victories in war; I determine what is produced, what is not and who gets what. I overthrow governments, subjugate poor populations and exploit the natural resources of the planet, leaving environmental ruins in my wake. I am money. I am the new God.

My actual material make-up seems harmless enough. I most often appear as a mere scrap of paper, yet my shape takes many forms. I can appear as a bank statement, a check, a gift certificate,a winning lottery ticket,a plastic credit card, even a surreal maelstrom of billions and trillions of electrons that are fired across the planet every single day in a matter of seconds. I maintain an illusion of interest, an unbiased objective tool, a mere medium of exchange. But I am much more than that.

A geographical analysis of the world reveals how the operation of the current social organization that humans have chosen is structured to accentuate my power. Cities are located largely on sea ports, perfectly positioned to ease my movement from one port to another, from one country to another. Millions, perhaps billions, of miles of cables have been laid, satellites have been launched into orbit, and microwave communications have been developed in order to better accommodate my electronic flow.
Walk through the downtown section of any major city in the world and look up at the buildings. Not even a hundred years ago, the tallest buildings were churches of another faith. Now they are temples erected in my name: banks, institutions that produce absolutely nothing and exist only to further my power.

Christianity itself, the dominant ideology of the western world for the last millennium, has waned in the face of my new religious following. Historically, we know that early coins emerged from temples, and the word Moneta, “She who warns,” was the title of the goddess Juno, whose temple was used by the Romans as a worship to make coins.

People purchase goods with me, get paid for their work with me, and regularly invest me in order to increase my power. The word used to describe my system—Capitalism—is just another way of saying moneyism. People worship me every single day of their lives, not just once a week on Sunday. Large returns are a sign of my blessing.

The United States of America has declared itself the crusading paladin of my faith. America is the self-proclaimed protector of my sacred church: the free market. Any person, organization or country that holds views at odds with my religion will be destroyed in my name. The Cold War was largely a manifestation of this crusade.
Marx’s communism was the largest and most powerful heresy and therefore required obliteration to satisfy me. It’s not the authoritarianism of Marxism that was blasphemous. Many brutally authoritarian governments in Latin America have the blessing of my archangel, the United States. Even the ostensibly Communist countries, such as China, have my favor. It is heresy against me that is not allowed.

I have a way of perpetuating my power, even by those who remain unconscious of my power. I am a mere scrap of paper, yet I gain power in every time you use me. I am worthless unless I am transacted. This is the beauty of me—if you posses me, you must worship me. It’s like an addiction: once you join my system, you can’t exit. Consumerism breeds more consumerism.

My church is changing everything. Anything that is not ready to sell must be transformed into a commodity. Only then can I grow. The environment is worthless unless it is exploited, creating capital and thus enlarging my congregation. I care not for the destruction of ecosystems. I need only production and consumption.
I have changed the entire way society looks at itself. People used to grow food to eat, wove clothes to wear, and built shelters to live in. Now, everything is done for me. People don’t work with the idea that what they are doing is necessary to themselves and the commodity at large. They are merely fulfilling an individualistic need to worship me.

Even better, people are no longer human beings. They are mere cogs in my great machine. The more a person can conform to this reality, the more holy a person becomes and therefore receives more of my favors. People are referred to as “consumers” or “producers.” Read the newspaper. It never reports that “a human being died today.” No, instead it might report that “a doctor died” or “the President died” or “a police officer died.”People are defined by how well they worship me. Those that worship more are remembered more than those who worship very little. Bill Gates, my new high priest, is well known, but who is the guy on the downtown street corner? I do not care, and neither will you.

If I did not have this power, why is it that millions of people starve and billions go malnourished daily while the world produces more than enough food to adequately feed everyone? Why is it that a person must go without necessary medical attention merely for the fact that he or she hasn’t the means to properly worship me? I am so very powerful.

The most important element of this faith is the fact that it is nearly impossible for members of my religion to even envision a world without the father, the son and the holiest of ghosts: private property, money, and the so-called free market. Language has been constructed to discourage such an undertaking. Any words that were created to describe a society structured differently, without me, have been altered with negative connotations or have been forgotten—words like socialism, anarchism, collectivism, solidarity, mutual aid, and autonomy.

There have been heretics through the ages, such as Gerard Winstanley of England, Jean Varlet of France, Peter Kropotkin of Russia, Emma Goldman of the United States, and Che Guevara of Argentina, who have dared to dream, but I had them harassed, brutalized or murdered for their optimism. Just as heretics of the Catholic Church were erased from memory, so too, these prophets have been removed from the history books by my new inquisition.

I am God; I am money; and in God you will trust.

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This essay was written by Hana Qashu, a student of mine in a senior-year Writing for Publication course I taught at a university in Jordan, and published in a collection of stories written by people living in the Middle East at the time. I thought folks in the West might find it interesting to see how a talented young girl in the Middle East thinks.

The Tale of Fuzz

Once upon a time in the wooded mountains of California, not all that far from the ocean, but far enough not to know that it existed, there was born a little kitten. He had beautiful markings but never knew because he had no family to admire him. His hair was long and curly, and he had a very bushy tail. He looked like a ball of fuzz, but he did not know because he had no family to tell him.

One day, when he was only a few weeks old and alone except for the remains of his mother, who had become a meal for a hungry coyote, he ventured forth in search of safer lands and in search of food and water for he was, indeed, hungry and thirsty.

Before very long he reached a river in the woods, a deep, cool river, and he drank from it thirstily. Near the river, he saw a quaint little cabin, and through the window he saw two children looking at a box that showed stories. The girl was beautiful, with gentle blonde curls and crayon-colored blue eyes. She said something to the boy, also blond, with lighter blue eyes, and he went out and came back with a glass of milk for his sister. The girl’s legs were covered in metal, and they did not move like the boy’s legs did. Her eyes were bright but sad, and she spoke quietly with her brother. Before them was a small table, and on the table was a sandwich. “Meat!” said the kitten to himself. “For this, I have ventured forth.”

And he went up to the door and made a loud noise, but there was no response. He had only to wait until someone wanted to come in or out, he thought, and so he lay down and went to sleep.

Three hours passed, and a roly-poly man walked up to the door. He looked a lot like the little boy. He called out that he was home from work, and a lady opened the door from the inside. The boy came running, and the girl looked up in anticipation.

Just then, the man looked down beside the doorstep and saw the sleeping kitten. “Well, look here,” he said. “We have a little fuzz ball here.” With that, he picked up the kitten and brought him into the house.

The boy and the lady admired him. They said that he had beautiful markings. They said his bushy tail was the most beautiful tail they had ever seen. They ran their hands over his curly hair, and that made him feel warm. He heard a low, pleasant sound coming from deep in his throat.

The boy carried him to his sister. “Pet him,” he said. “He purrs.”

“He must be hungry,” said the sister, and she gave him a piece of the meat from her sandwich. The kitten ate it greedily, and the boy disappeared for a few minutes, returning with more meat, which the kitten consumed just as greedily.

“Let’s call him Fuzzy,” said the roly-poly man.

“Good name!” the others chimed in, and the kitten understood that he now was to be addressed as Fuzzy.

The lady brought a bowl of water, and Fuzzy drank from it. It was not as good as the water in the river, but he knew that he could go to the river whenever he wanted to take a drink.

That night, Fuzzy slept on the bed of the little girl. “She is beautiful,” he thought. “She is friendly. They are all friendly. They are now my family. For this, indeed, I have ventured forth from my dead mother and the Land of the Coyotes.”

Every day, the boy and the girl gave Fuzzy meat to eat, and the lady opened the door so that Fuzzy could go to the river to drink. He always went to drink, sat and watched the birds but did not chase them for he was not hungry, and returned home, happy that he had found a family.

And it came to pass that one day Fuzzy again went out from the home to sip from the river for he was thirsty and the river ran deep, clear, and cold. He sat and watched the birds fly high and higher. “Where do they go?” he wondered, and he climbed a tall tree by the river. He could see far from the tree, far through to a long, dirt path through the woods, along which moved creatures he had never before seen.

He slipped down the tree and went to meet the new creatures. As he drew close, he saw that they were not creatures like any he had known. They moved. They made noise that even sounded like very loud purring, but they were not soft. They were great creatures, covered in metal, and their paws were round and rolled, making crunching sounds on the gravel. He walked up to one to introduce himself, but it did not stop or even look at him. One of its paws rolled over him and trapped his tail. He pulled away hard. He was caught! He pulled harder. Ouch! The pain was great, but, at last, he was free.

He was free, but he could not walk very well, and there was something very wrong with his tail. He walked aimlessly in pain, not able to find his way back to the cabin in the woods. At long last, he found the river, and he lay down in the grass beside it.

When day dawned, he crawled to the river for a drink. He felt very weak, and he could not move his tail, not even little enough to see what it looked like or why it hurt so much. He looked down into the river, and there he saw what had happened to his tail. It was thin and flat. The part near his body had no hair; the monster thing that had run over him had partially stripped his tail, leaving only white cord and blood near his body, and the remnants of the skin and hair dragged behind him like an anchor. Despondent, he could not look at it again. He lay down and went to sleep.

Time passed. Old day turned into new day. Dawn, night, dawn, night. And so he continued for ten days. He thought about his family; he dreamed about his family. But he could not move, except to take a drink from the river when he was thirsty. He was hungry, too, and there were many small creatures—mice and birds—but he could not catch them. It required many minutes for him to take the few steps to the river and back to his grassy bed. He held on, though, thinking of the cabin in the woods and the family that loved him. He had to make it back to them. He had to see them again. He could take any amount of pain if he could just see them again.

And so, one day, when the dawn arose, he stood, tottering and weak, on his legs and partially crawled and partially clawed his way up the river, looking for the cabin which could not be that far away. For three days and three nights, he inched his way home. On the fourth day, he saw it: the cabin, the children, the lady, and the roly-poly man—and a dish of food outside the door. They must have left it for him.

He inched his way toward the food as they returned inside the cabin, not knowing that he was only a few feet away, hidden by the tall river grass. Food! He reached it, and he began to devour it ravenously. He was hungry!

A few minutes passed, and the little boy looked out the window. “Mom! Dad!” he called out with joy. “Fuzzy’s home!”

Fuzzy felt safe again, and his heart leapt with joy. Then he thought of his tail. He had lost his big, bushy tail that they all admired. He was not as fuzzy as he used to be. Would they still want him? He cowered by the bowl of food, ready to crawl back to the river in shame if they no longer liked him. After all, who could like a cat with a defective tail?

They burst out the door, the little boy in the lead, then the lady, and the roly-poly man. The little girl with the blonde curls and crayon-blue eyes watched from the window with a sad look. “She sees I have no tail,” thought Fuzzy. And he was right.

“His tail is gone!” said the lady. “His beautiful tail is gone!” Fuzzy prepared to leave. “Poor baby!” She picked him up.

“He has to go to the vet,” said the roly-poly man. “Let’s see what the vet can do.”

The lady put Fuzzy in a big cage with a handle on it, and the roly-poly man picked him up and put him inside one of those great creatures that had tried to eat him. Fuzzy closed his eyes and hoped everything would go away.

“I am coming with you,” said the little boy, and he climbed inside the monster creature and sat beside Fuzzy.

The roly-poly man got in, too. He sat in the front, touched something on the monster’s neck, making it purr loudly, and kept moving the monster’s nose in one direction or another. Slowly, Fuzzy understood that they were moving. They were inside the monster, and the monster was moving, taking them with it. He began to cry. The little boy put his hand inside the cage and petted him. He began to feel unafraid.

After some minutes, they arrived at a big cabin. The woods were gone. There was no river, just many very big cabins, made not of wood but concrete and bricks and cinder. The roly-poly man opened up the monster creature and stepped outside. Then he reached for Fuzzy and carried him into the big cabin.

In the big cabin lay great treasures of silver. A certain tall man in a white coat entered, looked at him, said something incomprehensible to the roly-poly man, then picked up one of the long, narrow treasures and thrust it deep into Fuzzy. Fuzzy felt no pain, just a curious sensation of falling asleep.

When he woke up, Fuzzy had no tail at all! He was still in the room of treasures, and the tall man in white came over and looked at him. Then, he wrote something on a chart, picked up the phone, and talked into it. Some minutes later, the roly-poly man and the little boy appeared in the room of treasures. They put Fuzzy back into the cage, climbed back inside the monster creature, and arrived back at the cabin in the woods.

For a while, Fuzzy felt tired. He looked for his tail but could not find it. Yet, sometimes he thought he could feel it. After a few days, he felt much better. He began to play with the little boy and the little girl again. They fed him, and he entertained them. He showed them that he did not mind life without a tail, that he could be friendly and affectionate and playful with or without his tail. And they loved him just the way he was. They could all have lived happily ever after.

One day, however, when Fuzzy went out a little earlier than usual to partake of water from the river, the sun was not yet up. There, in the grass, where Fuzzy usually rested, crouched a coyote.

Fuzzy did not return home that day nor ten days later nor ever, but Fuzzy’s memory lived long thereafter. The family mourned but realized that Fuzzy had taught them important things. And one day, when the dawn rose, the young girl, who had no moving legs but only braces, got up and went out of the home to sip from the river.

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This story appeared in the same collection as the story below. Copyright 2005. I have used it in undergraduate philosophy classes. It is interesting to me to see student reaction -- whether they considered the story optimistic or pessimistic. One foreign student, a non-native speaker of English, told me that she considered it a horror story; she misinterpreted the ending tome that the girl would also be eaten by the coyote! Amazing. Once a work leaves an author's hands, all kinds of interpretations are made. Faulkner once said that he had not realized how much symbolism he had put into "The Bear" until he read the critics' reviews!

The Merging

It happened on one of those eerie, moonless nights when the nature of Life becomes infinitesimally clearer and lives are changed forever. The young college student with many and no future plans concurrently—as is the wont of younger years—was returning from a late-evening babysitting job. At midnight, the new moon was in full reign. She squinted past the headlights on her mini-truck into the total darkness that new moons, ironically named, always bring, trying to see each of the turns in the winding highway along the edge of the ocean. California’s oceanside roads were beautiful in the day and more beautiful at sunset, but in the dark, their curves could kill—and had on many occasions.

After a few turns, she found herself on a stretch of the road she knew well. She relaxed, straightened her back, and let her foot fall a little more heavily on the pedal. Soon she would be home, and how she needed to get just a little sleep before her psychology exam tomorrow! She sped down the road, skating through the curves as if on a roller rink or in a video game; she knew them all so well that habit alone moved the wheel of the truck in synchronicity with the curving of the road. As habit drove, her mind turned to reciting definitions she would need for the exam tomorrow: id, ego, super-ego.

Suddenly, just in front of her headlights, a concrete construction wall closing off her lane jumped up in front of her. That had not been there yesterday! Where were the warning signs? Lost in the folds of darkness’s blanket?

The moment the wall menaced, habit abandoned her. Id, now on alert, took over the task of driving, while Superego reprimanded her for her careless reverie and Ego, paralyzed by fear into inaction, simply watched.

The crash was inevitable, the jolt anticipated. However, the flipping of the truck and its rolling to its side disoriented all of them: Id, Ego, and Super-ego. When the rolling stopped, she was alone, momentarily abandoned even by thought.

Then, the headlights went out. There was a crackling sound, and there was a smell. More than a smell. There was something all around her. Vapors. Gas vapors. The gas tank! She had to get out of the truck, but she had to clear her mind first. She felt for her bearings. The truck was on its side, the driver’s door flat on the asphalt. No exit there. She felt further, and her fingers brushed the window to the cab. She pushed it open and put her head out. It was very narrow, but perhaps with some contortions she could squeeze through if she could just figure out what all was where. Where was she exactly? It looked like she was in the middle of the road, but she could not be sure. Her mind would not clear, and a disconcerting warmth and desire to sleep hypnotized both mind and limb.

As she struggled to focus on the road in front of her, to find shapes in the darkness, not only to locate her whereabouts but also to anchor herself in the here-and-now, a watery whiteness descended upon her and then enveloped her. She felt herself dissolving into it. The truck was no longer her only frame of reference; in fact, it was no frame of reference at all. She was in the truck, yes, but at the same time, somewhere else, in an expanding whiteness. Life Within, Life Without, Life Beyond—separate realities or intertwined trinity? A house of eternal dimension, with dissolving door frames and rooms expanding into other rooms without end and without form, just space before and after, above and below, a continuum without beginning, without end, without sequence. A place—or was it merely a transporting thought of the kind that facilitated the instantaneous movement of the Seagull—where appearance and reality, idea and action merged, a place to lose one’s integral self to the overlapping dimensions of time, location, and being.

And then, a hand emerged from within the watery whiteness. A brown, living hand, roughened by manual labor, strengthened by encounters with rock and asphalt. It belonged to a road worker, walking out from within the whiteness. Could it really be that someone had come to help?

She reached for the hand, and it pushed her back into the truck, into the darkness and the vapors. But she was not afraid, for she was not alone. The dark was no enemy but merely a cloak for Earth’s wearing absent the warming of the sun. Being not alone brought comfort, and she realized how uncomfortable being alone had been.

“Stand back,” the strangely compelling, oddly familiar voice gently urged her.
“This window,” he continued, crawling over the cab to the passenger window which pointed straight at the moonless night sky. No stars, no moon, yet the man’s plaid shirt and broad shoulders were clearly visible, haloed by the whiteness. Only his face remained unlit and unseen.

Skillfully, as if he rescued damsels daily, he kicked in the window, reached down, and lifted her up and through the window as easily as if he had turned the absent stars to stardust—so that’s where they had all gone on this lightless night—and sprinkled her with it to help her fly. Think happy thoughts, and she could fly to morning. The thought of happy thoughts was interrupted by more quiet urging by the strangely compelling, oddly familiar voice.

“Hurry! There is very little time.” The man helped her scramble down the side of the truck that used to be the roof.

“Hurry, hurry,” he repeated. And when she could not hurry, he lifted her with muscled arms and carried her across the empty road to a field of rock, dirt, gravel, and parked road-repair equipment.

He set her on her own wobbly legs just seconds before the crackling she had been hearing erupted with a roar into a bonfire, dyeing the mantle of night with broad plumes of red, lightning bolts of yellow. The new moon scrambled for cover. Night was now day. The sky was not black or even blue, but red and gold and grey. The truck was gone.

She trembled, and he held her more firmly. “Just a few more minutes,” he said. “Soon an ambulance will arrive and take you away to the hospital. You are safe here. I work here.”

They waited in silence. The presence of a companion was enough for now, and by the time the ambulance arrived, she had become calm enough to let go of the hand that had drawn her to safety. She let others help her into the ambulance. Only later did she realize that she had said neither thank you nor good-bye to the man in plaid with the strangely compelling, oddly familiar voice. Somehow, it seemed not necessary.

For now, her full attention was fixated on the cool deluge pouring forth from the fire hose, taking charge of the inferno which she had barely escaped. Fire yielded to water as the rushing ambulance rapidly distanced her from the smoking skeleton of her truck.

Her eyes moved from the disappearing road behind her to the looming edifice in front of her. A shapeless ether, dolloped with occasional pentacles of light, gradually dissolved into the well-formed, rectangular shape of St. John’s Hospital. The perfect name for this wonder of works: light splashing from the ceiling onto the gurneys below, doctors hustling, nurses bustling, interns scuttling, a beehive of telic activity. The wonder worker’s memorial offered her no overt sanctuary, but fatigue reached out and slowly drew down her eyelids until she could see no more of the object world….

… The overture of sleep-thought that had yet to reach its crescendo was prematurely ended by the hand of a police officer, who had arrived to take a report of her accident, shaking her awake. He was real enough. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and sat up.

As she dutifully related the minutiae of the evening, he patiently recorded her story until she described how the man in plaid had called the ambulance, waited with her until it had arrived, and then had passed her over to the medics. The police officer contemplated her with a concerned look, then said, “Ma’am, the ambulance was called by a passing truck driver, and the medics found you wandering dazed and alone at the construction site. You were lucky to get out of the truck alive.”

She was still processing that information when the doctor approached her bed. “You are lucky you had your seat belt on,” he said. “You don’t have a single scratch on you. It is a miracle that you were not killed.”

Again, luck! Was it luck? Who was the man whom only she had seen? She had to know.

And so, when she was released, she went to the scrap yard where her truck had been towed, fearful of what she might find and yet not knowing why she was fearful. She carefully examined the window through which she had crawled. It had been broken—but from which direction?

If it were kicked out, then perhaps the man in plaid was another version of herself, a personification of a strong alter ego her subconscious had summoned when her conscious was too weak to act. The Id taking care of the Ego. The Life Within meeting the Life Without.

However, if it were kicked in, then perhaps there did exist a man in plaid visible only to those selected to see him or those who believed in him. The Life Without meeting the Life Beyond.

There was no way to tell. Physical evidence was indeterminate.

She told her story to all who would listen, advertised in the paper, and called the work site coordinator. None of her actions were of any help. All she learned was that no one had been assigned to that work site the night of her accident and no one on the work crew recognized her description of the man who had helped her.

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With time, the construction site evolved into a roadside park. She liked to walk there in the late evening when no one else was around. Some said that it was not safe to be alone there at that time of night, but she felt secure. She would stand on the grass where once she had stood on rocks, look across the road, and on moonless, starless nights would see the burning truck. At those moments, for some reason, she felt protected in a strangely compelling and oddly familiar way. She felt not alone.

With time, the little park was discovered by the masses, and only on rare occasion was she able to stand alone and watch the sun set over the spot in the road that had come to center her life. On one of those rare occasions, she felt a stranger standing beside her. For some time, they stood silently in companionship and watched as the sun enflamed the sky, then dissolved into streaks of smoldering red and gold and grey above a now-skeletal view of the rock-rimmed ocean shore. Finally, she spoke.

“Hello.”

“Just a few more minutes,” he said. “Soon the darkness will arrive and take us away from this moment.”

“As it does every moonless night,” she responded. “I suppose it is not safe to stay here this late, after the guards have left, but I like to watch the sun set over the ocean beyond the road.”

“You are safe here,” he responded in a strangely compelling and oddly familiar voice. “I work here.”

She turned to look at him, but she was alone.

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All the text above the first dotted line is fact, below the line fiction. It was published under my real name in a collection of stories from the Middle East. (c) 2005.