Equality: In the Year 2000

Chapter Twelve The Year 2, New Calendar

When the two men reentered the room Edith looked at them questioningly. “What have you two been up to?”

“I’ll never tell,” Julian said, doing his best to leer.

The doctor went over to the phone screen.

Julian said hurriedly, “Who are you going to call?”

“Why, that friend I just told you about.”

Julian shook his head. “Go and see him.”

Leete looked mildly surprised, but then nodded. “I see,” he said.

“Yes. And keep obviously what is in mind, in mind,” Julian insisted, and then added somewhat wearily, “I am from an age when we were conscious of these things.”

“What in heaven are you two talking about?” Edith demanded.

“A dirty joke,” Julian said.

“What is a dirty joke?”

He looked at her in exasperation. “See here,” he said. “Ever since I came out of stasis, you’ve been telling me we don’t have this any more, you don’t have banks, you don’t have cities in the sense we had them a third of a century ago. You don’t have wars, and you don’t have jails. You don’t have newspapers and you don’t have schools in the sense that we did. You don’t even have stores. But now I am calling a halt. Don’t tell me you don’t tell dirty stories any more!”

Doctor Leete was chuckling. He said, “You know, it’s been so long that I’d just about forgotten. Dirty stories were simply stories usually based on taboos such as sex, or excretion, and usually involving taboo words. Do away with the taboos and the institution disappears.”

Edith was mystified. “What’s a taboo word?”

Julian was looking from one to the other. He had been in stasis for something like ten years before Edith had even been born.

The academician laughed again. “I doubt if any explanation would make sense to you. When I was a lad, I could say ‘pee’, if I meant urinate, but if I said ‘piss,’ I was spanked.”

Julian chimed in, “I was allowed to say ‘heck,’ but if I said ‘hell,’ I was punished, although the word was used in the same way. Some parents were even more strict. Their children could say ‘Gad,’ but not ‘God.’ ‘Goddamnit’ came out ‘gaddarnit.’ ’”

“What has all this got to do with dirty jokes, whatever they are?”

Julian sighed. “Let me think of an example. Okay. An American was telling an Englishman a poem:

“The Englishman returned to London and told it to a friend:

The doctor laughed mildly but Edith merely looked at Julian and said, “That’s a dirty story?”

“Well, yes.”

“A joke?”

“Yes.”

“What’s funny about it?”

Julian closed his eyes in pain. “It’s like your father was telling you: it’s based on a taboo word. So the Englishman by suggesting it, though not actually saying it, made the joke funny.”

Edith looked at her father. “What dirty word?”

Her father cleared his throat. “ ‘Cunt.’ In Middle English it was cunte, originally derived from the Latin cunnus, and meaning vagina. It was one of the taboo words.”

“Why not simply say vagina?”

He said, “I give up. I knew very well I wasn’t going to be able to explain dirty jokes. In fact, I’m not sure I understand why I ever thought they were funny. Good-bye. I’m off to see someone on a suggestion of Julian’s that I’m not sure I understand either.” He left, shaking his head.

Edith asked Julian, “Do you know any more dirty jokes?”

“No,” he said definitely, sitting down across from her. He brought his notes from his side pocket.

“What do you have there?” she said.

“Some notes 1 was going to ask your father about, but it occurs to me that as a student of anthropology, you might be more up on it than he is. It has to do with crime.”

“Crime? Oh, of course. Fascinating. I spent over a year studying it. It must have been fabulous, living back when they had crime.”

He let the breath out of his lungs. “Yeah,” he said. “Never a dull moment. No more crime these days, hey?”

“No. Of course not.”

He didn’t bother to disguise his skepticism as he fumbled through his notes. “All right. Now let me state my case. When I went into hibernation, we had one hell of a lot of crime. It was growing so fast it was hard to keep statistics.”

He looked down at his papers. “For instance, we had petty crime, such as shoplifting, avoiding paying your fare when getting on a subway or bus, children sneaking into movies, walking out on a bill in a restaurant, figuring out methods of making long distance calls on the telephone without paying.” He paused. “Then there were servants pilfering about the household, servants getting a kickback from the butchershop and other stores where they purchased supplies for their employers. Trivia such as that.”

“Fascinating,” she repeated.

“Yeah,” he muttered. “I once had a houseman who drank up three cases of vintage champagne on me.” He went back to his notes. “Then we had crimes of violence. Mugging, kidnapping, piracy even, in some parts of the world, murder, rape, robbery of homes, stores, warehouses, and banks.

“And along in here we have a whole variety of odds and ends: confidence games, prostitution, gambling, blackmail, pickpocketing, smuggling, cattle rustling, extortion. Actually, the list is endless. At the very top, even more lucrative than bank robbery, and certainly more often committed, there’s embezzlement.”

“Yes,” she said brightly. “I studied all about it. Men like Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Al Capone.”

He looked at her sarcastically. “So no more, eh?”

She shook her head.

“No more police, no more jails. Don’t need ’em any more, right?”

“That’s right,” she said reasonably.

He threw down the sheaf of notes on the coffee table.

“Why not? All through history we’ve had crime, since first some caveman slugged his neighbor over the head with a club and swiped his wife. So now, all of a sudden, why has it ended?”

“Because the reasons ended.”

He took her in silently.

She said, “Now see here. All those different types of crimes you mentioned fit roughly into one of two categories; those committed for the sake of money, and those due to mental illness. Obviously, now that we’ve eliminated money, crimes that dealt with stealing, as such, were abolished out of hand. What would you steal, these days? Those that dealt with mental illness are now in the hands of the Medical Guild, not police, courts, and jails.”

She thought about it. “Why, even in your day how did they deal with a shoplifter who was found to be a kleptomaniac?”

“Okay. But look, take a present-day embezzler. Suppose you had someone working in the part of the data banks dealing with what we would have called banking—the credit records. Someone in a position to so alter the records that he deposited to his own account, say, twice as much credit as the other citizens are granted from their Guaranteed Annual Income. What would you do with him?”

Edith sighed. “Jule, in the first place he would have no motive for doing such a thing since he already receives all that he needs. You can’t eat more than three or four meals a day, you can’t wear more than one outfit of clothes at a time, and you can’t sleep in more than one bed. As things are now, most people don’t use up their yearly quota of credit. What in the world would you do with twice as much? But if such a thing did happen, then obviously the person involved would be mentally deranged and the Medical Guild would treat him.”

“And during the time he was being treated, he would still continue to receive his Guaranteed Annual Income?”

“But of course.”

Julian sighed. “Okay. All right. But how about rape? Don’t tell me there are no longer crimes of passion.”

“Yes, there are; seldom, but sometimes. As to rape, sex is so free, so easily available to all, that only a terribly upset person would resort to rape for sexual satisfaction. In which case, once again, it is a matter for the Medical Guild to treat the poor harassed individual.”

“But suppose in committing the rape, the rapist kills the girl. Suppose the rapist is a sadist.”

She looked at him in puzzlement. “But surely even in your time a sadist was given psychiatric care rather than punishment.”

“Sometimes,” he muttered. “Sometimes they were executed, or given life imprisonment.”

“How terrible!”

“Suppose it’s a crime against the State?”

“What State? There is no State. The State was an institution for the purpose of maintaining a class-divided society. It was organized with laws, police and military, courts and prisons to maintain the status quo under slavery, feudalism, capitalism, or state-capitalism, which was what the Soviet-type communism was really all about. Today, we have no State, since we have no class or classes to be kept subjugated.”

“What I mean is, suppose someone comes along who wants to overthrow this so-called Golden Rule society of yours. What do you do with him?”

“Nothing. Any citizen is free to advocate any change.”

“But suppose he wants to overthrow the system?”

“If he could convince the majority of our citizens that his plan was appropriate, then it would be done.”

Julian was becoming impatient with her. “But suppose he knew that he couldn’t convince a majority and resorted to force and violence. In the old days, in the United States, it was theoretically legal to advocate a basic change. The country was full of minority parties and groups who wanted to establish everything from socialism to anarchy. But you had to advocate that it be accomplished by peaceful means—the ballot. When somebody came along such as the IWW, the Wobblies, or the early Communist Party, who favored armed revolt, the police, the F.B.I., and everyone else landed on them like a ton of bricks.”

The idea was so foreign to Edith that she had to think it over. She said finally, “He’d have his work cut out trying to accomplish it. For one thing, in your day half the citizens in the country seemed to possess guns. If not, they were easily obtained, even after various laws were passed to control them. But today I would estimate that not one person in fifty owns a firearm. Hunting is no longer a popular sport; we tend to protect our wildlife. Those who do have guns usually have small-caliber ones for use in marksmanship clubs. They would hardly be suitable for armed revolt.”

“But suppose a few thousand people did arm themselves,” he argued, “even with these small-caliber guns, and seized the government?”

“Jule, Jule, you know enough about the manner in which the country is run now to realize how silly that sounds. We have no government in the sense that applied in the middle of the twentieth century. The government that we do have, if that is what you want to call it, is not in control of the country. Let us suppose that you did seize all the members of the Production Congress. What would have been accomplished? They are not in control of the nation. The production of the industries and the other necessary work would go on. We would simply elect new members to a new Production Congress. But it is all so ridiculous. What would motivate such people? What would they gain that they do not have now?”

Julian grabbed up his notes and fumbled through them. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Somebody—it was you, I think—told me that narcotics were legal now. Anybody can try them.”

“Yes. If you become addicted and wish to be cured, the cure is immediate and you develop a built-in allergy to the drug you were on. Both a physical and a psychological allergy, so that you both don’t want to ever try it again and physically are incapable of standing it.”

Julian sighed. “It was one of the big problems of my time.”

Edith said, “When drugs were first legalized and taken out of the hands of the criminals, they were given quite a go. Then, as with pornography in Denmark, and later in the States, particularly after an extensive educational campaign in the media, use fell off to the vanishing point. I tried smoking opium once, out of sheer curiosity.”

“You did? You don’t look the type. What happened?”

She was indignant. “But of course I’m the type. I keep telling you that I am an amateur anthropologist. Man has smoked, eaten, and drunk opium for thousands of years.”

“What happened to you?”

“The first time? It made me sick.”

“What do you mean, the first time? What happened the second time?”

“It wasn’t so bad. I had some very nice dreams. I had read up on it, so I knew I had a good chance of becoming ill the first few times I smoked. But I went on and saw it through.”

He shook his head. “It simply doesn’t seem like Edith Leete. Did you finally wind up taking the cure?”

“The cure?”

“For addiction.”

“Oh, Jule. Don’t be ridiculous. I didn’t become addicted. I simply tried it a few times and then stopped. It bored me.”

Julian said, “Okay. Let’s get back to crime. What I want to know is what the hell happened to the criminals when these changes of yours started taking place? What happened to the Mafia, the Syndicate, Cosa Nostra? What did you have to do, shoot them all?”

She rubbed a hand down over her face in a gesture of despair. “Jule, Jule.” Then, “The average criminal in any society is not an affluent man. For every Lucky Luciano—was that his name? It’s been years since I studied it.”

“Yes, Lucky,” Julian said. “As a matter of fact, I met him a couple of times in Naples. Well, it was Capri, actually, just off the coast. He was a rather quiet type. Quite a gentleman, in a way. But there was death behind his eyes.”

“Good heavens, how wonderful,” she said. “For me it’s history. It’s like your telling me you knew, well, Lincoln or General Grant or someone like that.”

Julian said, “My family began its fortune during the Grant administration. There were many opportunities, if you had the connections.”

She said, “At any rate, for every Luciano, Costello, or Capone, there were a thousand petty thieves, dope peddlers, counterfeiters, and so forth whose average take, over the years spent in crime, was less than that of a worker in industry, especially when one considers the years in prison. Let me see if I can remember his name… yes, Willy ‘The Actor’ Sutton, one of the most successful bank robbers. He once figured out that during the forty years in which he had been engaged in crime, or was imprisoned, he had averaged less than two thousand dollars a year in ‘take-home pay.’ Of course, deducted from his gross income were bribes to the police and crooked politicians, lawyers’ fees, exorbitant prices for hideouts, and other professional expenses.”

“What’s your point?”

“You asked what happened to the criminal element when our new Society of the Golden Rule emerged. Certainly, a few Godfathers of the Mafia and such well-to-do criminals opposed the new way of things as strongly as any capitalist. But the overwhelming majority of smaller fry were as much in support of the changes as their more law-abiding citizens.”

Julian slumped back, tossing his notes to the table once again.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve been being very righteous all along here. But the fact of the matter is that when I was the head of West Enterprises, it sometimes became difficult to figure out where honesty ended and crime began. I’ve been hauled into court several times.”

She nodded. “Yes, I know, Jule. Remember, along with my father and mother, I have studied your life just about all my life. I probably know things about you that you don’t…”

He scowled at her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

She got to her feet and walked over to one of her father’s bookshelves. “Father is one of the last of the book collectors. If he had his way, he’d have a thousand volumes rather than relying on the International Data Banks. Now, where in the devil is the one I want?”

He waited for her to find whatever it was she was looking for. Eventually, she returned.

“Ferdinand Lundberg,” she said.

“I’ll be damned. I know that name. Seems to me he was a professor at one of the big schools. He wrote a couple of muckraker books, as I recall. I don’t think I read them.”

“Yes,” she said grimly. “You with your talk of crime, darling. Listen to this:

“’Most offenses open to members of the upper socioeconomic class… were dealt with by special administrative tribunals. The offenses were mostly variants of fraud or conspiracy. When they were committed against the broad public they called for relatively light penalties, seldom prison terms. Verdicts against the offender were often carefully phrased so as to be non-stigmatic… Even when a member of the upper socioeconomic class was found guilty of a stigmatic crime and was about to be sentenced, there was a marked difference in the language of the judge. Often in the case of a culprit of the lower classes the judge administered a savage tongue-lashing, while the defendant hung his head and his family sobbed, terrorized. But when upper-class culprits had been convicted in criminal court of using the mails to defraud the general public, the judge… typically began by saying: “You are men of affairs, of experience, of refinement and culture, of excellent reputation and standing in the business and social world.” They were in fact, as the judicial process had just disclosed, criminals. This difference in attitude of judges is often pronounced. Severely reprehensive toward members of the lower classes, the judges become wistful, melancholy, or sadly philosophical when sentencing men of the upper class. (After all, they both come from the same class, may have gone to the same school, and may belong to the same clubs.)… Many members of the upper classes did commit offenses for which the government held them accountable. But in most cases special arrangements had been made to handle them with kid gloves and in many cases to administer by way of punishment a slap on the wrist.’”

Julian laughed.

Her eyes narrowed. “What’s funny?”

He rubbed a hand over his chin. “Nothing, really. It’s absolutely true. Actually, I didn’t usually even appear in court. My attorneys represented me. One of the judges I remember was in college with me. We used to call him Fartface.”

“Fartface?”

“One of those taboo four-letter words your father mentioned. At any rate, he was on the take and—”

“On the take?”

“Ummm… that is, he was susceptible to bribery if you handled it in a careful, civilized manner.”

“How in the world did you handle bribery in a careful, civilized manner?”

He looked at her, knowing she wouldn’t understand what he was going to say. “In this particular case I gave his daughter a wedding present… fifty thousand dollars.” He added absently, “Tax free, obviously. Fifty thousand dollars from my account in Switzerland, in thousand-dollar bills.”

She was wide-eyed. “What did you get in return?”

He considered, remembering back down over the years. “Actually, what was involved was one of the smaller countries in Central America.”

Edith was incredulous. “You mean you bought a whole country?”

He said wearily, “That isn’t the way it works. It’s very complicated and, in fact, I don’t know how it works. I had people who worked for me who knew how it works. That’s how we all operated: Hughes, Getty, all of us. We could hire brains; we didn’t have to have any.”

She said, “I can’t believe this.”

“I gave you the wrong idea. I didn’t buy a country. Who in the hell wants a country? You’d have to worry about schools, hospitals, all the rest of it. What I bought was… well, control of everything that was worth owning in the country. The right to exploit it.” He added cynically, “Including the president and senate. Come to think of it, whether or not they were worth owning is moot.”

She regarded him coldly and said, “I think your actions were disgusting.”

He came to his feet.

“Yes, I know. Looking back on it, so do I.”