Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

little wave, “no childish righteousness. Nobody’s boasting about that sordid affair. But use your head, Professor. It was an act of war. The Saints had been driven from Missouri by brute force, and the U.S. Cavalry was amassing for an attack. The rules of war were not the same in those days as we like to believe they are now. It was a rich train—one of the richest that ever travelled West—and rich in arms as well as gold. In eighteen fifty-seven massacre was a standard wartime practice. It took stomach, but our forebears had a good deal more stomach than we do.” He looked down at his own vast tumescence glumly, as if noticing he’d perhaps made a joke. “A few years later, when times had changed, the church itself turned on the general in command of the operation—a cousin of Robert E. Lee.”

“Terrific,” Mickelsson said. He put down the wreckingbar to move his dresser and trunk out of the way. They’d be scratched beyond repair when this was over, he thought—then went clammy, remembering it wouldn’t matter; he’d have no use for trunks and dressers. “Terrific,” he said again, with still greater disgust.

Gently, wearily, Lawler asked in his fussily good English, “Does irony comfort you? I am not responsible for the cruelty of life at that time. You’re a descendant of Vikings, if I’m not mistaken. Are you responsible for the sack of Paris?”

Mickelsson worked on, clenching his dust-gritty teeth, saying nothing.

“But to return to your earlier, more interesting point,” Lawler said, “I think it is the case that most Latter-Day Saints, if you ask them about the Danites, will tell you that there certainly are none. But we’re adults, you and I. We know about people.

“Look at the matter philosophically. I think we’re in agreement, you and I, that people ought to act as individuals, with individual thought and will. How else can we have a democracy? The trouble is, they don’t. People are lazy, if not stupid—and I do not honestly believe the problem is stupidity. They don’t want to think. People want secure, happy families, pleasant barbecue parties, predictable-in-advance nights for bowling and the opera. Given that fact, one has two apparent choices: to try with all one’s might to teach them to think and to value thinking—and we both know, as teachers, how seldom that works—or to control their thinking, de-fuse them, so to speak—intellectually castrate them, you may prefer to say—and we both know how frequently, even in the university classroom, we do that.”

Abruptly, Lawler leaned forward from the side of the bed and stood up, darkly frowning, and backed, on tiptoe, with graceful, almost princely movements, to the bathroom door, which he threw open suddenly, as if he thought there might be someone behind it. The bathroom was empty, like the rest of the house. He closed the door and looked hard at Mickelsson. “Did you hear something? Is there someone here in the house with you?”

“I didn’t hear a thing.”

Lawler seemed to ponder it, tapping his chin with two fingers, his lips sucked in. Then he seemed to dismiss it. “All right,” he said. “Very well, where were we?” He nodded. “Ah. Controlling people’s minds. Yes, exactly!” His expression became solemn again. “Has it ever crossed your mind, Professor, that we’re in the process of wiping out physical illness? Fifty per cent of all cancer we can stop; we’re close to winning out over heart disease; we’re on the threshold of discovering the secret of aging. Do you know what that means? Soon the one great enemy—the only one remaining—will be mental illness. Imagine it! A whole planet of everlasting mad zombies! Freedom, civility, repression, frustration … increasing crowding, increasing indignity and an interminable life for suffering it all … Your kind of dream is finished, you see, your admirable but deadly liberalism. Life must defend itself against the mad raging horde. It’s right at the door, believe me!

“For that reason, you see, we have in our church a hierarchy of knowledge and control—much as the Freemasons at one time had. It’s basically what you might call a military structure: those who know, and those who, in descending degrees, obey. Those who obey are persuaded that the church knows best. I know, I know, you scorn that. Who doesn’t? You want everyone to think for himself, starting with propositions in the original Greek.” He shrugged, then shook his head impatiently. “But they won’t, that’s the evident fact of the matter. Believe it or not, most people want to give up all traces of their humanness to some authority that frees them to be comfortable, healthy beasts. If they weren’t Mormons, they’d be union fanatics or Organization men,’ and their children would be Moonies, or scientologists, or members of the Way International. Have you read about that?” Lawler’s eyebrows lifted, his face full of sadness. “Someplace in Ohio—Lima, perhaps? A profoundly dangerous outfit, I’m afraid! Gun-crazy, and rigidly mind-controlled by drugs. We, as you know, do nothing like that. Our use of violence is selective—that’s one reason no one is even sure of the present existence of the Sons of Dan. The membership of Way International, I might mention, grows by leaps and bounds. People, you see, like to be slaves! But no organization in the world—with the possible exception of the Jehovah’s Witnesses—is growing as fast as the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints. We play no tricks, we use no drugs—we forbid escape through drugs. We do not use ‘front organization’ trickery like the Moonies—cheap house-cleaners and babysitters who will poison and steal your child’s mind.” He smiled as if mournfully amused by such childish wickedness. “No, no! We work with human weakness itself, the most powerful drug of all. The universal hunger for security, easy answers, magic, and somebody to blame. The religious thirst, as your friend Nietzsche says, for things which are against reason. That’s the formula, you know. The medieval Church Fathers understood it, especially the mainly