The Karma Booth. Jeff Pearce
guessed he was about thirty-five years old. He was, in fact, forty-two. The blond hair was beginning to thin, but with the delicacy of his full lips and high cheekbones, he looked boyish. If he had smiled, the effect would have taken yet more years off his face. But he looked at them now with a severe, almost imperious gaze.
This was Professor Timothy Cale, and each semester, his courses on political science were oversubscribed.
“We participate,” he started softly, “because we trust.”
There was a long pause, and the students didn’t look terribly impressed with this opener. A faint cough came from the back of the hall. Then the professor’s voice rose, filling the room as if every one of them was insultingly dense not to comprehend what he’d just told them.
“We participate because we trust,” he repeated.
Now they were all focused, each one of them very still in his or her seat, sharply aware they had better keep their attention.
“This room is a new country,” the professor went on, now stepping away from the podium. He walked with expansive, long strides, and they imagined he really did intend to claim the room as some obscure sovereign nation. The voice kept hitting them with bullets of staccato emphasis. “I’ve told you before: every day you walk in here, you will surrender your assumptions to my baggage check of your ignorance, which I assure you is monumental.”
Then Timothy Cale stepped out of the front area and walked briskly up a couple of steps into the aisle between the seats. He stopped at the second row and yanked a book from the little desk of a student, holding it up for all the others to see.
“Look at this, a biography of Chairman Mao,” explained the professor, as he walked down towards the podium. “Good ol’ Mao Zedong. ‘Power comes from the barrel of a gun.’ Oh, really? Bullshit.”
He made a point of tossing the book into a trashcan.
“If that was all there was to it, there wouldn’t be any literature. Any innovation—hell, there would be no change at all. People—we, the governed—may grant or withhold the one thing that cannot be stolen: our trust. We participate because we trust. And we will trust when we can participate. So how do we? How do you define yourself as a citizen? Machiavelli did not just write The Prince. In his Discourses, he explained that—”
A cell phone erupted in the middle aisles, obnoxiously playing a hip-hop mix. Tim Cale glowered at the twenty-five-year-old football linebacker in the vividly bright polo shirt and track pants.
“Mr. Harding, please bring that down to the front.”
The student fumbled with the phone. “I’ll turn it off, sorry—”
“No, Mr. Harding. Bring it here.”
Shamefaced, the football star came forward like a ten-year-old caught chewing gum. He surrendered the phone to his professor, who efficiently and quickly removed the SIM card and smashed both it and the phone.
“Hey, that’s my fucking phone, man! You know how much it cost?”
“Far less than what your father paid for your wasted education, Mr. Harding,” the young-looking professor answered. “And this new land that you’re in is not a democracy.”
But the student didn’t know when to quit. “New country? So you can do what you like? Fuck that! It’s ridiculous!”
Tim shoved his hands into the pockets of his gray trousers and strolled away from the furious linebacker. He was talking to the others now. “Is it so ridiculous? Let me ask—sit down, Mr. Harding. Sit. You either comply or face exile from the kingdom. Let me ask all of you: How many people—and at what point when they develop an organization—does it take before you recognize them as a state?”
The students looked to each other, none wanting to debate or challenge him. Barely anyone paid attention to Harding slinking back to his seat. At last, one of their ranks ventured a challenge.
“It’s… silly. I mean, it’s like, preposterous. With a political state, you know, you got history, you got geography—”
“I have tenure here,” Tim cut in, his voice gentle and reasonable. “Same lecture hall I’ve always taught in. Why can’t I be a state?”
With a shrug, the challenger decided to press on. “You already gave us the answer.”
“Which is what, Mr. Bell?”
“Maybe we don’t trust you.”
There was a wave of nervous laughter helping to break the tension and then a sprinkling of appreciative applause.
“I mean, hey, you’re an authority,” added Bell. “You’ve demonstrated force, that’s all.”
“But you are participating,” Tim pointed out.
“Because we need something from you. We want to learn, so we go along for a while. That doesn’t make us citizens—or subjects.”
Tim nodded, apparently pleased with the brave reasoning. “Very good. Mr. Bell here has lived in Europe. He knows what it’s like to tolerate the rules of others. Oh, don’t look embarrassed by it, Mr. Bell. Okay! Okay, here, right here is our problem in these United States! And it’s in all of you. The assumption that worldly means ‘privileged’—that you should actually be embarrassed for being smart and having seen other countries.”
Tim scanned the rows of faces, seemingly taking them all in and tossing them back, shaking his head as he began to pace again. “Less than twenty-five percent of Americans own a passport, and to me, that is pathetic. It means you trust CNN and Fox News more than you want to go see what’s out there! Now some in this room want to go save Third World orphans—when you probably couldn’t get out of Newark airport if you tried.”
He made a point of stopping in front of a lovely young redhead in the first row. Her eyes flicked left and right, and she settled on a patch of the broadloom carpet. Tim mercifully walked on, his stare fixed now on one of the male students in the back row.
“Some of you—God help us—want to run for political office.”
Before the others could be sure exactly who he meant, he was already moving on, walking up the aisle and stopping in the middle.
“Some of you are hiding. You think education is camouflage, and a degree is a passport. Perhaps. But in this room, you will learn to think. And your understanding of what a nation is, what power is, will be broadened as we go along. For instance, how many people here believe in non-violence?”
There was a substantial show of hands from the seats. Tim let out a cruel laugh.
“What a delightful bunch of liberal pussies!”
There was more nervous laughter at this, but above it all was a new whispered chatter over his language.
“Oh, my words are offensive? They’re sexist? If you can’t handle words, how can you possibly help a man tortured in a cell or who’s got a rifle to his head? Every political action in history began as an extreme. Passive resistance is passive.”
“That’s not true!” piped up a girl in the seventh row. “People filled Tiananmen Square and—”
“And what, Ms. Wong? They sat. Woooowwww! And when the tanks rolled in a few thousand of your distant relatives got shot. As I recall, you told me your parents immigrated here in 1989. Well, did they leave because they won? Do you ever ask them what morally questionable things they had to do so that little Michelle could get her degree in America?”
She glared at him, not bothering to answer.
“Gandhi admitted he could never fight Hitler with his methods,” the professor continued. “Why? Because non-violence relies on shame. What if your enemy feels no shame? Non-violence is a political response to a matter of warfare. It means