(urth) Short Story 64: When I was Ming the Merciless

[jbarach at aol.com]

Marc --


This is one of my favorite Wolfe stories.  The passage you quoted ("There are things we don’t know about that live in the world with us – things in another plane of reality.  And when you make something like that, it comes – one of them comes.  It shapes itself to fit your image of it, becoming the real Spirit of the Yellows"), I submit, provides a glimpse of Wolfe's view of other gods and of idolatry.  


In the Bible, Paul says that idols are nothing.  But he also says that eating at the table of the idols is eating at the table of demons and having communion with them.  Both are true, and Wolfe's words here strike me as a way of understanding how they work together.  The idol itself is nothing more than a piece of wood, carved to look like a bull and called by the name "Baal."  So the biblical prophets make fun of those who cut down a tree, start a fire with part of the wood in order to cook their food, and carve another part of the wood into an image, before which they prostrate themselves.  It's just a hunk of wood!  But at the same time, it's not, in another sense, because it is identified with Baal (which means, as Paul puts it, that it's identified with demons), such that eating at Baal's table (or Zeus's table or Jupiter's table or whatever) is having communion with Baal, which is to say, having communion with demons.


So, too, the Lung Rin is some stuff.  Nothing particularly important.  But once it is made and given special honor and worshipped, something comes and becomes the real Spirit of the Yellows.  You worship a thing you've made and you're having fellowship -- becoming one with -- a demon.


It seems to me that someone could write up a helpful essay on idolatry, images, and (false) gods in Wolfe's works, bringing this passage together with, say, the gods in Long Sun, which are equally man-made and even pre-programmed, so that they appear on giant TV screens, but are also equally as real as "the Spirit of the Yellows."


John











-----Original Message-----
From: Marc Aramini <marcaramini at gmail.com>
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Sent: Mon, May 12, 2014 2:36 pm
Subject: (urth)  Short Story 64: When I was Ming the Merciless



“When I Was Ming the Merciless” is copyright 1975 andappeared in The Ides of Tomorrow.  It is collected in Endangered Species.
SUMMARY:
The narrator is interrogated after an experiment ondistributing resources with different groups of people goes awry.  He defends his actions in creating an Empirefrom the yellow group of the experiment, subjugating the green and blue groups,who, even if they were known before the experiment, were treated as peoplewithout names or identities.  They createweapons such as polearms and swords and forge a dragon banner, and at the endthe speaker orders his underlings to kill a woman, who is eviscerated.  Since she was being monitored by the outsideworld, her death summons the psychaids to break through the barriers and putthe experiment to a stop, though the Yellow group still fights against themwith their inferior jury rigged weapons. 
COMMENTARY:
A relatively straightforward story, there are still a fewthings worth mentioning.  This isobviously an outgrowth of the results of Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experimentof 1971 in which volunteers to be treated as prisoners and guards were selected.  Originally scheduled for two weeks, after sixdays it was disbanded because of the observations and interviews of a psychstudent who questioned the morality of the experiment as a whole, which wasencouraging depression in those playing prisoners and authoritarian abuse inthose who were enacting the roles of guards. This story seems to involve world resources and how competing groupscould come to share them, and this particular group has chosen subjugation andviolence to achieve its ends.  It mightalso echo the Blue-eye, Brown-eye classroom experiment carried out after MartinLuther King’s assassination in the refusal of allowing mixing between the colorgroups (in this case, Yellow, Green, and Blue) though this seems imposed tosome degree by the leader’s decree in the story.
THE WEAPONS:
Simple engineering of brooms and mops with cleavers, knives,and scarf joints allow polearms to be formed, and the swords were made frommetal reinforcing bars under the floor and beaten into swords.  The speaker’s own sword had a bone handle(What kind of bone?).  It is quite clearthat the leader has been changed to some degree by his experience in a way thatremoving him from the environment is not going to eliminate: “Out here therewill be more scope for ingenuity; we might even be able to get hold of somefissionables.  Just joking, of course.”
THEME:
Naturally this story is important because it introduces oneof Wolfe’s most enduring themes: Imitation begets reality.  If we pretend to be something, we become it.  However, there is still room for this to besomething of a fantasy story in its atavistic totem treatment of the Lung-Rinand the effigy of the speaker: 
“There are things we don’t know about that live in the worldwith us – things in another plane of reality. And when you make something like that, it comes – one of themcomes.  It shapes itself to fit yourimage of it, becoming the real Spirit of the Yellows. Anyway, when we had thetorchlight processions, sometimes you might think you could see it move. … Wecaught rats and pigeons when we built it and put them inside, so it would makestrange sounds; some of them must have lived a long time. .. You can’t kill thething, the Spirit of theYellows.  Not unless you kill all ofus.  We’ll be free some day.”
The threat of getting fissionables and the story of the “something”that takes over: “when a man – a male, let’s call him – has been fighting awoman, and he wins and knocks her down, and she drops whatever it is she has, aclub or whatever … and often her shirt and shorts are torn, there is an impulsethat takes command … and then, when a woman has had that happen once or twice,it takes everything out of them. … Some of the men said that they really likedit, underneath, but I don’t think so.”
This dominant, conquering, raping “impulse” is given flesh,and the implication is that the leader, with all his self-justification, stillimplies that no one really likes it, but it happens of itself.
The story also shows the circle of power fairly effectively:“Each of us would tell the rotten things that had happened to him … but we wereall thinking that it wasn’t like that here. We were all together – all Yellows together. … We swore that we weregoing to stand together or fall together.” 
Yet this solidarity imposes its rules on others: “I don’tfeel bad about her, whoever she was.  Wewere all volunteers … she kept getting out of line, over and over again, whenshe was just a stinking Green or Blue or whatever she was.  I can’t even remember.  So I decided she should be punished.  We made a ceremony out of it, with fire inthe braziers, and the big gong. … Jan put the sword through her belly … sheliked the blood from the blade.”  Fromthe determination to make the world better when they are in charge becauseterrible things happened to them outside before, they fail to recognize thehumanity of any other group, and create something just as or even morehorrific.
LUNG-RIN
While it is easy enough to associate the symbolism of theLung-Rin (according to our speaker, an image of two dragons fighting sewn fromthe back of his shirt) with China and its Yellow Emperor, said to be descendedfrom the dragon, (Lung is, of course, a dragon), Rin is a bit more problematicit is a Japanese name and can be used in speaking of something cold, but Iwould prefer to stick with the Chinese connotations.  Is this a combination of the mythical Kirinwith the dragon?  The Kirin does serve toherald the arrival or passing of a great leader.  In the early Chinese representations, thedragon was said to assimilate the features of those it conquered, thus becomingmore like a Chimera than one unified creature. While the color Yellow obviously impels them to identify themselves asMongolia, shortening it to the Mongo hoard allows the leader to actually,perhaps in jest, perhaps seriously, assume the persona of Ming the Merciless,obviously the leader of the Mongos in Flash Gordon.  
The overarching theme seen here, that we become what wepretend to be, will be recapitulated over and over in Wolfe, for good and for bad.  
STEREOTYPING:
While this story may at the surface be guilty ofstereotyping (Ming the Merciless is a fairly negative Chinese stereotype tobegin with, and the group identifying itself as Mongolia/Mongo based on their yellowbands and clothing does tend to latch on to an obvious color association) … atits heart the construction shows how easily it is to fall into arbitrary groupsand deny the humanity of others, even when we believe ourselves to bejust.  Thus the hunger for control andrespect makes the leader something of a superstitious totalitarian stereotype.  I feel that the stereotypes are intentional,self-conscious, and fit the theme of the story.
UNANSWERED QUESTIONS:
Are there any real distinctions in the groups that justifydifferences in behavior before the experiment? (ie – Greens being culled fromhard sciences rather than soft sciences?) The theme would seem to be no – that there is no difference in behaviorbased on any pre-existing class or state, as the new world order is immersiveand subjectively “real”.  
What kind of bone handle does the leader’s sword have?
APPENDIX: Unstated questions.
They are ultimately extremely predictable though they areelided from the text to present the pure voice of the leader trapped in his relativedelusions.  They would usually appearbetween every paragraph.  This allows theleader’s voice to predominate the text to culminate in his absurd claims:  “none of you could possibly know how it wasthen, when I was Ming the Merciless.”
“Welcome.” 
“Is there anything you would like to say?” 
“Would you like a cigarette?” 
“Why was there no coffee?” 
?”What went wrong [during the experiment]?” (It is unclearwhat the question is at this point, to which our narrator responds: “Odd thatyou should put it as you did.  Because I’vethought of it so often myself, since the end, in just that way”) 
“Aren’t you ashamed?” which is silenced.
“Relax/Calm down.”
“Tell us about your leadership tricks/weapons/how you did it?”
“Do you feel the need to justify yourself?”
“Time spent doing what?”
“Are you okay?”
There may be several paragraphs with no questions while hedescribes making weapons.
“Would you like to see your sword?”
“What is [the Lung-Rin]?”
“Was that your god?”
“No, we haven’t talked to Don.”
“What happened to [the Spirit of the Yellows]?
“What did you talk about outside?”
“No. The recorder stays on.”
“Did the women want to fight?”
“Were you a government/sociology/psych student?” (hard todetermine which major they attempted to pigeonhole him in after he claimed hewasn’t Emperor).
“Were there differences?”
“Did you let [the rapists/abusers from other colors] joinyou?”
“So you tried to take the colors off?”
“Were the brave women’s shirts in a similar torn state?”
“The colors could not band together?”
“The Greens had no fighters?”
“Can you tell us what all this was about?”
“What did you call your Empire?”
“How do you feel about killing [the girl]?”
“Did you kill her yourself?”
“And that was when the experiment stopped?” (Or something tothat effect)
“Do you understand how we feel about this?”


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