Cat Country (24 page)

‘Go ahead, a rough outline will do very nicely.’ I was only afraid that he wouldn’t go on.

‘The first political reform probably came just after the demand was made that the emperor let the people have a hand in the government. Of course, he refused, and at that point the People’s Suffrage Brawl drew some military men into its ranks. The emperor, seeing things take this inauspicious turn, made officials of the leaders of the brawl, and then they began to devote themselves so exclusively to their official duties that they completely forgot about the People’s Suffrage Brawl.

‘As luck would have it, at just that point some other people heard that we really didn’t need to have an emperor to begin with, and they organised still another brawl: the Government by the People Brawl. The emperor saw clearly that the only way to handle this brawl would be to organise a counter-brawl of his own. Anyone who joined the emperor’s brawl was paid a thousand National Souls per month. When the members of the Government by the People Brawl found out about it, visions of wealth began to dance before their eyes. They immediately panicked and fell over each other in reaffirming their allegiance to the emperor. But the emperor was still somewhat put out with the members of the Government by the People Brawl and only allowed them a salary of one hundred National Souls a month. They were satisfied at first, but not long afterwards he had to raise them to a hundred-and-three in order to hold their allegiance. The fact that these people were given a monthly salary for no work attracted everybody’s attention and before you knew it, there were brawls of ten members, two members, and even some of only one. There was no end to the names that the brawls went by.’

‘Excuse me for asking, but did the real, down-to-earth common people take part in any of these brawls?’

‘I was just getting to that. How could one expect the common people to take part? They were ignorant, uninformed and uneducated. The only thing that they could do was stand around and wait until someone decided to exploit them; they were absolutely helpless. And yet every single brawl that was organised proclaimed that it was “for the country and for the common people”. But when the leaders of the brawls obtained official posts, they’d take the emperor’s money just like anyone else; and the emperor’s money was all milked out of the common people whom the brawl leaders claimed they wanted to help in the first place. And if they couldn’t get official positions, then they’d ally themselves with the military and put the people in shackles that way. The more brawls that were organised, the worse off the common people became and the poorer the country got.’

I butted in again. ‘Do you mean to say that there were no good people in the brawls? Wasn’t there a single one who was genuinely devoted to the interests of the country and people?’

‘Of course there were! But you have to remember that even “good people” have to eat, and even “revolutionaries” have to make love. Food and love both take money. And thus people began to shift their interests from revolution to devising ways of making money. Once they had enough money for food and a wife, they became slaves to their salaries. They lost all hope of getting out from under, and all thoughts of revolution, politics, country and the common people were consigned, once and for all, to oblivion.’

‘Do you mean that nobody who has food and a job will engage in political activity?’ I asked.

‘The common people are too ignorant to be interested in revolutions. The rich people are well-informed enough to revolt but, of course, they don’t dare do anything. For if a rich man so much as moves, the emperor, or the military or brawl members will immediately confiscate his property. But if he just braves things through patiently without making a move, then he can purchase a minor post and preserve at least some of his property, although he may not be able to hold on to all of it. But if he made any move at all, he would lose everything he had. So that rules out the common people and the rich folk as potential revolutionaries.

‘The only people who can safely engage in politics are people who have been abroad, or students in the schools, or gangsters, or local bandits, or military men who can read a few characters. You see, when these people move into politics, they are bound to gain, and when they retire from politics they can be certain of suffering no loss. If they make a brawl, they’ll have enough to eat; and if they don’t make a brawl, they’ll still have enough to eat. Thus, in our country revolution has become a kind of profession.

‘Consequently after all these years of making brawls, only two striking features have emerged: first, in politics we have had change but no reform, so the more that democratic ways of thinking have developed, the poorer our people have become; and secondly, the more political brawls that have been organised, the shallower our youth have become. The students spend their time in politics instead of study; consequently, even when they do achieve positions of power – even though they may genuinely want to save the country – they are so poorly educated that all they can do is stand back and stare at the things to be done like blank-eyed idiots. For during their school years when they should have been acquiring the ability and knowledge necessary for handling national affairs, they wasted their time in engaging in politics. This really pleased the old folks no end; for although they were just as ignorant as the young people, still they had many more wicked ideas about how to get along in the world than did the young. Since the young people didn’t have time to learn anything in school, when they finally did achieve positions of power, they had to go to the old people to find out how to do things, and that’s just what the wily old foxes were waiting for. Thus our revolutions looked after themselves, but the real directing power behind them has always remained in the hands of those wily old foxes.

‘Since the ideas of the young are muddle-headed and the schemes of the old are sly, everybody has come to believe that politics is a kind of “muddling through” carried out on the social plane. If one is good at this kind of “muddling through”, then one obtains everything his heart desires; and if one isn’t good at it, then he falls flat on his face. As a result of all this, the students in our schools don’t bother to study any more. All they do is memorise a little of the new jargon, learn a few of the old people’s crafty schemes, and then present themselves to the world as political geniuses.’

I let him rest for a while and then said. ‘You haven’t got to
Everybody Shareskyism
yet.’

‘Well, the more brawls that came into being, the more impoverished our people became because everybody’s efforts were devoted to the brawls and nobody paid any attention to economics. At that point,
Everybody Shareskyism
arrived in Cat Country.
Shareskyism
emphasised the people and was strongly grounded in economics. Until the arrival of
Shareskyism
, despite the large number of revolutions we had gone through, the emperor had never fallen. For whenever a new brawl became popular, the emperor would simply announce that he believed in the same programme and would even like to become leader of the brawl. Then he would secretly contribute funds in large amounts and the brawl members would make him head. Therefore, a poet once praised our emperor as “Ruler of the Ten Thousand Brawls”.

‘However, when
Everybody Shareskyism
arrived, everything changed. One of our emperors was actually murdered, and at long last a brawl actually came into power, the
Everybody Shareskyism
brawl. Since this brawl advocated getting rid of everyone except honest-to-goodness peasants and workers, quite a few people were killed; but there was nothing unusual about this, for in Cat Country we have always killed people without so much as a second thought. Actually, it might not have been a bad idea if they had really slaughtered all of the superfluous people, sparing only peasants and workers. But Cat People after all, are still Cat People, and even when killing people they are bound to introduce some variations on the theme. For instance, if a man gave enough money, he was spared; and those who had someone influential to put in a word for them were also spared. Consequently, those who ought to have been killed were not; and those who ought to have been spared, on the contrary, lost their lives. The ones who ought to have been killed but weren’t, wormed their way into the
Everybody Shareskyism
brawl and started corrupting it with wily schemes from within. The result was that more and more people died every day, but the orthodox principles of the brawl were never put into practice.

‘But the best was yet to come.
Everybody Shareskyism
advocated allocating jobs on the basis of ability while at the same time equalising compensation for all jobs. To realise such a programme, it would have been necessary to reconstruct our economy and revamp our education. However, the members of our
Everybody Shareskyism
brawl didn’t understand economics to begin with and had even less conception of the problems involved in creating a new system of education. Consequently, when all the killing was over, everybody just stood around and stared blankly at each other. They had hoped to build the new society on a base of peasants and workers, but they didn’t have the foggiest notions of what agriculture or work were.

‘For openers, they equalised the distribution of land. After everybody had acquired his fair share, reverie trees were planted and everyone bore up as best he could until the trees reached maturity. The workers were eager to work, but there was nothing for them to do. And so they killed off some more people, in the belief that the minority left after the slaughter would be easier to provide for. It’s as though one were to say that when your skin itches, you’ll be much better off if you tear away that part of it. That’s about all I have to say about our experience with
Everybody Shareskyism
.

‘It was exactly the same as with all the other political theories that came from abroad. In other countries they were really good programmes that prescribed the right medicine for the right disease. But when they got to us, they changed so that rather than being cures, they turned into the carriers of fresh diseases. We ourselves never carefully examined either the new programmes or our old problems; consequently, we suffered all the pain associated with revolution, but derived none of the benefits. Other people revolt in order to put new plans and policies into practice. We revolt only in order to “stir up a brawl”. Because we are fundamentally lacking in knowledge, we are forced to turn our attention away from attacking problems to attacking people. Because we concentrate on attacking people, everybody utterly forgets about the lofty character that is demanded of people engaged in revolutionary enterprise. Instead, we can do nothing but attack each other in the basest ways imaginable. And so the result of several years of
Everybody Shareskyism
, other than slaughtering people, is for everybody to stand around and stare blankly at each other.

‘In the end the leader of the
Everybody Shareskyism
brawl became our next emperor! From
Everybody Shareskyism
to the throne – what a non sequitur! What a nightmare! But when you come to think of it, there’s nothing very odd about it, for Cat People have never understood what government is in the first place. Having royally bungled
Everybody Shareskyism
, we had no choice but to set up an emperor again. And with the emperor back, at least we were able to put an end to all of our indecision.

‘To this very day, we still have an emperor, and he is still known as the “Ruler of the Ten Thousand Brawls”! And down to this very day we still have people who believe in
Everybody Shareskyism
too.’

Young Scorpion was weeping.

SOME GENERALS PREFER BOUDOIRS TO BATTLEFIELDS

E
VEN IF
everything that Young Scorpion said were true, it still didn’t constitute a constructive critique. What good was there in being so pessimistic? Of course, having come from a peaceful and happy China, I was inclined towards optimism and somehow or other felt there was still some hope for Cat Country. (A healthy man usually finds it difficult to understand why a sick one takes such a dim view of things. People should always keep up their hopes – as a matter of fact, hope is really one of mankind’s responsibilities; for despair is a sign of self-abandonment, while hope is the mother of all endeavour.) I didn’t believe for a moment that if the Cat People united their strength, they could still fail to achieve any positive accomplishments. There were many, many factors that inhibited the development of Cat Country and prevented their politics from getting on the right track. On the basis of what I had seen and heard, I was not fully aware of all the difficulties that they faced, but the Cat People were, after all, still people; and people are creatures who are capable of surmounting any difficulty that may face them.

I decided to find Old Scorpion and see if I could get him to introduce me to a few of the leading political figures of Cat City. If I were able to meet a few clear-headed people, perhaps I could obtain some critical opinion that was more substantial and constructive than that which Young Scorpion had given me. Actually, I ought to have interviewed the common people first, but they were so frightened of foreigners that I couldn’t really think of any way of getting close to them.

Of course, given the lack of an informed populace, one couldn’t reasonably expect to find a well-ordered political system. But on the other hand, precisely because the populace was uncritical, it should be somewhat easier to get a political movement going if one could only find a genuine statesman willing to exert himself for the people and the nation. Even though I had never relished the prospect of being the minion of an intrepid leader, I decided to continue my search for the ideal hero; perhaps I’d find just such a leader among the leading political figures of Cat Country. I happened to arrive just at a time when Old Scorpion was holding a party. I assumed that since he was one of the most important personages in Cat City, I’d be sure to find some statesmen among the invited guests. This should be an excellent opportunity.