Chapter 5

I was surprised to find that, over time, the world managed to confront an amazing number of new problems that neither I nor anyone else, probably, had anticipated. The world economy had been suffering at the time I started my New Morality campaign, and it continued to suffer now. Nothing I had done had attempted directly to address this issue. I didn’t really feel competent to do so.

However, the much-increased level of public morality was helpful. Also something of a boon was the drop in population caused by the literally millions of mostly losers who had died overnight as my campaign broadened and wore on.

Then again, the coming of higher levels of morality was itself disruptive in a very large number of instances. People took months trying to adjust to the new balance in the world. There were still sporadic outbreaks of death, simply because new people were taking over for the old ones, and sometimes they overstepped the bounds of the New Propriety.

There were also some international disputes brewing. India and Pakistan had once again reached the brink of war.

International morality, it turns out, was a complex thing. Both sides in a brewing war, I knew, felt they were doing what was best for their country and its people. Both sides were wrong. But not morally wrong. Just wrong.

At least in this instance, the mere contemplation of war, no matter how horrific it promised to be, was not invoking any of my formulations. The war-planners weren’t dying.

I had to find a way to head off the war. It threatened to become a wholesale nuclear war. I had to find a way to avoid the death of millions by killing people.

Maybe by the thousands.

I began by killing off all the advocates of war in either country’s press. As soon as a journalist, television commentator, blogger or politician publicly advocated war with his or her country’s neighbor, that person croaked, forthwith. Since the death of the television commentators was instantaneous and sometimes observable on-air by millions, the clear connection between war-advocacy and “punishment” was established for all the world to see.

The war threat blew over, with only a few dozen people’s lives required to be sacrificed.

Well, I felt sort of bad, basing these people’s death sentence on mere advocacy of a political position; but, hey, the stakes were high and my cause was just!

It had occurred to me from time to time that some of the more arbitrary and capricious uses of my power were liable, inadvertently, to cause personal bodily harm to Yours Truly at some point. Upon realizing this, I “exempted” myself, permanently, from any of the groups of “sinners” that I might nail, based on some aspect of their personal behavior.

While I had never been a rapist or a serial killer... well ... who knew when I might describe group conduct that could include conduct I had myself engaged in?

When I installed this personal exemption thing, I had the passing thought that surely I was overreaching. I had never deluded myself into thinking that I was without sin. I knew I wasn’t any more morally upright than the average man on the street.

Why, then, was I taking this extra precaution, creating this one-man, all-purpose-exempt category?

Well, the “serial killer” thing was the easy explanation. I was, in a sense at least, the world’s foremost serial killer. All past practitioners had to take a back seat. Hell, I had the numbers. I’d killed more folks in the past six months than all the other serialists had managed in their entire combined careers!

Maybe it wasn’t a Godlike power I had, but more a Satan-like power.

Still, hadn’t I been an amazing force for good? Wasn’t all the world a safer place? Kids were free to play outdoors again, even in big cities, without fear of molestation. Homeowners didn’t have to worry very much about locking their doors.

There was, I admitted, a certain drab quality that had come into daily living. Not much excitement afoot. People were living in a Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, Ozzie and Harriet kind of world.

Most folks, it seemed, thought that was just fine.

But, quite a few missed the good old days. And unfortunately, I was becoming one of them.

After a few months of relative inactivity, I admitted to myself that I had become perhaps the unhappiest man on earth.

I hadn’t stopped, entirely, killing off evildoers in the world, but certainly my statistics were way, way down. Every now and then a subcategory needing attention would occur to me, and a scattered few remaining sinners would disappear from the general population. For the most part, these people were small potatoes. Their deaths (or at least the implicit reasons for their deaths) often went completely unnoticed.

I confronted my unhappiness head-on, as I had to do, since there wasn’t anyone in whom I could confide. I had never deluded myself. From the beginning, I’d known that I was deriving perverse pleasure from the exercise of my amazing power. I was delivering the people of the world from evil, just the sort of thing a just God would do. Problem was, I was enjoying my work a little too much. And I knew it.

Well, why not? I deserved a little happiness as much as the next guy, right? It happened that I derived happiness from killing off the world’s worst people. I was the Universal Garbage Man.

And now, as I rapidly approached the time when all the world’s garbage had been successfully carried away, I found myself miserable. There was a need for new worlds to conquer; new evils to overcome.

But where to begin?

At first, I tried just making up categories of offensive people to do away with. I decided that everybody who used vulgar language in public, or who gratuitously insulted people (waitresses, caddies, taxi drivers) whom the insulter perceived to be his/her social inferior, should just up and die.

The results were disappointing. The international press didn’t even take notice of the scattered resulting deaths from my latest pronouncement. It was strange, because rude and offensive conduct had long been a problem everywhere.

I realized, eventually, that all the more weighty death sentences I had leveled on an unsuspecting world had been effective beyond their limited terms. People had absorbed and internalized the idea that bad conduct could lead to their sudden death. Bad conduct of all kinds, including mere rudeness and thoughtlessness for the feelings of others, was on the wane.