Red Meg

Red Meg leaned a black plastic rifle case against the wall, dropped her range bag and purse next to it, and slid into a chair across from me.

She’s a petite thing, somewhere in her twenties, probably about five-foot-three and just over a hundred pounds. They say that good things come in small packages, and Meg’s lithe, supple form certainly doesn’t belie that adage. She was wearing black, almost leotard-tight slacks and a loose black blouse with the tail knotted in front to display an enticing expanse of taut, bare midriff.

There’s no denying that Meg is startlingly beautiful, with a fine, symmetrical face framed by neatly styled, shoulder-length blonde hair, sparkling green eyes, and a perfectly chiseled nose. I watched Ray’s eyes traveling back and forth between her and the rifle case. Ray is an old friend. I hadn’t seen him in a couple of years and had invited him to eat with me at the Bullseye Café so that we could catch up on each other. Knowing his political, philosophical, and religious beliefs as well as I did—he seemed incapable of talking for more than five minutes without bringing them up—I suspected that Meg’s unexpected appearance might turn out to be inopportune.

Pokey, the waitress, ambled over and took Meg’s order: iced tea, a salad, and baked catfish. Meg eats healthy.

“We were just talking about global warming,” Ray ventured, pointedly ignoring the odd black case and obviously intent on getting to know Meg better. I couldn’t blame him for being interested in her; he is male. But I was pretty sure I knew where his efforts would lead. I also decided to let him twist in the wind for awhile and not satisfy his curiosity by explaining that obviously, after her meal, Meg was headed for the shooting range to do a little target practice with her recently acquired AR-15.

She sniffed at Ray’s suggested topic of conversation. “I have the answer to that. In fact, I have the answer to most of the world’s problems.”

I held my breath. You see, Meg was born with a severe disability. It’s the primary reason that, although she attracts men like honey attracts flies, she disposes of them as quickly as Raid. She is constitutionally incapable of moderating what she says. If she thinks it, she says it, with no apologies. And what she thinks is—umm, shall we say “out of the mainstream”?

“The answer to everything!” Ray exclaimed, grinning. I think he thought she was joking. “A lot of people would pay money for that. You could sell it to the government.”

“No I couldn’t,” she replied, favoring him with a pleasant smile. “Those leprous toads are incapable of understanding anything but graft and votes.”

If her reply took him back, Ray managed to conceal it. “But what’s the answer to everything? I’d like to know that.”

“Most of the world’s problems are caused by too many people,” she said. “If we had a quarter of our population, we’d need a quarter as much food, a quarter as much energy, a quarter as much housing, and we’d produce a quarter as much garbage. The seas wouldn’t be overfished, or polluted with mercury. There’d be three times as much raw materials for everyone.”

“Okay,” Ray said slowly, not certain if she was serious. “But how do we do that? Should we do like China and restrict how many children a family can have?”

“Certainly not! Governments muck up everything they touch and should never be allowed to restrict human freedom. It has to be done through persuasion, by changing the culture so that stupid and defective people are too shamed to breed. With education, even dolts are capable of acting in their own best interest. We have to stop paying people subsidies for breeding.”

I started to point out that large populations produce a critical mass of scientists, engineers, and so forth, producing an explosion in technology and the arts, but decided against becoming entangled in this conversation.

“That sounds like eugenics!” Ray barely concealed his horror.

“You say that as if eugenics were a bad thing!”

Ray sat suddenly upright in his chairs, his eyes growing wider. “Of course it’s a bad thing. Think of what the Nazis did, killing thousands of disabled people, not to mention the Jews, Gypsies, and other groups.”

Pokey brought Meg her tea and salad, and Meg slipped a straw into the tall glass and took a sip before continuing. “Eugenics means ‘good genes’ or ‘good breeding.’ We use it all the time in raising animals, only we call it selective breeding. Only a fool would intentionally engage in malgenics. It’s simply a matter of getting people to think before they make children. We should have public service announcements on radio and television explaining it to the illiterate. Signs on busses, on billboards. If you’re going to have children, you should have strong, healthy children—children you can spend time with, that you can educate and make into moral, intelligent, productive, fully developed human beings. We’re taking the opposite approach—have you ever read ‘The Marching Morons’?”

Ray shook his head.

“You should.” But instead of explicating Kornbluth’s story, she turned to her salad.

“Children used to be considered an asset,” Ray objected. “More hands to work the farm. You seem to consider them a liability.”

“Too many children certainly are a liability in an industrial society, unless you’re very wealthy. Even then it’s impossible to give them enough personal attention. Parents only have so much time.”

Ray shook his head slowly, almost sadly. “I believe God loves everyone, regardless of how smart or slow they are.”

“He has a funny way of showing it.” Meg speared lettuce with her fork. “He lets millions of His little loved ones starve to death. Others struggle their entire short, miserable lives just to scrape a little food out of the ground. Still others wallow in poverty, drugs, and crime—only to end up in prison or early graves.”

“Everyone deserves a chance. Everyone is of equal value.” Ray sounded shocked.

“You’re kidding yourself if you really think everyone is equally valuable. We are an experiment of nature, each with different abilities. We’re like seeds scattered in the wind. Some land on fertile ground, take root, and blossom. Others land in the parched desert and never even germinate. Still others might get wedged inside cracks in rocks, put out a few crippled sprouts, then wither and die—or, miraculously, bloom into healthy, gorgeous plants. Some are genetically unsound from the beginning and grow into misshapen mutants. Experiments fail. That’s nature. That’s life.”

She chewed and swallowed a bite of her salad, then continued, “Equality is the great delusion of our time. In what way are you and I equal? Strength? Certainly not. Obviously you’re bigger and stronger than I am, but I’m probably a better shot. Knowledge? No, indeed! Our life experiences have been completely different. We had different parents, different families, different innate abilities. We went to different schools, read different books, and have different friends. You know things I don’t know and vice versa. You’re male and I’m female. You’re tall and I’m short. Whatever similarities there may be between us, there are hundreds or thousands of differences. I don’t believe in equality. I believe in uniqueness!”

“But we’re all equal under the law. You do believe in that, don’t you?”

“Of course. Anything else would by tyranny. The government can’t be trusted to judge people’s innate abilities. Neither can scientists. Only nature can do that. You might say, ‘Let God sort them out.’” She shot a mischievous glance at me.

“So we should just let the sick and the old die? That’s what nature would do.”

“We’re wealthy enough as a society that we don’t have to go to extremes. Education will take us a long way. It already has in some countries, where births are below replacement levels. We don’t need government bayonets, just education, time, and will.”

Ray was silent for a moment. Then he asked, “Do you believe in God? What religion are you?”

“Social Darwinist—reformed.”

Ray didn’t know what to say and Meg went back to her salad.

Finally I said, “Ray, I think I failed to introduce you. This is Megan. As you’ve gathered, she’s a very unusual person. In fact, she’d be an outlier in any demographic. We call her Red Meg around here, because, like Nature, she’s ‘red in tooth and claw.’”

Red Meg bestowed one of her man-killer smiles upon the two of us.

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Link of possible interest:

“The Marching Morons” by Cyril M. Kornbluth – entry at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons