Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) Page 14

  But in 1945, Armistice Day became Veterans Day, and by the time I was preaching in St. John’s, the message of November 11 was that there were going to be lots more wars, and that we were ready for them this time (were we ever!), and that not just boys but girls, too, should want to grow up to be veterans (don’t be left out!).

  We hadn’t yet killed more than a thousand Panamanians in the process of kidnapping their Head of State (a paid CIA agent) on suspicion of drug trafficking, or I sure would have talked about that. I would have reminded people my age what Captain J. W. Philip said to his crewmen aboard the Battleship Texas in Santiago Bay in 1898 during the Spanish-American War. (American public school kids used to know his words by heart. I bet they don’t anymore.) Shellfire from the Texas had set the Spanish Cruiser Vizcaya ablaze from stem to stern. And Captain Philip said, “Don’t cheer, boys, those poor devils are dying.” War back then, while perhaps necessary and surely exciting, was also a tragedy. It is still a tragedy, and can never be otherwise. But while we were zapping Panamanians all I heard from the top of our power structure were variations on “whee” and “whoopee.”

  (Yes, and while I was doing the final editing on this book, which was written in the summer of 1990 and is supposed to be about the 1980s, we experienced our great victory over Iraq. I will simply repeat what a woman said at supper a week after we stopped shooting and bombing and rocketing: “The atmosphere of this country now is like a big party in a beautiful home. Everybody is polite and bubbly, but there is this awful stink coming from somewhere, and it’s getting worse and worse. And nobody wants to be the first to mention it.”)

  The only warfare Ronald Reagan ever saw was in the movies, of course. Everybody was glad to be fighting. Wounds were never messy and wounded people were never noisy, and nobody died in vain. And George Bush was a war hero of the first rank, beyond doubt. But he was an aviator, so war must have felt like a sport, one hell of a scary sport. Aviators almost never have to take a close look at the faces (if any) of people they’ve killed or wounded. It is common for combat veterans who fought on the ground to have bad dreams about people they killed. Fortunately for me, I never killed anyone. Imagine how ashamed a bombardier or fighter pilot would be if he had to make the same confession, that he hadn’t killed anyone.

  And then there’s the business of George Bush being the first President in my lifetime to be elected after a campaign which was nakedly racist, using a black psychopath as a boogeyman. If he had done that with an Armenian or a Pole or a Jew, he would have been as despicable as Nazidom’s Heinrich Himmler, the former chicken farmer who was boss of all the death camps. But Bush knew the United States better than I have ever dared to know them, and he scared us with a black man, and he won, he won. But the heck with that. Blah blah blah. In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published a work of imagination about this country turning Fascist, It Can’t Happen Here. That’s what I say, too: It can’t happen here, unless there’s another Great Depression, of course.

  I was already friends with the Cathedral’s bishop, Paul Moore, Jr. Jill had known him since she was a little girl in Morristown, New Jersey. He and his wife Brenda and Jill and I had gone to the Galapagos Islands together. One night when we were right on the Equator (Ecuador!), I asked him to point out a constellation I had never seen, the Southern Cross. He had seen it, I knew, because he had fought as a Marine well south of the Equator, in Guadalcanal. (That was where he got religion. If I had had one, I would have lost it there.) The Southern Cross was a teeny-weeny thing, not much bigger than the head of a thumbtack from our vantage point.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “Not your fault,” I said.

  He had lived and preached in Indianapolis for quite a while, and so knew several of my relatives who had backslid into Christianity. He is a very good man, always on the side of the powerless when they are abused or scorned or cheated by the powerful (mostly subscribers to The Wall Street Journal). A pregnant woman asked me one time if I thought it was wrong to bring a child into such an awful world. I replied that what made living almost worthwhile for me was all the saints I met, and I named Bishop Moore.

  XVI

  My first wife, Jane Marie, née Cox, whom I met in kindergarten, was born a Quaker and (as Mrs. Adam Yarmolinsky) died a high Episcopalian. Her Quaker father and brother both served in the Marines. This military variety of Quaker (Richard M. Nixon is a famous example) came into being, I have been told, when Quaker families moved westward in the company of other religious denominations. The children were attracted (as though by carnivals) to services so unlike their own, with music and exciting preachers, and with fantastic battles between God and the Devil to hear about. So the Quaker elders, in order to keep the children Quakers, went into show business, too, and began to talk and think like the more colorful majority. (Result: Richard M. Nixon and my first father-in-law and brother-in-law.)

  My first brother-in-law had a nervous crack-up during Marine basic training, but I don’t believe that had anything to do with his being a Quaker, not the sort of Quaker he was. He was an excellent skater and was invited to join an ice show after he graduated from Indiana University. But his Quaker father sternly opposed that move. So he enlisted in the Marines, where, as I’ve said, he went bananas. In any case he’s OK now. (All’s well that ends well.)

  My dear Jane went to Swarthmore, a Quaker college near Philadelphia, and expressed love for the austere Quakerism still practiced there, without music or calculated passion, and without preachers. Attendees at Meetings in bare rooms spoke about this or that on the spur of the moment, without any agenda about who was to speak or what the subject should be. Sometimes nobody spoke, she said (e.g., after the bombing of Pearl Harbor). But that, too, was wonderful, perhaps the most moving performance of all, or so Jane said.

  But Jane never went to a Quaker Meeting after we were married, although she always made it a first order of business to find out where the nearest one was whenever we took up residence in a new community. She didn’t go to Meetings, I think, because Quaker congregations in the East (and we had become easterners) were so close to being Folk Societies as described by Robert Redfield. They were united by blood ties and inhabited a territory which had been theirs for several generations. And here was what was so daunting to Jane or anybody else who might want to join them: They did not welcome strangers, save as well-behaved visitors who would soon have the good manners to go away again. (They were like Israeli youngsters raised on kibbutzim as described in The Children of the Dream by Bruno Bettelheim.)

  (I was similarly frosted when I was an invited speaker at the Unitarian church on Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I wasn’t to consider myself a relative of any sort, and it was obvious that I could not tell that cold-roast professorial bunch anything that it hadn’t accepted or dismissed collectively years and years ago. It was like an old kibbutz.)

  An early expression of Jane’s powerful longing for a big like-minded family was a persistent prediction she began to make in her early teens, that she would one day have seven children. This came true. We had three of our own, and thought we had stopped there. But then my sister and her husband died, and we took in their three kids.

  (It makes me think we don’t know anything about time when somebody turns out to have predicted something so complex and specific so accurately. The sinking of the great ship Titanic was also foreseen. A novelist wrote about it before the ship was launched.)

  Jane did not like the family she came from (partly because her mother went insane periodically), but she sure adored her kids, and they adored her. (After our marriage broke up, and there was a lot of hydrofluoric acid eating holes in my clothing, so to speak, I told a psychiatrist at a party that my next mate, if there was to be another one, would have to be a woman who really loved her mother a lot. The psychiatrist replied that that was one of the dumbest, most self-destructive things he had ever heard from the lips of any male or female. “Instead, why don’t you go over Niagara Falls in a barre
l?” he said.)

  When Jane’s beloved children became grownups and flew the coop one by one, she was again attacked by a terrible loneliness which I (only one person, and a chain-smoker at that) surely couldn’t begin to satisfy.

  So she went in for Transcendental Meditation (TM) with what seemed to me total abandon. One contemporary of our grown kids, Jody Clarke, went to work for Maharishi Mahesh Yogi as a TM recruiter and instructor. He had meditated for thousands of hours (and would be killed in the crash of an airplane while looking for a good location for a TM ashram in North Carolina). When Jane told Jody all the glorious things she saw when she meditated, he was astonished. He said, “My goodness, I never saw anything like that!”

  For almost everybody but Jane, TM was blank, brightly lit, air-conditioned, keenly alert peacefulness. For her it was like going to the movies. So was Holy Communion, I think, when she became an Episcopalian. (I doubt that the Pope or Bishop Paul Moore, Jr., or the battle-axe who wouldn’t let Jill and me get married in The Little Church Around the Corner ever came as close to Christ as Jane did with a wafer and wine.) Like her mother, and like her son Mark, too, before he recovered, she was a hallucinator. (Unlike Mark and me, though, she never had to be locked up somewhere.) TM and then Episcopalianism made her visions not only reputable and unfrightening, but holy and fun. (There must be uncounted millions like her, so rapt in churches and concert halls, or on park benches on sunny days with a carousel playing not far away.)

  My late war buddy O’Hare was born a Roman Catholic in Pennsylvania but came home from the war a religious skeptic. Bishop Moore, as I’ve said, went to war a religious skeptic and came out of it a profoundly convinced Trinitarian. He told me he had a vision during the fighting on Guadalcanal. He went on from his vision (although he was born rich and had a rich Anglo-Saxon’s education and tastes and friends) to minister to the poor in parishes where the prosperous had fled to the suburbs, to speak loathingly of social Darwinists (Neo-Cons, the FBI, the CIA, humorless, anal-retentive Republicans, and so on).

  I myself was not changed by the war, except that I became entitled to converse as a peer with other combat veterans of any army, of any war. (To do so, in fact, gives me a fleeting taste of membership in Robert Redfield’s Folk Society.) During the question-and-answer period following my speech at the National Air and Space Museum, I was asked what being bombed strategically had done to my personality. I replied that the war had been a great adventure for me, which I wouldn’t have missed for anything, and that the principal shapers of my personality were probably neighborhood dogs when I was growing up. (Some were nice, some were mean. Some looked nice but were mean. Some looked mean but were nice.) This is true.

  My second wife is another Episcopalian, and like my first one thinks that I have no religion and am a spiritual cripple on that account. When Jill’s and my daughter Lily was baptized by the Bishop of New York in the biggest Gothic church in the world (in a neighborhood so poor that the Bishop couldn’t get cable service for his TV), I did not attend. (There is a sound reason for hating me right there, but I think the main reason is cigarettes. O’Hare was buried with a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches in his pocket. I don’t think Jill would do that for me, but you never know. Never prejudge anyone.)

  In order not to seem a spiritual quadriplegic to strangers trying to get a fix on me, I sometimes say I am a Unitarian Universalist (I breathe). So that denomination claims me as one of its own. It honored me by having me deliver a lecture at a gathering in Rochester, New York, in June 1986. I began (almost exactly as I would begin at the graduation ceremonies at the University of Rhode Island):

  “There was a newspaper humorist named Kin Hubbard in my hometown of Indianapolis, where my ancestors were Freethinkers and then Unitarians—or not much of anything as far as religious labels go. Kin Hubbard attended a graduation ceremony out there in Indiana. He commented afterward on the graduation address to the departing seniors. He said it might be better to spread out the really important stuff over four years instead of saving it all up until the very end.

  “I do not expect to flabbergast you tonight with all the really important stuff. I know you are already well educated both in a bookish sense and in the famous American School of Hard Knocks.

  “I myself seem to be coming across really important stuff very late in life. I am sixty-three, but it was only two months ago that I found a quotation from the works of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, a contemporary of Mark Twain, which explains and justifies the spiritual condition of myself, my Indiana ancestors, and my children, and of Mark Twain as well, I think. Nietzsche said in effect, and in German of course, that only a person of great faith could afford to be a skeptic.

  “So what we have here in Rochester tonight is a congregation of people who have faith. You have it in an era when so many Americans find the human condition meaningless that they are surrendering their will and their common sense to quacks and racketeers and charismatic lunatics. Bad preachers will give them faith for money, or in exchange for what little political power the frightened souls without faith may have in this pluralistic democracy.

  “I listen to the ethical pronouncements of the leaders of the so-called religious revival going on in this country, including those of our President, and am able to distill only two firm commandments from them. The first commandment is this: ‘Stop thinking.’ The second commandment is this: ‘Obey.’ Only a person who has given up on the power of reason to improve life here on Earth, or a soldier in Basic Training could accept either commandment gladly: ‘Stop thinking’ and ‘Obey.’

  “I was an Infantry Private during World War II and fought against the Germans in Europe. My religion as well as my blood type was stamped into my dogtags. The Army decided my religion was P, for ‘Protestant.’ There is no room on dogtags for footnotes and a bibliography. In retrospect, I think they should have put S on my dogtags, for ‘Saracen,’ since we were fighting Christians who were on some sort of utterly insane Crusade. They had crosses on their flags and uniforms and all over their killing machines, just like the soldiers of the first Christian Emperor Constantine. And they lost, of course, which has to be acknowledged as quite a setback for Christianity.

  “Now what is it, do you think, that makes Christians so bloodthirsty?

  “I will tell you what my theory is, and I will be glad to hear yours after I am through standing up here and going ‘Blah blah blah.’ I think the problem is linguistic, and might be repaired, if the evangelists would only allow it, with startling simplicity. The Christian preachers exhort their listeners to love one another and to love their neighbors and so on. Love is simply too strong a word to be of much use in ordinary, day-to-day relationships. Love is for Romeo and Juliet.

  “I’m to love my neighbor? How can I do that when I’m not even speaking to my wife and kids today? My wife said to me the other day, after a knock-down-drag-out fight about interior decoration, ‘I don’t love you anymore.’ And I said to her, ‘So what else is new?’ She really didn’t love me then, which was perfectly normal. She will love me some other time—I think, I hope. It’s possible.

  “If she had wanted to terminate the marriage, to carry it past the point of no return, she would have had to say, ‘I don’t respect you anymore.’ Now—that would be terminal.

  “One of the many unnecessary American catastrophes going on right now, along with the religious revival and plutonium, is all the people who are getting divorced because they don’t love each other anymore. That is like trading in a car when the ashtrays are full. When you don’t respect your mate anymore—that’s when the transmission is shot and there’s a crack in the engine block.

  “I like to think that Jesus said in Aramaic, ‘Ye shall respect one another.’ That would be a sign to me that He really wanted to help us here on Earth, and not just in the Afterlife. Then again, He had no way of knowing what ludicrously high standards Hollywood was going to set for love. How many people resemble Paul Newman or Meryl Streep? />
  “And look at the spectrum of emotions we think of automatically when we hear the word ‘love.’ If you can’t love your neighbor, then you can at least like him. If you can’t like him, you can at least not give a damn about him. If you can’t ignore him, then you have to hate him, right? You’ve exhausted all the other possibilities. That’s a quick trip to hate, isn’t it? And it starts with love. It is such a logical trip, like the one from ‘white-hot’ to ‘ice-cold,’ with ‘red-hot,’ ‘hot,’ ‘warm,’ ‘tepid,’ ‘room temperature,’ ‘cool,’ ‘chilly,’ and ‘freezing’ in between. The spectrum of emotions suggested by the word ‘love’ again: ‘love,’ and then ‘like,’ and then ‘don’t give a damn about,’ and then ‘hate.’

  “That is my explanation of why hatred is so common in that part of the world dominated by Christianity. There are all these people who have been told to do their best at loving. They fail, most of them. And why wouldn’t they fail, since loving is extremely difficult? Most of these people are also failures as pole-vaulters and performers on the flying trapeze. And when they fail to love, day after day, year in and year out, come one, come all, the logic of the language leads them to the seemingly inevitable conclusion that they must hate instead. The step beyond hating, of course, is killing in imaginary self-defense.

  “ ‘Ye shall respect one another.’ Now there is something almost anybody in reasonable mental health can do day after day, year in and year out, come one, come all, to everyone’s clear benefit. ‘Respect’ does not imply a spectrum of alternatives, some of them very dangerous. Respect is like a light switch. It is either on or off. And if we are no longer able to respect someone, we don’t feel like killing that person. Our response is restrained. We simply want to make him or her feel like something the cat drug in.