Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) Read online

  The Reverend (as was his right) was making an undisguised attack not only on Americans’ demi-God—given right to consider every sort of idea (including his), but also on the Constitution’s insistence that the Government (including the public schools) not declare one religion superior to any other and behave accordingly with the force of law.

  So the Reverend was not a hypocrite. He was perfectly willing to say in so many words that there was nothing sacred about the First Amendment, and that many images and ideas other than pornography should be taken out of circulation by the police, and that the official religion of the whole country should be his sort of Christianity. He was sincere in believing that my Slaughterhouse-Five might somehow cause a person to wind up in a furnace for all eternity (see the mass promulgated by Pope St. Pius V), which would be even worse (if you consider its duration) than being raped, murdered, and then mutilated by a man maddened by dirty pictures.

  He in fact won my sympathy (easy to do). He was not a television evangelist (so easily and justly caricatured), although he probably preached on radio from time to time. (They all do.) He was a profoundly sincere Christian and family man, doing a pretty good job no doubt of imitating the life of Christ as he understood it, sexually clean, and not pathologically fond of the goods of this Earth and so on. He was trying to hold together an extended family, a support system far more dependable than anything the Government could put together, in sickness as in health, for richer or for poorer, whose bond was commonly held beliefs and attitudes. (I had studied anthropology, after all, and so knew in my bones that human beings can’t like life very much if they don’t belong to a clan associated with a specific piece of real estate.)

  The Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography, a traveling show about dirty books and pictures put on the road during the administration of Ronald Reagan, was something else again. At least a couple of the panel members would later be revealed as having been in the muck of financial or sexual atrocities. There was a clan feeling, to be sure, but the family property in this case was the White House, and an amiable, sleepy, absentminded old movie actor was its totem pole. And the crazy quilt of ideas all its members had to profess put the Council of Trent to shame for mean-spirited, objectively batty fantasias: that it was good that civilians could buy assault rifles; that the contras in Nicaragua were a lot like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison; that Palestinians were to be called “terrorists” at every opportunity; that the contents of wombs were Government property; that the American Civil Liberties Union was a subversive organization; that anything that sounded like the Sermon on the Mount was socialist or communist, and therefore anti-American; that people with AIDS, except for those who got it from mousetrapped blood transfusions, had asked for it; that a billion-dollar airplane was well worth the price; and on and on.

  The Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography was blatantly show business, a way for the White House to draw attention to its piety by means of headlines about sex, and to imply yet again that those in favor of freedom of speech were enthusiasts for sexual exploitation of children and rape and so on. (While other Reagan supporters were making private the funds for public housing and cleaning out the savings banks.)

  So I asked to appear before the Commission when it came to New York, but my offer was declined. I wanted to say, “I have read much of the heartrending testimony about the damage words and pictures can do which has been heard by your committee. The scales have fallen from my eyes. I now understand that our Government must have the power to suppress words and images which are causes of sexually motivated insanity and crimes. As John the Apostle says, ‘In the beginning was the word.’

  “I make my living with words, and I am ashamed. In view of the damage freely circulated ideas can do to a society, and particularly to children, I beg my Government to delete from my works all thoughts which might be dangerous. Save me from myself. I beg for the help of our elected leaders in bringing my thoughts into harmony with their own and those of the people who elected them. That is democracy.

  “Attempting to make amends at this late date, I call the attention of this committee, and God bless the righteous Edwin Meese, to the fundamental piece of obscenity from which all others spring, the taproot of the tree whose fruit is so poisonous. I will read it aloud, so audience members under the age of twenty-one should leave the room. Those over twenty-one who have heart trouble or are prone to commit rape at the drop of a hat might like to go with them. Don’t say I haven’t warned you.

  “You Commission members have no choice but to stay, no matter what sort of filth is turned loose by witnesses. That can’t be easy. You must be very brave. I like to think of you as sort of sewer astronauts.

  “All right? Stick your fingers in your ears and close your eyes, because here we go:

  “ ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.’

  “End of joke.

  (I put together this chapter upon returning home from the burial in Hellertown, Pennsylvania, of an old war buddy named Bernard V. O’Hare. His name will keep popping up as this book goes on. He was a chain-smoking District Attorney for the first half of his career, and then a chain-smoking defense attorney until his death from cancer a little past midnight, June 9, 1990. I asked him when he was still a DA if he was doing much good by putting felons in prison. He said, “No, I think people have more than enough trouble without me piling on.” That doesn’t have much to do with the First Amendment. It has everything to do with how bereft I am feeling now. I have put into the Appendix what he wrote about our long friendship for a Festschrift Jill gave me on my sixtieth birthday.)

  VIII

  (The first story of mine which got into trouble with the sincerely Christian far right was about time-travelers who went back to Bible times and discovered that Jesus Christ was five feet, two inches tall. I think I liked Jesus more than the story’s naysayers did, since I was asserting that I didn’t care how tall or short He was. Bernard V. O’Hare was also short, but not nearly that short, and was still the most effective and humane criminal lawyer in the recent history of Northampton County, Pennsylvania. He was very much a local hero. I, his old war buddy, was the only nonfamily mourner from out of state at his funeral.)

  The free-speech provisions of the First Amendment guarantee all of us not only benefits but pain. (As the physical fitness experts tell us, “No pain, no gain.”) Much of what other Americans say or publish hurts me a lot, makes me want to throw up. Tough luck for me.

  When Charlton Heston (a movie actor who once played Jesus with shaved armpits) tells me in TV commercials (public-service announcements?) about all the good work the National Rifle Association (to which Father and I both belonged when I was a kid) is doing, and how glad I should be that civilians can and do keep military weapons in their homes or vehicles or places of work, I feel exactly as though he were praising the germs of some loathsome disease, since guns in civilian hands, whether accidentally or on purpose, kill so many of us day after day.

  (When I graduated from School Number Forty-three in Indianapolis, each member of our class had to make a public promise as to what he or she would try to do when an adult to make the world a better place. I was going to find a cure for some disease. Well—I sure don’t need an electron microscope to identify an AK-47 or an Uzi.)

  “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,” sayeth Article II of the Bill of Rights, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Perfect! I wouldn’t change a word of it. I only wish the NRA and its jellyfishy, well-paid supporters in legislatures both State and Federal would be careful to recite the whole of it, and then tell us how a heavily armed man, woman, or child, recruited by no official, led by no official, given no goals by any official, motivate
d or restrained only by his or her personality and perceptions of what is going on, can be considered a member of a well-regulated militia.

  (To cut a Gordian knot here: I think a sick fantasy is at work, of a sort of Armageddon in which the bad people, poor, dark-skinned, illiterate, lazy, and drug-crazed, will one night attack the neat homes of the good white people who have worked hard for all they have, and have in addition given money and time to charity.)

  I used to be very good with guns, was maybe the best shot in my company when I was a PFC. But I wouldn’t have one of the motherfuckers in my house for anything.

  I consider the discharge of firearms a low form of sport. Modern weapons are as easy to operate as cigarette lighters. Ask any woman who never worked one before, who went to the local gun shop and joined the NRA’s idea of a well-regulated militia and then made Swiss cheese out of a faithless lover or mate. Whenever I hear of somebody that he is a good shot, I think to myself, “That is like saying he is a good man with a Zippo or Bic. Some athlete!”

  George Bush, like Charlton Heston, is a lifetime member of the NRA. I am even more offended, though, by his failure to take notice of the most beautiful and noble and brilliant and poetical and sacred accomplishment by Americans to date. I am speaking about the exploration of the Solar System by the camera-bearing space probe Voyager 2. This gallant bird (so like Noah’s dove) showed us all the outer planets and their moons! We no longer had to guess whether there was life on them or not, or whether our descendants might survive on them! (Forget it.) As Voyager 2 departed the Solar System forever (“My work is done”), sending us dimmer and dimmer pictures of what we were and where we were, did our President invite us to love it and thank it and wish it well? No. He spoke passionately instead of the necessity of an Amendment to the Constitution (Article XXVII?) outlawing irreverent treatment of a piece of cloth, the American flag. Such an Amendment would be on a nutty par with the Roman Emperor Caligula’s having his horse declared a Consul.

  (I worry a lot about what they teach at Yale.)

  I was able nonetheless to deliver an optimistic graduation address to the Class of 1990 at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston in late May. (The University’s soon-to-retire President, Edward D. Eddy, had been a colleague of mine on The Cornell Daily Sun. That’s what I was doing there.) I prefaced my remarks with a comment on graduation speeches by Kin Hubbard, an Indianapolis humorist who wrote a joke a day for newspapers when I was young. He said that he thought it would be better if colleges would spread the really important stuff over four years instead of saving it all up for the very end.

  (In my opinion, Kin Hubbard was as witty as Oscar Wilde, saying things like, “I don’t know anybody who would be willing to work for what he’s really worth,” and “If somebody says it isn’t the money, it’s the money,” and on and on.)

  “The title of my speech,” I told the Class of 1990, “is ‘Do Not Be Cynical About the American Experiment, Since It Has Only Now Begun.’ “

  I said that I was often asked to speak about censorship, since my book Slaughterhouse-Five was so often tossed out of school libraries. (This is because it is on a list of supposedly dangerous books which has been circulating since 1972 or so. No new books are ever added.) “I have received letters from readers in the Soviet Union,” I said, “who were told years ago that my books were being burned up over here.” (That happened only in Drake, North Dakota.) “I replied to them that censorship is mostly a rural problem,” I went on. “The same communities used to burn people when I was a boy. I feel that we are finally getting somewhere.

  “It was mostly black people who were being burned. The most extraordinary change in this country since I was a boy is the decline in racism. Believe me, it could very easily be brought back to full strength again by demagogues. As of this very moment anyway we are fairly good at judging people for what they are rather than for how closely they resemble ourselves and our relatives. We are in fact better at doing that than any other country. In most other countries people wouldn’t even consider doing that.

  “Who brought about this admirable change in our attitudes? The oppressed and denigrated minorities themselves, with guts and great dignity which they coupled with the promises of the Bill of Rights of the Constitution.

  “Is censorship on the rise? You would certainly think so, since it has been in the news so much. But I believe it to be a disease which has been around for a long, long time, like Alzheimer’s disease, but which has only recently been identified as a disease and treated. What is new isn’t censorship but the fact that it is now recognized as being sickening to our pluralistic democracy, and a lot of good people are trying to do something about it.

  “The United States of America had human slavery for almost one hundred years before that custom was recognized as a social disease and people began to fight it. Imagine that. Wasn’t that a match for Auschwitz? What a beacon of liberty we were to the rest of the world when it was perfectly acceptable here to own other human beings and treat them as we treated cattle. Who told you we were a beacon of liberty from the very beginning? Why would they lie like that?

  “Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, and not many people found that odd. It was as though he had an infected growth on the end of his nose the size of a walnut, and everybody thought that was perfectly OK. I mentioned this one time at the University of Virginia, of which Jefferson was not only the founder but the sublime architect. A history professor explained to me afterward that Jefferson could not free his slaves until he and they were very old, because they were mortgaged and he was broke.

  “Imagine that! It used to be legal in this beacon of liberty to hock human beings, maybe even a baby. What a shame that when you find yourself short of cash nowadays you can’t take the cleaning lady down to the pawnshop anymore along with your saxophone.

  “Now then: Boston and Philadelphia both claim to be the cradle of liberty. Which city is correct? Neither one. Liberty is only now being born in the United States. It wasn’t born in 1776. Slavery was legal. Even white women were powerless, essentially the property of their father or husband or closest male relative, or maybe a judge or lawyer. Liberty was only conceived in Boston or Philadelphia. Boston or Philadelphia was the motel of liberty, so to speak.

  “Now then: The gestation period for a ‘possum is twelve days. The gestation period for an Indian elephant is twenty-two months. The gestation period for American liberty, friends and neighbors, turns out to be two hundred years and more!

  “Only in my own lifetime has there been serious talk of giving women and racial minorities anything like economic, legal, and social equality. Let liberty be born at last, and let its lusty birth cries be heard in Kingston and in every other city and town and village and hamlet in this vast and wealthy nation, not in Jefferson’s time but in the time of the youngest people here this afternoon. Somewhere I heard a baby cry. It should cry for joy.

  “Hooray for the Class of 1990 and those who helped them make America stronger by becoming educated citizens.

  “I thank you for your attention.”

  IX

  (Rhode Island was the first of the Thirteen Colonies to advocate and implement the right of its citizens to worship or not worship however they pleased.)

  Jill Krementz is an Episcopalian (although she goes to church rarely) and I am an atheist (or at best a Unitarian who winds up in churches quite a lot). So when we decided to get married in 1979, having lived together for several years, there seemed a smorgasbord of sacred and secular venues in which we might become as one, so to speak. Since we had met during the production of a play of mine, I suggested that the magic spell be cast at what was said to be the actors’ church, “The Little Church Around the Corner,” which (hey, presto!) was also Episcopalian, down on Twenty-ninth Street, just off Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The darling church won its quaint name and reputation for liking theater people in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Joseph Jefferson (author and star of Rip Van Winkle) asked t
o be married in a high Anglican church a couple of blocks north of Twenty-ninth and right on Fifth Avenue. He was told politely that actors were known to be more casual morally than members of that particular congregation, so why didn’t he “try the little church around the corner.” He did.

  So then I did, and never have I caught more hell for having been divorced! (The fact that I was connected with the theater won me no sympathy. Neither did the fact that Jill was a lifelong friend of Paul Moore, the Episcopal Bishop of New York.) It was a woman we talked to. She was obviously powerful, but this was before any women had been ordained. She could be a priest now, and my having divorced my first wife was the most unforgivable thing she had ever heard. (When they got around to ordaining women, one of the first would have this improbable name: Tanya Vonnegut. She was the wife of a cousin of mine, and a great beauty and no doubt an inspiring priest.)

  We could get married at The Little Church Around the Corner, according to the battle-axe we spoke to, if I joined the church and did penance with church work, which might include teaching Sunday school. So we put on our show at Christ Church United Methodist up at Sixtieth and Park. (I don’t remember how we happened to choose that one. We may have discussed church architecture with Brendan Gill of the Landmarks Preservation Commission.) There were no snags there. The whole thing went through like a dose of salts, as the saying goes.