Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) (15 page)

There are people who go to great lengths to prove that they own some part of Skyscraper National Park, putting their names on buildings or whatever, but they might as well put their names on things like the Grand Canyon or Old Faithful (which will spout at your convenience if you pour a box of laundry detergent down the hole). Manhattan is a geological phenomenon. An enormous fraction of the planet’s wealth was concentrated on a little island of solid granite. This caused crystals to sprout in such profusion that the island when viewed from the air now resembles a quartz porcupine.

If I am ever going to find a Folk Society for myself (and time is growing short), it will not be on Manhattan. The members of such a society, Dr. Redfield taught me, must feel that a particular piece of land gave birth to them, and has been and always will be theirs. As I say, nobody can really own anything in Skyscraper National Park.

I have said in speeches that Dr. Redfield, by describing a Folk Society, deserved to be honored alongside the identifiers of vitamins and minerals essential to our good health and cheerful ness. Sailors in the British Navy used to feel lousy on long sea voyages because they weren’t getting enough vitamin C. Then they started sucking on limes and they felt OK again. (That is why we call British people limeys. Their sailors were thought to be ridiculous for sucking limes.) I have asserted that a lot of us were wasting away for want of a Folk Society. But vitamins and minerals are real, and Folk Societies, if any survive anywhere, are probably quack remedies for what ails people like me, on the order of Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound for Female Complaints.

I visited the Anthropology Department of the University of Chicago a few months ago. Dr. Sol Tax was the only faculty member from my time who was still teaching there. I asked him if he knew what had become of my own classmates (including Lisa Redfield, Dr. Redfield’s daughter). Many of them, Lisa, too, he said, were practicing what he called “urban anthropology,” which sounded an awful lot like sociology to me. (We used to look down on the sociologists. I couldn’t imagine why and can’t imagine why.) If I had stayed with anthropology as a career, I would now be doing, probably, what I
am
doing, which is writing about the acculturated primitive people (like myself) in Skyscraper National Park.

A vitamin or mineral deficiency always has bad effects. A Folk Society deficiency (hereafter “FSD”) quite often does. The trouble begins when a person suffering from FSD stops thinking, in order to become a member of an artificial extended family which happens to be crazy. The homicidal “family” of Charles Manson springs to mind. Or what about the cult of the Reverend Jim Jones in Guyana, whose members on his advice (“Tonight you will be with me in Paradise”) fed the kids Kool-Aid laced with cyanide and then drank it themselves. (The Reverend Jones, like Manson, was from Indianapolis. I didn’t tell John Updike that before his lecture there. I had already given him enough information about a city he would probably never see again. Why send him out there with an overload?) And there is the Ku Klux Klan (whose national headquarters was in Indiana when I was a little boy). And there is the National Rifle Association. And there are all those people who exhibit weirdness if they work in the White House for very long.

Every cockamamie artificial extended family of FSD sufferers resembles Redfield’s Folk Society to this extent: it has a myth at its core. The Manson family pretended to believe (the same thing as believing) that its murders would be blamed on blacks. Los Angeles would then be purified somehow by a race war. The myth at the core of the political family which calls itself “Neo-Conservatives” isn’t that explicit, but I know what it is, even if most of them can’t put it into words. This is it: They are British aristocrats, graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, living in the world as it was one hundred years ago.

Did anyone back then ever look more worn-out by the White Man’s Burden than do William F. Buckley, Jr., and our former Representative at the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick in the present day? What to do about the Hottentots?

This delusion is in most cases comical. But it has also been tragical for dark-skinned poor people not just in this country but in many, many other parts of the world, since the Neo-Cons have been so influential in shaping our foreign policy during the past ten years. Never mind domestic policy. Foreign policy got all the money.

I mean, my goodness, at one point they had our battleship fire salvos into Lebanon, with no particular targets in mind. That was a scene straight out of Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
. That book was published way back in 1902, when the idea that upper-class white people were the most highly evolved animals on Earth, and that poor people and dark people were monkeys without tails, had yet to be discredited. The Neo-Cons had our planes fire rockets at monkeys without tails in Tripoli (hitting, among other things, Qaddafi’s daughter and the French Embassy). They had us kill maybe one thousand monkeys without tails in the process of arresting one monkey without a tail, the Head of State, in Panama. And there are all these other gruesome things we did or are still doing to monkeys without tails in Guatemala and E1 Salvador and Nicaragua and the South Bronx and Mozambique, and who knows where else? (“Only the Shadow knows.”)

Who but an organ grinder cries when a monkey dies? Not even another monkey.

(Don Quixote was a Neo-Conservative in his time, but all he did was bust a sail on a windmill and scare some sheep.)

I tried to deal some with the Neo-Cons’ wrong-centuryism and wrong-countryism in a novel I finished four months ago,
Hocus Pocus
. The Franklin Library is (at this writing) preparing a deluxe edition of
Hocus Pocus
(with an illustration by my daughter Edith, the former Mrs. Geraldo Rivera, now married to a really great guy) for which I have provided a special preface.

It says that I, ever since studying anthropology, “have regarded history and cultures and societies as characters vivid as any in fiction, as Madame Bovary or Long John Silver or Leopold Bloom or who you will. A critic for
The Village Voice
announced in triumph sometime back his discovery that I was the only well-known writer who had never created a character, and that the next step should be to unfrock me on that account. He was incorrect, since Eliot Rosewater and Billy Pilgrim and some others of my invention are surely stereophonic and three-dimensional, and as idiosyncratic as you please. But he was onto something nonetheless: In many of my books, including this one, individual human beings are not the main characters.

“The biggest character in
Hocus Pocus
(excluding myself, of course) is imperialism, the capture of other societies’ lands and people and treasure by means of state-of-the-art wounding and killing machines, which is to say armies and navies. It can’t be said too often that when Christopher Columbus discovered this hemisphere there were already millions upon millions of human beings here, and heavily armed Europeans took it away from them. When executed on a smaller scale, such an enterprise is the felony we call armed robbery. As might be expected, violence of this sort has not been without its consequences, one of which turns out to be the unwillingness of the richest heirs of the conquerors to take responsibility for what has become an awful lot of complicated property in need of skilled management and exceedingly boring and appallingly expensive maintenance, not to mention an increasingly unhappy and destructive and ailing general population.

“But in
Hocus Pocus
, as in real life this very minute, the richest heirs in what has become the United States have been rescued by foreigners, most famously cash-heavy Japanese, eager to buy the country with paper forms of wealth negotiable almost anywhere and free of the least implication of social or managerial obligations. Heaven! So those heirs, many of whom captured the fruits of the European conquest of this part of the Western Hemisphere only recently, through activities in bad faith on Wall Street or the looting of savings banks, reveal themselves as being no more patriotic about where they live than were the British conquerors of Rhodesia, the Belgian conquerors of the Congo, or the Portuguese conquerors of Mozambique. Or all the different sorts of foreigners who are buying up the USA.”

There was more to that preface, but the heck with it. (The older I get, the less willing I am to stand behind anything I say or do. Then again, all I do is louse up paper, whereas Ronald Reagan, who used to work for General Electric, too, loused up the whole country. GE itself, of course, loused up the Hudson River and several hundred square miles downwind from Hanford, Washington.)

What I wish I’d said in the preface (senile
esprit de l’escalier)
is that we are the last big colony to be abandoned by its conquerors. After they are gone, taking most of our money with them (maybe to Europe, maybe to compounds right here in the former colony, such as the Hamptons or Palm Beach or Palm Springs), we will be like Nigeria, a sort of improbable Dr. Seuss–type nation composed of several tribes. In Nigeria (which I visited during a tribal war) the biggest tribes are the Hausas, the Yorubas, and the Ibos. Here they will be the Blacks, the Hispanics, the Irish, the Italians, the Asiatics, and the Nothings (which would include those of German descent).

There will be clashes. We will be a Third World country. The only consolation is that every other country will be Third World, too. (You watch!) Thanks to the inevitable aftereffects of imperialism, of taking people’s land away and busting up their cultures, this will be a Third World planet.

I proposed this theory to Salman Rushdie, who has said that Britain itself is the last outpost of Empire, having imported dark-skinned former subjects for mistreatment right there on the island where it all began. Rushdie, whom I mentioned in my piece about Nelson Algren, is in hiding, having had a contract put out on him by Iran. So I wrote him a letter. There has been no reply so far, but he
did
publish a killer of a review of
Hocus Pocus
in a British paper, saying that I was a burned-out case and so on. (I was so upset I considered putting a contract out on him.)

Things are bad. (The best book I ever wrote was
Galápagos,
in which I said that our big brains were making our lives unbearable.) The most trusted man in America is said to be Walter Cronkite. (Who else is there?) He used to be my friend, but now he is very cold to me. Imagine being an American and being treated like something the cat drug in by the most trusted man in America! (Imagine being an American.)

Further on in the preface I went after American Eastern Seaboard prep schools again. (I am bughouse on that subject.) I said that those schools were clones of British prep schools, and that their idea of character was the so-called “muscular Christianity” exhibited by aristocratic imperialists in the time of Queen Victoria. (Those old-timers sure knew how to deal with monkeys without tails.) And then along comes
Masterpiece Theatre
on so-called “Public Television,” dramatizing stories about the beauty and charm and wittiness not only of British imperialism but of the British class system as well. The British class system is as subversive of what the United States once hoped to be and might have been and should have been as
Das Kapital
or
Mein Kampf.
(Why is it, do you suppose, that the lower social orders don’t watch more Public TV?)

British imperialism was armed robbery. The British class system (which seems so right to the Neo-Cons) was and still is unarmed robbery. (Just because the Soviet Union, which used to brag about being such a friend of the common people, has collapsed, that doesn’t mean the Sermon on the Mount must now be considered balderdash.)

I try to be fair. I have been wrong in the past, and could be wrong again, blaming prep schools and
Masterpiece Theatre
for the status quo. (During the Great Depression, my unicorn father’s favorite radio show was
Amos
‘n’
Andy,
which took white people’s minds off their troubles by making light of the troubles of black people. I remember one elegant joke from that show. It was a pretend black man’s, actually a white man’s, definition of
status quo
as “de mess we’s in.”) It could be that we’s in de mess we’s in because we’s plain done went bananas. I dealt with that in an essay published in
The Nation
(read by one American in every twenty-five hundred). It went like this:

“What has been America’s most nurturing contribution to the culture of this planet so far? Many would say jazz. I, who love jazz, will say this instead: Alcoholics Anonymous.

“I am not an alcoholic. If I were, I would go before the nearest AA meeting and say, ‘My name is Kurt Vonnegut. I am an alcoholic.’ God willing, that might be my first step down the long, hard road back to sobriety.

“The AA scheme, which requires a confession like that, is the first to have any measurable success in dealing with the tendency of some human beings, perhaps ten percent of any population sample anyone might care to choose, to become addicted to substances that give them brief spasms of pleasure but in the long term transmute their lives and the lives of those around them into ultimate ghastliness.

“The AA scheme, which, again, can work only if the addicts regularly admit that this or that chemical is poisonous to them, is now proving its effectiveness with compulsive gamblers, who are not dependent on chemicals from a distillery or a pharmaceutical laboratory. This is no paradox. Gamblers, in effect, manufacture their own dangerous substances. God help them, they produce chemicals that elate them whenever they place a bet on simply anything.

“If I were a compulsive gambler, which I am not, I would be well advised to stand up before the nearest meeting of Gamblers Anonymous and declare, ‘My name is Kurt Vonnegut. I am a compulsive gambler.’

“Whether the meeting I was standing before was of Gamblers Anonymous or Alcoholics Anonymous, I would be encouraged to testify as to how the chemicals I had generated within myself or swallowed had alienated my friends and relatives, cost me jobs and houses, and deprived me of my last shred of self-respect.