If This Isn't Nice, What Is?

by Kurt Vonnegut

  If I have offended some of you by speaking ill of Thomas Jefferson, tough titty for you. I can say anything I please, short of shouting “Fire!” if there is no fire, because I am a citizen of the U.S.A. Your government does not exist and should not exist in order to keep you or anybody else, no matter what color, no matter what race, no matter what religion, from getting your damn fool feelings hurt.

  If you found an official powerful enough and dumb enough to actually shut me up about Thomas Jefferson, the two of you would be hauled into court, and the Indiana Civil Liberties Union would make you both feel like something the cat drug in.

  Which brings us to Saint Thomas Aquinas, a great Italian theologian and philosopher who eight hundred years ago perceived a hierarchy of laws which human beings should obey. At the top were God’s Laws, from the Old and New Testaments, of course. Below them were Natural Laws, the ways Nature, obviously, to both Saint Thomas and Jefferson, expected things to go. Lowest of all were man’s laws. If you think of laws arranged in that order in a deck of cards, God’s Laws would be the aces, Nature’s law would be the kings, and ACLU lawyers, attempting to secure the civil rights of the deuces and treys and even unpopular tens and jacks in our society, would have nothing but pipsqueak queens to play. I in fact once heard a man dismiss the Bill of Rights as “nothing but a bunch of amendments.” Chickenfeed, when compared with God and Nature.

  And indeed the unambiguous laws in the Bill of Rights might as well have been chickenfeed, or even chicken droppings, so cruelly spotty was their enforcement until the start of the lifetimes of people my age—people born in 1922. Only a year before we were born were female citizens allowed to vote and run for office. My Lord! And for many years after that, until the end of World War II, for Heaven’s sakes, African-American citizens of both sexes were in many parts of the country, this beacon of liberty, discouraged from voting by a combination of technicalities and sheer terror. Don’t forget: Nobody had ever been punished for lynching one. “Nature red in tooth and claw7.”

  Who were and are the bleeding hearts who fought and fight to make our governments, local, state and federal, behave justly and mercifully and respectfully toward all its citizens, no matter how socially and politically powerless and unpopular they may be? I have an old and once-despised name for them which may surprise you. They are “Abolitionists.” We are Abolitionists. Abolition of what? Of human slavery. Such passions for human rights as we have derive their strength from inherited guilt about the unspeakably hideous crime on which so much of the early and even present wealth of the whole of this nation, under God, is based, the labor of kidnapped persons, of slaves. And we tonight are also atoning as best we can for the murders of brothers by brothers, so to speak, in our Civil War. “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. He is trampling out the vineyards where the grapes of wrath are stored.”

  What did The Battle Hymn of the Republic and Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and all that have to do with our present enthusiasm for women’s rights? Not that much, really. Women just got lucky this time.

  HOW MUSIC CURES OUR ILLS (AND THERE ARE LOTS OF THEM)

  Vonnegut looks on the dark side, and finds that music, waltzing, the blues, humor, and “people who behave compassionately” make life worthwhile.8

  I was so innocent once that I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.

  But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America’s becoming humane and reasonable. That is because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. I myself have experienced that intoxication. I was once a Corporal.

  By saying our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our men and women fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many of their bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

  But I will say this:

  No matter how corrupt and greedy our government and our corporations and our media and Wall Street and our religious and charitable organizations may become, the music will still be perfectly wonderful.

  If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

  THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED

  OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

  WAS MUSIC.

  And I have arranged for a Strauss waltz to be played as you depart, so you can waltz the heck out of here when it is time to go. For those of you who don’t know how to waltz, nothing could be easier and more human. You go step, slide, rest, step, slide, rest, step slide, rest. Oom, pah, pah, oom, pah, pah.

  Bill Gates doesn’t seem to realize that we are dancing animals.

  During our catastrophically idiotic war in Vietnam, the music just kept getting better and better. We lost that war, by the way. Order couldn’t be restored in Indochina until the locals could finally kick us the hell out of there.

  That war only made billionaires out of millionaires. This war9 is making trillionaires out of billionaires. I call that progress.

  And how come the people in countries we invade can’t fight like ladies and gentlemen, in uniforms, and with tanks and helicopter gunships?

  About music: I like Strauss and Mozart and all that, but I would be remiss not to mention the absolutely priceless gift which African-Americans gave to the whole wide world when they were still in slavery. I mean “the blues.” All pop music today, jazz, swing, be-bop, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Stones, rock-and-roll, hip-hop, and on and on is derived from the blues.

  How do I know it’s a gift to the world? One of the best rhythm-and-blues combos I ever heard was three guys and a girl from Finland, playing in a club in Krakow, Poland.

  The wonderful writer Albert Murray, who is a jazz historian among other things, told me that, during the era of slavery in this country, an atrocity from which we can never fully recover, the suicide rate per capita among slave owners was much higher than the suicide rate among slaves. Al Murray says he thinks this was because slaves had a way of dealing with depression, which their white owners did not. They could play the blues.

  He says something else which also sounds right to me. He says the blues can’t drive depression clear out of a house, but they can drive it into the corners of any room where they are being played.

  I am, incidentally, honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as honorably as we can without any expectations of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.

  We had a memorial service for Asimov a while back, and at one point I said, “Isaac is up in Heaven now.” That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of Humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored.

  If I should ever die, again God forbid, I hope some of you will say, “Kurt’s up in Heaven now.” That’s my favorite joke.

  How do Humanists feel about Jesus? If what he said was superb, how can it matter whether he was God or not?

  When you get to my age, if you get to my age, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged, what life is all about. I have seven kids, four of them adopted.

  Most of you here are the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.

  I put my big question about life to my biological son Mark. Mark is a pediatrician, and author of a memoir entitled The Eden Express. It is about his crackup, str
aitjacket and padded cell stuff, from which he recovered sufficiently to graduate from Harvard Medical School.

  Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it.

  I have to say that’s a pretty good sound bite, almost as good as, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese, five hundred years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.

  The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks.

  And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one.

  We’ve sure come a long way since then, only seven hundred years ago. Sometimes I wish we hadn’t. I hate H-bombs and The Jerry Springer Show.

  I love science. All Humanists do. I’m particularly fond of the Big Bang Theory. It goes like this: There was once all this nothing, and it was so much nothing that there wasn’t even such a thing as nothing. And then all of a sudden there was this great big BANG, and that’s where all this crap came from. Forget the Bible.

  Any questions?

  You know what they should put over the entrance to the Physics Department? Just that one word:

  BANG!

  You know what else I think? I think life is no way to treat an animal, and not just people, but pigs and chickens, too. Life just hurts too much.

  Doesn’t anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools or health insurance for all?

  How about Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?

  Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

  Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

  Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God, and so on.

  Not exactly planks in a Republican platform.

  For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

  “Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

  Only kidding, but seriously: there is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be President.

  This was true even in my high school. Only seriously disturbed people ran for class president.

  We might have psychiatrists examine all the candidates. But who but a nut case would want to be a psychiatrist?

  But, when you stop to think about it, only a nut case would want to be a human being, if he or she had a choice. Such treacherous, untrustworthy, lying and greedy animals we are!

  I wouldn’t trust any one of you, no matter how friendly and innocent you may appear, any farther than I could throw you. Because you’re human.

  And for the love of God, as the Christians say, please don’t trust me. I couldn’t stand it.

  My favorite song? It’s How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Loved You, When You Know I’ve Been a Liar All My Life?

  You want to know what I pray every night?

  I go down on my old knees, next to my cot in the coal bin, and I pray with all my heart, “To whom it may concern: Couldn’t you please put my soul inside a sea otter or a barn owl instead?” I would rather be a sea otter than a human being, even if there were another oil spill.

  You want to know what the British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell called this planet? He said it was “the Lunatic Asylum of the Universe.” And he said the inmates had taken over, and we were tormenting each other and trashing the joint. And he wasn’t talking about the germs or the elephants. He meant we the people.

  Lord Russell lived to be almost a hundred. His dates are 1872 to 1970 AD. What does “AD” signify? That commemorates an asylum inmate who was nailed to a wooden cross by a bunch of other inmates. With him still conscious, they—no kidding—hammered spikes through his wrists and insteps, and into the wood. Then they set the cross upright, so he had to dangle up there where even the shortest person in the crowd could see him writhing this way and that.

  Can you imagine people doing such a thing to a person?

  No problem. That’s entertainment. Ask the devout Roman Catholic Mel Gibson, who, as an act of piety, made a fortune with a movie about how Jesus was tortured. Never mind what Jesus said.

  During the reign of King Henry the Eighth, founder of the Church of England, he had a counterfeiter boiled alive in public. Show biz again.

  Mel Gibson’s next movie should be The Counterfeiter. Box office records will again be broken.

  One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

  And what did the great British historian Edward Gibbon have to say about the human record so far? He said, “History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.”

  The same can be said about this morning’s issue of The New York Times.

  Edward Gibbon’s dates? 1737 to 1794 AD.

  The French Algerian writer Albert Camus, who won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, wrote that “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”

  So there’s another barrel of laughs from literature.

  Camus himself died in an automobile accident.

  His dates? 1913 to 1960 AD.

  Listen: All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being: Moby-Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, The Iliad and The Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, The Bible and The Charge of the Light Brigade.

  But I have to say this in defense of humankind: No matter in what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got there. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these crazy games going on, which could make you act crazy, even if you weren’t crazy to begin with. Some of the games which were already going on when you got here were love and hate, Liberalism and Conservatism, automobiles and credit cards and girls’ basketball.

  On the subject of crazy games already going on before any of us ever got here:

  If you keep up with current events in the supermarket tabloids, you know that a team of Martian anthropologists has been studying our culture for the past ten years, since our culture is the only one worth a nickel on the whole damn planet. You can forget Brazil and Argentina.

  Anyway: They went back home last week, because they knew how terrible global warming was about to be. Their space vehicle wasn’t a flying saucer. It was more like a flying soup tureen. And they’re little all right, only six inches high. But they aren’t green. They’re mauve.

  And their little mauve leader, by way of farewell, said in that teeny-weeny, tanny-wanny, toney-woney little voice of hers that that there were two things about American culture no Martian would ever understand.

  “What is it,” she squeaked, “what can it possibly be about blow jobs and golf?”

  Even crazier than golf, though, is modern American politics, where, thanks to TV, and for the convenience of TV, you can be only one of two kinds of human beings, either a Liberal or a Conservative.

  Actually, this same sort of thing happened to the people of England ten generations ago, and Sir William Gilbert, of the radical team of Gilbert and Sullivan, wrote these words for a song about it back then:

  I often think it’s comical

  How nature always does contrive

  That every boy and
every gal,

  That’s born into the world alive,

  Is either a little Liberal,

  Or a little Conservative.

  Which one are you in this country, and it’s practically a law of life that you have to be one or the other? If you aren’t one or the other, you might as well be a doughnut.

  If some of you still haven’t decided, I’ll make it easy for you.

  If you want to take my guns away from me, and you’re all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them kitchen showers, and you’re for the poor, you’re a Liberal.

  If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you’re a Conservative.

  What could be simpler?

  A show of hands, please: How many of you are Liberals?

  On the subject of homosexuality: If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. And in a few minutes I’ll give a lesson in creative writing.

  In the meanwhile, though, I want to talk about our government’s war on drugs. It’s certainly a lot better than no drugs at all. It was illegal mescaline which put my son Mark into a loony bin for a little while.

  But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal. One, of course is ethyl alcohol. And President George W. Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed or tiddley-poo or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time from when he was 16 until he was 41. When he was 41, he says, Jesus appeared to him, and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.

  Other drunks have seen pink elephants.

  And what the heck, he didn’t make any of the big decisions, and couldn’t, and wouldn’t want to in any case.