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

by Kurt Vonnegut

  “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.

  “Not every member of AA or GA has sunk quite that low, of course—but plenty have. Many, if not most, have done what they call ‘hitting bottom’ before admitting what it is that has been ruining their lives.

  “I now wish to direct your attention to another form of addiction, which has not been previously identified. It is more like gambling than drinking, since the people afflicted are ravenous for situations that will cause their bodies to release exciting chemicals into their bloodstreams. I am persuaded that there are among us people who are tragically hooked on preparations for war.

  “Tell people with that disease that war is coming and we have to get ready for it, and for a few minutes there, they will be as happy as a drunk with his martini breakfast or a compulsive gambler with his paycheck bet on the Super Bowl.

>   “Let us recognize how sick such people are. From now on, when a national leader, or even just a neighbor, starts talking about some new weapons system which is going to cost us a mere $29 billion, we should speak up. We should say something on the order of, ‘Honest to God, I couldn’t be sorrier for you if I’d seen you wash down a fistful of black beauties with a pint of Southern Comfort.’

  “I mean it. I am not joking. Compulsive preparers for World War III, in this country or any other, are as tragically and, yes, as repulsively addicted as any stockbroker passed out with his head in a toilet in Port Authority Bus Terminal.

  “For an alcoholic to experience a little joy, he needs maybe three ounces of grain alcohol. Alcoholics, when they are close to hitting bottom, customarily can’t hold much alcohol.

  “If we know a compulsive gambler who is dead broke, we can probably make him happy with a dollar to bet on who can spit farther than someone else.

  “For us to give a compulsive war-preparer a fleeting moment of happiness, we may have to buy him three Trident submarines and a hundred intercontinental ballistic missiles mounted on choo-choo trains.

  “If Western Civilization were a person—

  “If Western Civilization, which blankets the world now, as far as I can tell, were a person—

  “If Western Civilization, which surely now includes the Soviet Union and China and India and Pakistan and on and on, were a person—

  “If Western Civilization were a person, we would be directing it to the nearest meeting of War Preparers Anonymous. We would be telling it to stand up before the meeting and say, ‘My name is Western Civilization. I am a compulsive war-preparer. I have lost everything I ever cared about. I should have come here long ago. I first hit bottom in World War I.’

  “Western Civilization cannot be represented by a single person, of course, but a single explanation for the catastrophic course it has followed during this bloody century is possible. We the people, because of our ignorance of the disease, have again and again entrusted power to people we did not know were sickies.

  “And let us not mock them now, any more than we would mock someone with syphilis or smallpox or leprosy or yaws or typhoid fever or any of the other diseases to which the flesh is heir. All we have to do is separate them from the levers of power, I think.

  “And then what?

  “Western Civilization’s long, hard trip back to sobriety might begin.

  “A word about appeasement, something World War II, supposedly, taught us not to practice: I say to you that the world has been ruined by appeasement. Appeasement of whom? Of the Communists? Of the Neo-Nazis? No! Appeasement of the compulsive war-preparers. I can scarcely name a nation that has not lost most of its freedom and wealth in attempts to appease its own addicts to preparations for war.

  “And there is no appeasing an addict for very long: ‘I swear, man, just lay enough bread on me for twenty multiple-reentry vehicles and a fleet of B-1 bombers, and I’ll never bother you again.’

  “Most addictions start innocently enough in childhood, under agreeable, reputable auspices—a sip of champagne at a wedding, a game of poker for matchsticks on a rainy afternoon. Compulsive war-preparers may have been encouraged as infants to clap their hands with glee at a campfire or a Fourth of July parade.

  “Not every child gets hooked. Not every child so tempted grows up to be a drunk or a gambler or a babbler about knocking down the incoming missiles of the Evil Empire with laser beams. When I identify the war preparers as addicts, I am not calling for the exclusion of children from all martial celebrations. I doubt that more than one child in a hundred, having seen fireworks, for example, will become an adult who wants us to stop squandering our substance on education and health and social justice and the arts, and food and shelter and clothing for the needy, and so on—who wants us to blow it all on ammunition instead.

  “And please understand that the addiction I have identified is to preparations for war. I repeat: to preparations for war—addiction to the thrills of de-mothballing battleships and inventing weapons systems against which there cannot possibly be a defense, supposedly, and urging the citizenry to hate this part of humanity or that one, and knocking over little governments that might aid and abet an enemy someday, and so on. I am not talking about an addiction to war itself, which is a very different matter. A compulsive preparer for war no more wants to go to big-time war than an alcoholic stockbroker wants to pass out with his head in a toilet in Port Authority Bus Terminal.

  “Should addicts of any sort hold high offices in this or any other country? Absolutely not, for their first priority will always be to satisfy their addiction, no matter how terrible the consequences may be—even to themselves.

  “Suppose we had an alcoholic President who still had not hit bottom and whose chief companions were drunks like himself. And suppose it were a fact, made absolutely clear to him, that if he took just one more drink, the whole planet would blow up.

  “He has all the liquor thrown out of the White House, including his Aqua Velva shaving lotion. Late at night he is terribly restless, crazy for a drink but proud of not drinking. So he opens the White House refrigerator, looking for a Tab or a Diet Pepsi, he tells himself. And there, half hidden by a family-size jar of French’s mustard, is an unopened can of Coors beer.

  “What do you think he’ll do?”

  I wrote that seven years ago, and have used it in speeches many times since. (Even Jesus Christ, if He hadn’t been crucified, would have started repeating Himself.) It could be classed as a practical joke, since I was only pretending to be serious. (Then again, all wordplay or fiction or speeches or whatever is practical joking, since people are made to feel fear or love or satisfaction or whatever while they are simply sitting someplace and nothing much is really going on.)

  The best practical joke I ever heard of (and it may have been Hugh Troy’s doing) involved a man in an ad agency who got a big promotion and went out and bought a homburg hat as a badge of rank. Some people in the office pooled their money to buy several identical homburgs, but of different sizes, which they substituted from time to time for the one the man had bought for himself. So when the man went out to lunch or whatever and put on his hat, it had to seem to him that his head was swelling or shrinking, since sometimes the hat sat way up high (like a gumdrop), and sometimes it came down over his eyes and ears (like a diving bell).

  I used to say that the funniest word joke in the world was the one which asked, “Why is cream more expensive than milk?” Answer: “Because the cows hate to squat on those little bottles.” Technological changes in the dairy industry require me to take away the joke’s championship. Cream is no longer sold in glass bottles with wide mouths over which a cow might conceivably be forced to squat. So the new champion is an oldie from the golden age of radio comedy, during which Ed Wynn (“The Perfect Fool”) was cast as a Fire Chief. Each show began with Wynn’s conducting some sort of ridiculous Fire Department business on the telephone. One time a woman called up to say her house was on fire. Wynn asked her if she had tried putting water on it. She said she had, and he said, “I’m sorry, but that’s all we could do.” He hung up.

  (So there’s the new World’s Champion.)

  XV

  And get a load of this naive sermon I preached at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City:

  “I will speak today about the worst imaginable consequences of doing without hydrogen bombs. This should be a relief. I am sure you are sick and tired of hearing how all living things sizzle and pop inside a radioactive fireball. We have known that for more than a third of this century—ever since we dropped an atom bomb on the yellow people of Hiroshima. They certainly sizzled and popped.

  “After all is said and done, what was that sizzling and popping, despite the brilliant technology which caused it, but our old friend death? Let us not forget that St. Joan of Arc was made to sizzle and pop in old times with nothing more than firewood. She wound up dead. The people of Hiros
hima wound up dead. Dead is dead.

  “Scientists, for all their creativity, will never discover a method for making people deader than dead. So if some of you are worried about being hydrogen-bombed, you are merely fearing death. There is nothing new in that. If there weren’t any hydrogen bombs, death would still be after you. And what is death but an absence of life? That is all it ever can be.

  “Death is nothing. What is all this fuss about?

  “Let us ‘up the ante,’ as gamblers say. Let us talk about fates worse than death. When the Reverend Jim Jones saw that his followers in Guyana were facing fates worse than death, he gave them Kool-Aid laced with cyanide. If our government sees that we are facing fates worse than death, it will shower our enemies with hydrogen bombs, and then we will be showered in turn. There will be plenty of Kool-Aid for everyone, in a manner of speaking, when the right time comes.

  “What will the right time look like?

  “I will not waste your time with trivial fates, which are only marginally worse than death. Suppose we were conquered by an enemy, for example, who didn’t understand our wonderful economic system, and so Braniff airlines and International Harvester and so on all went bust, and millions of Americans who wanted to work couldn’t find any jobs anywhere. Or suppose we were conquered by an enemy who was too cheap to take good care of children and old people. Or suppose we were conquered by an enemy who wouldn’t spend money on anything but weapons for World War III. These are all tribulations we could live with, if we had to—although God forbid.

  “But suppose we foolishly got rid of our nuclear weapons, our Kool-Aid, and an enemy came over here and crucified us. Crucifixion was the most painful thing the ancient Romans ever found to do to anyone. They knew as much about pain as we do about genocide. They sometimes crucified hundreds of people at one time. That is what they did to all the survivors of the army of Spartacus, which was composed mostly of escaped slaves. They crucified them all. There were several miles of crosses.