Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage

by Kurt Vonnegut

  “Compare making somebody feel like something the cat drug in with Armageddon or World War III.

  “So there you have my scheme for making Christianity, which has killed so many people so horribly, a little less homicidal: substituting the word ‘respect’ for the word ‘love.’ And as I said, I have been in actual battle with people who had crosses all over themselves. They were sure no fun.

  “I have little hope that my simple reform will attract any appreciable support during my lifetime, anyway, or in the lifetimes of my children. The Christian quick trip from love to hate and murder is our principal entertainment. We might call it ‘Christianity Fails Again,’ and how satisfying so many of us have been trained to find it when it fails and fails.

  “In America it takes the form of the cowboy story. A good-hearted, innocent young man rides into town, with friendly intentions toward one and all. Never mind that he happens to be wearing a loaded Colt .44 on either hip. The last thing he wants is trouble. But before he knows it, this loving man is face to face with another man, who is so unlovable that he has absolutely no choice but to shoot him. Christianity Fails Again.

  “Very early British versions are tales of the quests of the Christian knights of King Arthur’s Camelot. Like Hermann Goring, they have crosses all over them. They ride out into the countryside to help the weak, an admirably Christian activity. They are certainly not looking for trouble. Never mind that they are iron Christmas trees decorated with the latest in weaponry. And before they know it, they are face to face with other knights so unlovable that they have absolutely no choice but to chop them up as though they were sides of beef in a butcher shop. Christianity Fails Again. What fun! And I point out to you that there was an implied promise that our own government would entertain us with failures of Christianity when John F. Kennedy allowed his brief Presidency to be called Camelot.

  “And how does our present federal administration, which has become just one more big corporation fighting for our attention on television and in the newspapers, propose to maintain its popularity? With the same old tried and true story, which begins with friendly, open people, who say such things as ‘Nobody wants peace more than we do’ and ‘Nobody is slower to anger than we are’ and so on. And then, all of a sudden, ‘Ka-boom, ka-boom!’ Christianity Fails Again.

  “The place where it failed most recently, incidentally, which is Libya, has a population less than that of greater Chicago, Illinois. And should any Christian be sorry that we killed Qaddafi’s baby daughter? Well—Jerry Falwell should speak to this issue, since he knows all the verses in the Bible which make murder acceptable. My own theory is that the little girl, by allowing herself to be adopted by a dark-skinned Muslim absolutely nobody watching American television could love, in effect committed suicide.

  “Perhaps the CIA could find out if she had been despondent before cashing in.

  “But I digress.

  “I have come all the way to Rochester to speak to a congregation of persons of such deep faith that they dare to be skeptical about widely accepted pronouncements of what life is all about, who call themselves Unitarian Universalists. So I should surely offer an opinion as to the present condition of that relatively small denomination.

  “I will say that you, in terms of numbers, power, and influence, and your spiritual differences with the general population, are analogous to the earliest Christians in the catacombs under Imperial Rome. I hasten to add that your hardships are not the same, nor are you in any danger. Nobody in the power structure thinks children of the Age of Reason amount to a hill of beans. That is the extent of your discomfort. That sure beats being crucified upside down or being fed to the carnivorous menagerie at the Circus Maximus.

  “You are like the early Christians in yearning for an era of peace and plenty and justice, which may never come. They thought Jesus would bring that about. You think human beings should be able to create such an era through their own efforts.

  “You are like them, as I have already said, in that you live in a time when killing is a leading entertainment form. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the average American child watches 18,000 TV murders before it graduates from high school. That kid has seen Christianity fail with pistols and rifles and shotguns and machine guns. It has seen Christianity fail with guillotines and gallows and electric chairs and gas chambers. That youngster has seen Christianity fail with fighter planes and bombers and tanks and battleships and submarines—with hatchets and clubs and chain saws and butcher knives. And afterward that boy or girl is supposed to feel grateful to the corporations, our Federal Government among them, which put on such shows.

  “Romans as rich and powerful as modern corporations used to put on such shows, so we can say that all that has changed is the sponsorship.

  “Like the early Christians, you are part of a society dominated by superstitions, by pure baloney. During Roman Imperial times, though, pure baloney was all that was available about the size of the planet, about its place in the cosmos, about the natures of its other inhabitants, about the probable origins of life, about the causes and cures of diseases, about chemistry, about physics, about biology, and on and on. Everybody, including the early Christians, had no choice but to be full of baloney. That is not the case today. And my goodness, do we ever have a lot of information now, and proven techniques for creating almost anything in abundance and for moderating all sorts of catastrophes.

  “How tragic it is, then, that the major impulses in this and several other societies nowadays should be in the direction of the pure baloney and cruel entertainments of thousands of years ago, which almost inevitably lead to the antithesis of beauty and the good life and Christianity as taught by Jesus Christ, which is war.

  “When I say that the Unitarian Universalists, the people who know pure baloney when they hear it, are something like the early Christians in the catacombs, am I suggesting that contempt for baloney will someday be as widespread as Christianity is today? Well—the example of Christianity is not encouraging, actually, since it was nothing but a poor people’s religion, a servant’s religion, a slave’s religion, a woman’s religion, a child’s religion, and would have remained such if it hadn’t stopped taking the Sermon on the Mount seriously and joined forces with the vain and rich and violent. I can’t imagine that you would want to do that, to give up everything you believe in order to play a bigger part in world history.

  “You would need a logo—something you could put on T-shirts and flags to start with, and then maybe on the sides of tanks and airplanes and peacekeeping missiles later on. If you really want a logo, I recommend a circle with a baloney sausage in the middle, and with a bar across the sausage—meaning, in international sign language, ‘No baloney.’

  “But then, in order to recruit a large and enthusiastic following, perhaps even a rabid following, you would have to repudiate that symbol—without saying so, of course. You would have to make up a lot of highly emotional baloney, which you surely don’t have now—all about what God wants and doesn’t want, whom He likes, whom He hates, what He eats for breakfast. The more complete picture of God you can cobble together, the better you’ll do.

  “The more violent picture of Him you create, the better you’ll do. I say this as an expert, as a former advertising and publicity man. The President and I came out of the same division at General Electric. And there he is in the White House, and here I am speaking to some obscure religious sect in Rochester. But that’s another story. My point is that if you are going to succeed as a mass movement, you are going to do it on television and videocassettes or nowhere, and any God you invent is going to be up against Miami Vice and Clint Eastwood and Sylvester Stallone. Stallone, incidentally, was a girls’ gym teacher in Switzerland during the Vietnam War. You look into those spaniel eyes of his, and you know just how hard he tried to love before he started killing socialist wogs and gooks.

  “And stay clear of the Ten Commandments, as do the television evangelists. Those things ar
e booby-trapped, because right in the middle of them is one commandment which would, if taken seriously, cripple modern religion as show business. It is this commandment: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’

  “I thank you for your attention.” (The end.)

  I was preaching to the choir, so to speak. In more conventionally religious venues, my Freethinking has proved less digestible. So that after I spoke at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, in October 1990, the Dean of the Chapel there, the Reverend Paul H. Jones, wrote a troubled letter to a mutual friend, from which I have his permission to quote in part. “Why am I so depressed as I read Hocus Pocus?” he asked. “Don’t I like the human condition as he portrays it via the characters, situations, educational system? The world is disintegrating. Does that accurately reflect life? Where am I in that world? With whom do I identify? Why don’t I like it?”

  He goes on: “I want to ask Vonnegut about his religious persuasion. What is redemptive about his writings? Must they be? Are they intended to be? Am I imposing or asking too much? He deliberately mentioned Jesus and invoked religious images. What gives?”

  My reply is the next-to-last thing in the Appendix.

  (As for my pacifism, it is nothing if not ambivalent. When I ask myself what person in American history I would most like to have been, I am powerless to protest when my subconscious nominates Joshua L. Chamberlain. Colonel Chamberlain, while in command of the 20th Maine Volunteers during the Civil War, ordered a downhill and then uphill bayonet charge which turned the tide of battle in favor of the Union forces at Gettysburg.)

  XVII

  “ ‘Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys in Mozambique?’ I asked.

  “I was strapped into the seat of a jet bound from Johannesburg, South Africa, to Maputo, the capital of the former Portuguese colony of Mozambique, on the east coast of Africa, where I had never been before. All I knew about it so far was that it was as beautiful and habitable as California, had several good ports on one of the longest shorelines of any African nation, was underpopulated, got enough rain most years and sounded like a Garden of Eden—but was a manmade hell instead.”

  Thus began a piece I wrote for Parade at the start of 1990, when the so-called Communist Bloc of nations could no longer hold up their end of the Harry High School myth that there was a desperate struggle between good and evil societies going on. (When I was a student at Shortridge High School, whose colors were blue and white, we hated Arsenal Tech, whose colors were green and white. One time I got roughed up by a bunch of Tech subhumans while I was walking home alone from a Shortridge-Tech football game wearing a Shortridge band uniform. As I would tell Benny Goodman many years later, “I used to play a little licorice-stick myself.”)

  “The stranger I asked about the good guys and the bad guys was a white American male named John Yale, who was an old hand in Mozambique,” my Parade piece went on. “He was a worker for World Vision, an American evangelical Christian charity, which was getting food and clothing and other bare essentials to some of the country’s more than 1 million helpless refugees. The population of the whole country was only 15 million—fewer people than are crowded into Mexico City nowadays. The refugees had been driven off their little farms and had had their homes and schools and hospitals burned down by other Mozambicans who called themselves in Portuguese the National Resistance of Mozambique, or RENAMO for short.”

  (Our Neo-Conservatives, or Neo-Cons for short, think RENAMO is the cat’s pajamas. I heard from several of them after the piece was published, and their letters reminded me of the way Dean Martin introduced Frank Sinatra once. He said Sinatra was going to tell about all of the good things the Mafia was doing.)

  “John Yale replied that his job was not to choose sides in a civil war but to help people in deep trouble—no matter who or what they were said to be. But I sensed from some of the other carefully neutral things he said about RENAMO, which had been raping and murdering and pillaging and all that since 1976, when it was trained and equipped by white South Africans and Rhodesians, that it shouldn’t be thought of as people. RENAMO had become an incurable disease instead, out of control, since the armed forces were so poor and spread so thin, a ghastly feature of daily life no more to be discussed in terms of good and evil than cholera, say, or bubonic plague.

  “There is, in fact, an old, old word in every language for roving gangs of heartless hit-and-run robbers, gangs which have become a crippling or fatal disease, unreasoning, existing for their own sake and nothing more. In English the word is bandits. In Portuguese it is bandidos, which, I would soon learn, in Maputo and elsewhere was a synonym for RENAMO.

  “ ‘Crippling or fatal disease’ did I say? Our own State Department estimates that RENAMO, virtually unopposed, has killed more than 100,000 Mozambicans since 1987 alone—including at least 8,000 children under the age of five, most of whom were driven into the bush, where they starved to death. Our own government may have supported RENAMO secretly in the past, because Mozambique was avowedly Marxist, and South Africa used to do so openly and unashamedly. But no more. The bandidos are so few, and so hated, for good reason, that they can never expect to take over the country. Everybody else—including the United States and the Soviet Union and the International Red Cross and CARE and John Yale of World Vision—is doing everything possible to ease the agony of the non-Marxist, noncapitalist, nearly naked, and utterly pitiful refugees. For that matter, by the time I got there, the few Mozambicans sophisticated enough to have some idea of how Marxism was supposed to work were as sick of Socialist idealism in practice as anybody in Moscow or Warsaw or East Berlin.

  “I was soon off the jet and into an eight-seat twin-engine Cessna flown by a lantern-jawed kid named Jim Friesen, who had previously been a bush pilot in northwest Canada. Jim couldn’t fly low to give us a closer look at the sights because the bandidos could be anywhere in the open country. They shot at boats and planes and trucks and cars, at anything that looked as if it might have something to do with making the lives of the common people less hellish. Our chartered Cessna wasn’t a luxury. It was a necessity, since all the roads below us had been turned into death traps by bandido ambushes and mines.”

  (Before I left, somebody asked me if I wasn’t afraid of getting killed, and I said, “I’m just going to Mozambique, not the South Bronx.”)

  “Imagine California with all its roads cut, with most of its country people driven into towns and cities, with its farms abandoned, and with its huddled, defenseless population having to be fed and clothed by air. Welcome to Mozambique.

  “From October 9 to October 13, while Wall Street was having a little crash, Jim Friesen flew me and several others with media contacts in the USA—including reporters from The New York Times and The Washington Post and Newsweek and CNN—from one isolated and besieged refugee center to another. What we saw wasn’t all that different from what every adult American has seen more than enough of in photographs, whether they were taken in liberated Nazi death camps or Biafra or the Sudan or you name it. I myself have seen people that hungry in real life—at the end of World War II in Germany, where I was a PW, and again on the Biafran side of the Nigerian civil war.”

  (In my novel Bluebeard I describe a valley full of refugees at the end of WW II. It wasn’t imaginary. It was real. O’Hare and I were there.)

  “In Mozambique we saw lots of familiar stuff, stupefied starving children with eyes as big as dinner plates, adults with chests that looked like bird cages. There was one new sight for me anyway: purposely mutilated people with their noses or ears or whatever cut off by hand-held sharp instruments.”

  (I didn’t just hear about them. I saw them and talked to them through an interpreter. They weren’t brought to us. They were just faces, what was left of them, in a great big crowd of people who could easily be dead soon for want of calories.)

  “We were making this gruesome trip at the invitation of CARE, a bigger and older relief organization than John Yale’s. CARE hoped that we would let or
dinary Americans know about the peculiarly manmade agony of faraway Mozambique, and what so many relief agencies to which they might have contributed were doing there.”

  (CARE came into being after World War II, of course, bringing food to people starving in the ruins of Europe. It had since ministered to Third World people in dire need, but an executive in its New York City headquarters told me that, what with the collapse of the Russian Empire, CARE might have to return to certain parts of Europe again, mainly with storage batteries and tractor tires and so on. The chief piece of farm machinery in Mozambique was one of the world’s worst polluters, since the farmers there cleared fields by burning them. RENAMO should be thanked, maybe, for making so many of them stop doing that.)

  “With us was CARE’s boss in Mozambique, David P. Neff, forty-three years old, whose hometown, which he hadn’t seen in quite some time, was New Athens, Illinois. He had been in the Peace Corps in Cameroon, instead, and had then been hired by CARE, mastering shipping and accounting and hard-edge management techniques for getting relief supplies to where they were most needed—on time, unspoiled, and unstolen—to the people the donors had addressed them to, in Liberia and then in the Gaza Strip and then in the Philippines and then in Somalia and then in Sierra Leone. And now Mozambique. His enemy wasn’t RENAMO. It was inefficiency.”

  (Will Dave and his family next take up residence and learn the language and the customs in Warsaw or Leningrad?)

  “I won’t repeat the tales of hunger Dave had to tell. As I say, color the people in old photographs of Auschwitz all shades of brown and black and you will be looking at what he sees every day. I will pass on instead what he said to me as we were flying over a refugee center near the mouth of the crocodile-infested Zambezi River, at a town called Marromeu. We flew over the town before landing, making sure that the people were out in the open, trying to scratch a living with their hoes from their little gardens, and not hiding in the bush from yet another hit-and-run attack by what some Americans still call ‘Freedom Fighters.’ Dave said that keeping RENAMO in mines and bullets and rocket launchers was so cheap that they didn’t need South Africa or the CIA or whatever to support them. He estimated the price at about $4 million a year, the cost of a movie without big stars or of a fairly elaborate Broadway musical. This was a sum from a few rich individuals outside Mozambique, or even one billionaire.