A Man Without a Country - Kurt Vonnegut [20]
And wait until you hear what the Martians poop. It’s uranium. Just one of them can light and heat every home and school and church and business in Tacoma.
But seriously, 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 planet. You can sure forget Brazil and Argentina.
Anyway, they went home last week, because they knew how terrible global warming was about to become. Their space vehicle, incidentally, 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 are not green. They’re mauve.
And their little mauve leader, by way of farewell, said in that teeny-weeny, tanny-wanny, toney little voice of hers that there were two things about American culture no Martian would ever understand.
“What is it,” she squeaked, “what can it possibly be about blowjobs and golf?”
That is stuff from a novel I’ve been working on for the past five years, about Gil Berman, thirty-six years my junior, a standup comedian at the end of the world. It is about making jokes while we are killing all the fish in the ocean, and touching off the last chunks or drops or whiffs of fossil fuel. But it will not let itself be finished.
Its working title—or actually, its nonworking title—is If God Were Alive Today. And hey, listen, it is time we thanked God that we are in a country where even the poor people are overweight. But the Bush diet could change that.
And about the novel I can never finish, If God Were Alive Today, the hero, the stand-up comedian on Doomsday, not only does he denounce our addiction to fossil fuels and the pushers in the White House, because of overpopulation he is also against sexual intercourse. Gil Berman tells his audiences:
I have become a flaming neuter. I am as celibate as at least fifty percent of the heterosexual Roman Catholic clergy. And celibacy is no root canal. It’s so cheap and convenient. Talk about safe sex! You don’t have to do anything afterwards, because there is no afterward.
And when my tantrum, which is what I call my TV set, flashes boobs and smiles in my face, and says everybody but me is going to get laid tonight, and this is a national emergency, so I’ve got to rush out and buy a car or pills, or a folding gymnasium that I can hide under my bed, I laugh like a hyena. I know and you know that millions and millions of good Americans, present company not excepted, are not going to get laid tonight.
And we flaming neuters vote! I look forward to a day when the President of the United States, no less, who probably isn’t going to get laid tonight either, decrees a National Neuter Pride Day. Out of our closets we’ll come by the millions. Shoulders squared, chins held high, we’ll go marching up Main Streets all over this boob-crazed democracy of ours, laughing like hyenas.
What about God? If He were alive today? Gil Berman says, “God would have to be an atheist, because the excrement has hit the air-conditioning big time, big time.”
I think one of the biggest mistakes we’re making, second only to being people, has to do with what time really is. We have all these instruments for slicing it up like a salami, clocks and calendars, and we name the slices as though we own them, and they can never change—“11:00 AM, November 11, 1918,” for example—when in fact they are as likely to break into pieces or go scampering off as dollops of mercury.
Might not it be possible, then, that the Second World War was a cause of the first one? Otherwise, the first one remains inexplicable nonsense of the most gruesome kind. Or try this: Is it possible that seemingly incredible geniuses like Bach and Shakespeare and Einstein were not in fact superhuman, but simply plagiarists,