A Man Without a Country - Kurt Vonnegut [9]
I am a German-American, a pure one dating back to when German-Americans were still endogamous, marrying each other. When I asked the Anglo-American Jane Marie Cox to marry me in 1945, one of her uncles asked her if she really “wanted to get mixed up with all those Germans.” Yes, and even today there is a sort of San Andreas fault line running between German-Americans and Anglos, but fainter all the time.
You might think this was because of the First World War, in which the English and the Americans fought Germany, during which the fault opened as wide and deep as a mouth of hell, although no German-American had performed an act of treason. But the crack first appeared around the time of the Civil War, when all my immigrant ancestors got here and settled in Indianapolis. One ancestor actually lost a leg in battle and went back to Germany, but the rest stayed and prospered like crazy.
They arrived at a time when the Anglo ruling class, like our polyglot corporate oligarchs of today, wanted the cheapest and tamest workers they could find anywhere in the whole wide world. The specifications for such persons, then as now, were those listed by Emma Lazarus in 1883: “tired,” “poor,” “huddled,” “wretched,” “homeless,” and “tempest-tost.” And people like that had to be imported back then. Jobs couldn’t, as today, be sent to them right where they were so unhappy. Yes, and they were coming here any way they could, by the tens of thousands.
But in the midst of this tidal wave of misery was what would in retrospect seem to the Anglos a Trojan horse, one filled with educated, well-fed, middle-class German businessmen and their families, who had money to invest. One ancestor on my mother’s side became a brewer in Indianapolis. But he didn’t build a brewery. He bought one! How was that for pioneering? Nor had these people had to play any part in the genocides and ethnic cleansing which had made this for them a virgin continent.
And these guilt-free people, speaking English at work but German at home, built not only successful businesses, most strikingly in Indianapolis and Milwaukee and Chicago and Cincinnati, but their own banks and concert halls and social clubs and gymnasia and restaurants, and mansions and summer cottages, leaving the Anglos to wonder, with good reason, I have to say, “Who the hell’s country is this anyway?”
6
I have been called a Luddite.
I welcome it.
Do you know what a Luddite is? A person who hates newfangled contraptions. Ned Ludd was a textile worker in England at around the start of the nineteenth century who busted up a lot of new contraptions—mechanical looms that were going to put him out of work, that were going to make it impossible for him with his particular skills to feed, clothe, and shelter his family. In 1813 the British government executed by hanging seventeen men for “machine breaking,” as it was called, a capital crime.
Today we have contraptions like nuclear submarines armed with Poseidon missiles that have H-bombs in their warheads. And we have contraptions like computers that cheat you out of becoming. Bill Gates says, “Wait till you can see what your computer can become.” But it’s you who should be doing the becoming, not the damn fool computer. What you can become is the miracle you were born to be through the work that you do.
Progress has beat the heck out of me. It took away from me what a loom must have been to Ned Ludd two hundred years ago. I mean a typewriter. There is no longer such a thing anywhere. Huckleberry Finn, incidentally, was the first novel ever to be typewritten.
In the old days, not long ago, I used to type. And, after I had about twenty pages, I would mark them up with a pencil, making corrections. Then I would