Armageddon In Retrospect - Kurt Vonnegut [5]
I guess all of you know that I am suing the manufacturer of Pall Mall cigarettes, because their product didn’t kill me, and I’m now eighty-four. Listen: I studied anthropology at the University of Chicago after the Second World War, the last one we ever won. And the physical anthropologists, who had studied human skulls going back thousands of years, said we were only supposed to live for thirty-five years or so, because that’s how long our teeth lasted without modern dentistry.
Weren’t those the good old days: thirty-five years and we were out of here. Talk about intelligent design! Now all the Baby Boomers who can afford dentistry and health insurance, poor bastards, are going to live to be a hundred!
Maybe we should outlaw dentistry. And maybe doctors should quit curing pneumonia, which used to be called “the old people’s friend.”
But the last thing I want to do tonight is to depress you. So I have thought of something we can all do tonight which will definitely be upbeat. I think we can come up with a statement on which all Americans, Republican or Democrat, rich or poor, straight or gay, can agree, despite our country’s being so tragically and ferociously divided.
The first universal American sentiment I came up with was “Sugar is sweet.”
And there is certainly nothing new about a tragically and ferociously divided United States of America, and especially here in my native state of Indiana. When I was a kid here, this state had within its borders the national headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan, and the site of the last lynching of an African-American citizen north of the Mason-Dixon Line, Marion, I think.
But it also had, and still has, in Terre Haute, which now boasts a state-of-the-art lethal-injection facility, the birthplace and home of the labor leader Eugene Debs. He lived from 1855 to 1926, and led a nationwide strike against the railroads. He went to prison for a while because he opposed our entry into World War One.
And he ran for President several times, on the Socialist Party ticket, saying things like this: “While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
Debs pretty much stole that from Jesus Christ. But it is so hard to be original. Tell me about it!
But all right, what is a statement on which all Americans can agree? “Sugar is sweet,” certainly. But since we are on the property of a university, we can surely come up with something which has more cultural heft. And this is my suggestion: “The Mona Lisa, the picture by Leonardo da Vinci, hanging in the Louvre in Paris, France, is a perfect painting.”
OK? A show of hands, please. Can’t we all agree on that?
OK, take down your hands. I’d say the vote is unanimous, that the Mona Lisa is a perfect painting. The only trouble with that, which is the trouble with practically everything we believe: It isn’t true.
Listen: Her nose is tilted to the right, OK? That means the right side of her face is a receding plane, going away from us. OK? But there is no foreshortening of her features on that side, giving the effect of three dimensions. And Leonardo could so easily have done that foreshortening. He was simply too lazy to do it. And if he were Leonardo da Indianapolis, I would be ashamed of him.
No wonder she has such a cockeyed smile.
And somebody might now want to ask me, “Can’t you ever be serious?” The answer is, “No.”
When I was born at Methodist Hospital on November eleventh, 1922, and this city back then was as racially segregated as professional basketball and football teams are today, the obstetrician spanked my little rear end to start my respiration. But did I cry? No.
I said, “A funny thing happened on the way down the birth canal, Doc. A bum came up to me and said