God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian - Kurt Vonnegut [10]
He is science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout. I asked him how he felt about what happened in Kosovo, Serbia. I tape-recorded his reply, but his upper plate came unstuck again and again. For the sake of clarity, I repeat in my own voice what he said.
And I quote:
NATO should have resisted the nearly irresistable temptation to be entertainers on television, to compete with movies by blowing up bridges and police stations and factories and so on. The infrastructure of the Serb tyranny should have been left unharmed in order to support justice and sanity, should they return. All cities and even little towns are world assets. For NATO to make one unliveable is to cut off its nose to spite its face, so to speak.
Show business!
The homicidal paranoia and schizophrenia of ethnic cleansing does its worst quickly now, almost instantly, like a tidal wave or volcano or earthquake—in Rwanda and now Kosovo, and who knows where else? The disease used to take years. One thinks of the Europeans killing off the Aborigines in the Western Hemisphere, and in Australia and Tasmania, and the Turks’ elimination of Armenians from their midst—of course the Holocaust, which groundon and on from 1933 to 1945. The Tasmanian genocide, incidentally, is the only one of which I’ve heard which was one-hundred-percent successful. Nobody on the face of the Earth has a native Tasmanian as a forebear!
As is now the case with Mycobacterium tuberculosis, there is a new strain of the ethnic-cleansing bacterium that makes conceivable remedies of the past seem pathetic or even absurd. In every case nowadays: too late! The victims are practically all dead or homeless by the time they are first mentioned on the six o’clock news.
All that good people can do about the disease of ethnic cleansing, now always a fait accompli, is to rescue the survivors. And watch out for Christians!
This is Kurt Vonnegut, signing off.
my career in post-mortem journalism,
dear listeners, almost certainly ends today. No sooner had Jack Kervorkian unstrapped me from my gurney, and I sat up and prepared to tell of my interview in Heaven with the late Isaac Asimov, than Jack was hustled out of here in handcuffs—to answer a murder charge in Michigan. Irony of ironies! This purported murderer has saved my life more than a dozen times! With Jack gone, this lethal-injection facility no longer feels like a home away from home to me.
Forgive my mixed emotions, then, as I mourn the misery of one friend, Jack, who is still alive, while rejoicing in the relative well-being of another—Isaac Asimov, who died of kidney and heart failure, age seventy-two, eight years ago.
When on Earth, Isaac, my predecessor as honorary president of the American Humanist Association, was the most prolific American writer of books who ever lived. He wrote nearly five hundred of the things—to my measly twenty so far, or to Honoré de Balzac’s eighty-five. Sometimes Isaac wrote ten published volumes in a single year! These weren’t only prize-winning science fiction. Many were scholarly popularizations of Shakespeare and biochemistry and ancient Greek history, and the Bible and relativity, and on and on.
Isaac has a Ph.D. in chemistry from Columbia, and was born in Smolensk, in the former Soviet Union, but was raised in Brooklyn. He hated flying, and never read Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Joyce or Kafka, according to his obituary in the NewYork Times. “I am a stranger,” he once wrote, “to twentieth-century fiction and poetry.”
“Isaac,” I said, “you should be in the Guinness Book of Records.”
And he said, “To be immortalized along with a rooster named ‘Weirdo,’ who weighed twenty-two pounds and killed two cats?”
I asked him if he was still writing, and he said, “All the time! If I couldn’t write all the time, this would be hell for me. Earth would have been a hell for me if I couldn’t write all the time. Hell itself would be bearable for me, as long as