God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian - Kurt Vonnegut [4]
Law-abiding citizens opened fire from all sides, killing eight of his men, two of them his sons. He himself was taken prisoner by a force of United States Marines, sworn to uphold the Constitution. Their commander was Colonel Robert E. Lee.
John Brown wears a hangman’s noose for a necktie up in Heaven. I asked him about it, and he said, “Where’s yours? Where’s yours?”
His eyes were like glowing coins. “Without shedding of blood,” he said, “there is no remission of sin.” It turns out that’s in the New Testament, Hebrews 9:22.
I congratulated him on what he’d said on his way to be hanged before a gleeful, jeering throng of white folks. I quote: “This is a beautiful country.” In only five words, he had somehow encapsulated the full horror of the most hideous legal atrocities committed by a civilized nation until the Holocaust.
“Slavery was legal under American law,” he said. “The Holocaust was legal under German law,” he said.
John Brown is a Connecticut Yankee, born in Torrington. He said there was a Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, who had actually encapsulated God in only six words: “All men are created equal.”
Brown was twenty when Jefferson died. “This perfect gentleman, sophisticated, scientific, wise,” John Brown went on, “was able to write those incomparable sacred words while owning slaves. Tell me: Am I really the only person to realize that he, by his example, made our beautiful country an evil society from the very first, where subservience of persons of color to white people was deemed in perfect harmony with natural law?
“I want to get this straight, I said. “Are you saying that Thomas Jefferson, possibly our country’s most beloved founding father, after George Washington, was an evil man?”
“Let that, while my body lies a-molderin’ in the grave,” said John Brown, “be my truth which goes marchin’ on.”
(Choral rendition of one stanza of “Battle Hymn of the Republic”)
This is Kurt Vonnegut, signing off in the lethal injection facility at Huntsville, Texas. Until the next time, ta ta.
during yesterday’s controlled
near-death experience, I chatted just inside the Pearly Gates with Roberta Gorsuch Burke, married for seventy-two years back here on Earth to Admiral Arly A. Burke, Chief of Naval Operations from 1955 to 1961. He led the navy into the Nuclear Age.
She died last July at the age of ninety-eight. Admiral Burke, by then retired of course, died a year before that at the age of ninety-nine. They met on a blind date in 1919, when he was in his first year at the Naval Academy. On that date, she was a last minute substitute for her older sister. Fate.
They married four years later. If past performance is any indication, they will surely stay married there at the far end of the blue tunnel throughout all eternity. She said to me, “Why fool around?” President Clinton told her at her husband’s funeral, when she still had a year to live, “You have blessed America with your service and set an example not only for navy wives today, and to come, but for all Americans.”
The simple epitaph Roberta Gorsuch Burke chose for her tombstone here on Earth: “A Sailor’s Wife.”
dr. jack kevorkian has again
unstrapped me from what has become my personal gurney, here, in the lethal injection facility at Huntsville, Texas. Jack has now supervised fifteen controlled near-death experiences for me. Hey, Jack, way to go! On this morning’s trip down the blue tunnel to the pearly gates, Clarence Darrow, the great American defense attorney, dead for sixty years now, came looking for me. He wanted WNYC’s listeners to hear his opinions of television cameras in courtrooms. “I welcome them,” he said,