God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian - Kurt Vonnegut [5]
“The presence of those cameras finally acknowledges,” he said to me, “that justice systems anywhere, anytime, have never cared whether justice was achieved or not. Like Roman games, justice systems are ways for unjust governments—and there is no other sort of government—to be enormously entertaining with real lives at stake.”
I thanked Mr. Darrow for having made American history much more humane than it would have been otherwise, with his eloquent defenses in court of early organizers of labor unions, of teachers of unpopular scientific truths, and for his vociferous contempt for racism, and for his loathing of the death penalty. And the late, great lawyer Clarence Darrow said only this to me: “I did my best to entertain.”
Signing off now. Hey, Jack, waddaya say we go downtown for some of that good old Tex-Mex cuisine?
during what has been almost
a year of interviewing completely dead people, while only half dead myself, I asked Saint Peter again and again if I could meet a particular hero of mine. He is my fellow Hoosier, the late Eugene Victor Debs of Terre Haute, Indiana. He was five times the Socialist Party’s candidate for president back when this country still had a strong Socialist Party.
And then, guess what, yesterday afternoon none other than Eugene Victor Debs, organizer and leader of the first successful strike against a major American industry, the railroads, was waiting for me at the far end of the blue tunnel. We hadn’t met before. This great American died in 1926 at the age of seventy-one when I was only four years old.
I thanked him for words of his, which I quote again and again in lectures: “As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
He asked me how those words were received here on Earth in America nowadays. I said they were ridiculed. “People snicker and snort,” I said. He asked what our fastest growing industry was. “The building of prisons,” I said.
“What a shame,” he said. And then he asked me how the Sermon on the Mount was going over these days. And then he spread his wings and flew away.
this is kurt vonnegut.
During my controlled near-death experience this morning, I had a continental breakfast with Harold Epstein, who died recently on his one-and-a-half-acre estate in Larchmont. He died of what can only be called natural causes, since he was ninety-four. This sweet man was a certified public accountant who, after a heart attack thirty-four years ago, surrendered in the company of his sweet wife Esta to what he himself called “Garden Insanity.”
Esta is still among us, and I hope she’s listening. These two love birds, Harold and Esta Epstein, traveled around the world four times, seeking, and often finding, wonderful new plants for American gardens, although neither one of them had any formal training as a horticulturist. At the time Harold’s soul traded his old flesh for new flesh in Heaven, he was president emeritus of the American Rock Garden Society, the Greater New York Orchid Society, and the Northeast Region of the American Rhododendron Society.
I asked him for a WNYC sound bite I could use in summing up his life after his heart attack so long ago. He said, “My only regret is that everybody couldn’t be as happy as we were.” The late Harold Epstein said that the first thing he did after he got to Heaven, after picking a flower he’d never seen before, was to thank God for the priceless gift of garden insanity.
jack kevorkian and i thought
we knew all the risks I was taking during the controlled near-death experiences he has been giving me. But today I fell in love with a dead woman! Her name is Vivian Hallinan.
What made me want to meet her was one word in the headline on her obituary in the New York Times: “Vivian Hallinan, 88, Doyenne of Colorful West Coast Family.” What made someone or even a whole family “colorful”? I had interviewed people