God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater_ Or, Pearls Before Swine - Kurt Vonnegut [13]
But then the King and Queen got the Rosewater family crystal, silver and gold out of the dank vaults of the Rosewater County National Bank, began to throw lavish banquets for morons, perverts, starvelings and the unemployed.
They listened tirelessly to the misshapen fears and dreams of people who, by almost anyone's standards, would have been better off dead, gave them love and trifling sums of money. The only social life they had that was untainted by pity had to do with the Rosewater Volunteer Fire Department. Eliot arose quickly to the rank of Fire Lieutenant, and Sylvia was elected President of the Ladies' Auxiliary. Though Sylvia had never before touched a bowling ball, she was made captain of the auxiliary's bowling team, too.
Avondale's clammy respect for the monarchy turned to incredulous contempt, and then to savagery. Yahooism, drinking, cuckolding, and self-esteem all took sharp upturns. The voices of Avondale acquired the tone of bandsaws cutting galvanized tin when discussing the King and Queen, as though a tyranny had been overthrown. Avondale was no longer a settlement of rising young executives. It was peopled by vigorous members of the true ruling class.
Five years later, Sylvia suffered a nervous collapse, burned the firehouse down. So sadistic had republican Avondale become about the royalist Rosewaters that Avondale laughed.
Sylvia was placed in a private mental hospital in Indianapolis, was taken there by Eliot and Charley Warmergran, the Fire Chief. They took her in the Chief's car, which was a red Henry J with a siren on top. They turned her over to a Dr. Ed Brown, a young psychiatrist who later made his reputation describing her illness. In the paper, he called Eliot and Sylvia "Mr. and Mrs. Z," and he called the town of Rosewater "Hometown, U.S.A." He coined a new word for Sylvia's disease, "Samaritrophia," which he said meant, "hysterical indifference to the troubles of those less fortunate than oneself."
Norman Mushari now read Dr. Brown's treatise, which was also in the confidential files of McAllister, Robjent, Reed and McGee. His eyes were moist and soft and brown, compelling him to see the pages as he saw the world, as though through a quart of olive oil.
Samaritrophia, he read, is the suppression of an overactive conscience by the rest of the mind. "You must all take instructions from me!" the conscience shrieks, in effect, to all the other mental processes. The other processes try it for a while, note that the conscience is unappeased, that it continues to shriek, and they note, too, that the outside world has not been even microscopically improved by the unselfish acts the conscience had demanded.
They rebel at last. They pitch the tyrannous conscience down an oubliette, weld shut the manhole cover of that dark dungeon. They can hear the conscience no more. In the sweet silence, the mental processes look about for a new leader, and the leader most prompt to appear whenever the conscience is stilled, Enlightened Self-interest, does appear. Enlightened Self-interest gives them a flag, which they adore on sight. It is essentially the black and white Jolly Roger, with these words written beneath the skull and crossbones, "The hell with you, Jack, I've got mine!"
It seemed unwise to me, Dr. Brown wrote and Norman Mushari read slaveringly, to set the noisy conscience of Mrs. Z at liberty again. Neither could I take much satisfaction in discharging her while she was as heartless as Ilse Koch. I made it the goal of my treatments, then, to keep her conscience imprisoned, but to lift the lid of the oubliette ever so slightly, so that the howls of the prisoner might be very faintly heard. Through trial and error with chemotherapy and electric shock, this I achieved. I was not proud, for I had calmed a deep woman by making her shallow. I had blocked the underground rivers that connected her to the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, and made her content with being a splash pool three feet across, four