God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater_ Or, Pearls Before Swine - Kurt Vonnegut [24]
Mushari concealed his hunger for clinical details of Eliot's ailment, waited tensely for someone to urge the Senator to continue. No one did, so Mushari exposed himself. "And what did the doctor say?"
The Senator, suspecting nothing, resumed his tale: "These people never want to talk about what you want to talk about. It's always something else. When he found out who I was, he didn't want to talk about Eliot. He wanted to talk about the Rosewater Law." The Rosewater Law was what the Senator thought of as his legislative masterpiece. It made the publication or possession of obscene materials a Federal offense, carrying penalties up to fifty thousand dollars and ten years in prison, without hope of parole. It was a masterpiece because it actually defined obscenity.
Obscenity, it said, is any picture or phonograph record or any written matter calling attention to reproductive organs, bodily discharges, or bodily hair.
"This psychoanalyst," the Senator complained, "wanted to know about my childhood. He wanted to go into my feelings about bodily hair." The Senator shuddered. "I asked him to kindly get off the subject, that my revulsions were shared, so far as I knew, by all decent men." He pointed to McAllister, simply wanting to point at someone, anyone. "There's your key to pornography. Other people say, 'Oh, how can you recognize it, how can you tell it from art and all that?' I've written the key into law! The difference between pornography and art is bodily hair!"
He flushed, apologized abjectly to Sylvia. "I beg your pardon, my dear."
Mushari had to prod him again. "And the doctor didn't say anything about Eliot?"
"The damn doctor said Eliot never told him a damn thing but well-known facts from history, almost all of them related to the oppression of odd-balls or the poor. He said any diagnosis he made of Eliot's disease would have to be irresponsible speculation. As a deeply worried father, I told the doctor, 'Go ahead and guess as much as you want to about my son. I won't hold you responsible. I'd be most grateful if you'd say anything, true or not, because I ran out of ideas about my boy, responsible or irresponsible, true or not, years ago. Stick your stainless steel spoon in this unhappy old man's brains, Doctor,' I told him, 'and stir.'
"He said to me, 'Before I tell you what my irresponsible thoughts are, I'll have to discuss sexual perversion some. I intend to involve Eliot in the discussion—so, if an involvement of that sort would affect you violently, let's have our talk come to an end right here.' 'Carry on,' I said. 'I'm an old futz, and the theory is that an old futz can't be hurt very much by anything anybody says. I've never believed it before, but I'll try to believe it now.'
" 'Very well—' he said, 'let's assume that a healthy young man is supposed to be sexually aroused by an attractive woman not his mother or sister. If he's aroused by other things, another man, say, or an umbrella or the ostrich boa of the Empress Josephine or a sheep or a corpse or his mother or a stolen garterbelt, he is what we call a pervert.'
"I replied that I had always known such people were about, but that I'd never thought much about them because there didn't seem to be much to think about them.
" 'Good,' he said. 'That's a calm, reasonable reaction, Senator Rosewater, that I'm frank to say surprises me. Let us hasten on to the admission that every case of perversion is essentially a case of crossed wires. Mother Nature and Society order a man to take his sex to such and such a place and do thus and so with it. Because of the crossed wires, the unhappy man enthusiastically goes straight to the wrong place, proudly, vigorously does some hideously