God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater_ Or, Pearls Before Swine - Kurt Vonnegut [8]
And so on. The Senator said that the carrot and the stick had been built into the Free Enterprise System, as conceived by the Founding Fathers, but that do-gooders, who thought people shouldn't ever have to struggle for anything, had buggered the logic of the system beyond all recognition.
In summation: he said, I see two alternatives before us. We can write morals into law, and enforce those morals harshly, or we can return to a true Free Enterprise System, which has the sink-or-swim justice of Caesar Augustus built into it. I emphatically favor the latter alternative. We must be hard, for we must become again a nation of swimmers, with the sinkers quietly disposing of themselves. I have spoken of another hard time in ancient history. In case you have forgotten the name of it, I shall refresh your memories: "The Golden Age of Rome," friends and neighbors, "The Golden Age of Rome."
As for friends who might have helped Eliot through his time of troubles: he didn't have any. He drove away his rich friends by telling them that whatever they had was based on dumb luck. He advised his artist friends that the only people who paid any attention to what they did were rich horses' asses with nothing more athletic to do. He asked his scholarly friends, "Who has time to read all the boring crap you write and listen to all the boring things you say?" He alienated his friends in the sciences by thanking them extravagantly for scientific advances he had read about in recent newspapers and magazines, by assuring them, with a perfectly straight face, that life was getting better and better, thanks to scientific thinking.
And then Eliot entered psychoanalysis. He swore off drinking, took pride in his appearance again, expressed enthusiasm for the arts and sciences, won back many friends.
Sylvia was never happier. But then, one year after the treatments had begun, she was astonished by a call from the analyst. He was resigning the case because, in his taut Viennese opinion, Eliot was untreatable.
"But you've cured him!"
"If I were a Los Angeles quack, dear lady, I would most demurely agree. However, I am not a Swami. Your husband has the most massively defended neurosis I have ever attempted to treat. What the nature of that neurosis is I can't imagine. In one solid year of work, I have not succeeded in even scratching its armor plate."
"But he always comes home from your office so cheerful!"
"Do you know what we talk about?"
"I thought it better not to ask."
"American history! Here is a very sick man, who, among other things, killed his mother, who has a terrifying tyrant for a father. And what does he talk about when I invite him to let his mind wander where it will? American history."
The statement that Eliot had killed his beloved mother was, in a crude way, true. When he was nineteen, he took his mother for a sail in Cotuit Harbor. He jibed. The slashing boom knocked his mother overboard. Eunice Morgan Rosewater sank like a stone.
"I ask him what he dreams about," the doctor continued, "and he tells me, 'Samuel Gompers, Mark Twain, and Alexander Hamilton.' I ask him if his father ever appears in his dreams, and he says, 'No, but Thorsten Veblen often does.' Mrs. Rosewater, I'm defeated. I resign."
Eliot seemed merely amused by the doctor's dismissal. "It's a cure he doesn't understand, so he refuses to admit it's a cure," he said lightly.
That evening, he and Sylvia went to the Metropolitan Opera for the opening of a new staging of Aïda. The Rosewater Foundation had paid for the costumes. Eliot looked sleekly marvelous, tall, tailcoated, his big, friendly face pink, and his blue eyes