Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [34]
She asked me if I thought the speech Paul Slazinger, the Writer in Residence, gave in Chapel had been a good one. This was probably the most anti-American speech I had ever heard He gave it right before Christmas vacation, and was never agair seen in Scipio. He had just won a so-called Genius Grant from the MacArthur Foundation, $50,000 a year for 5 years. On the same night of his speech he bugged out for Key West, Florida
He predicted, I remember, that human slavery would come back, that it had in fact never gone away. He said that so man) people wanted to come here because it was so easy to rob the poor people, who got absolutely no protection from the Gov ernment. He talked about bridges falling down and water mains breaking because of no maintenance. He talked about oil spills and radioactive waste and poisoned aquifers and looted banks and liquidated corporations. “And nobody ever gets punishec for anything,” he said. “Being an American means never having to say you’re sorry.”
On and on he went. No matter what he said, he was stil going to get $50,000 a year for 5 years.
I said to Kimberley that I thought Slazinger had said some things which were worth considering, but that, on the whole he had made the country sound a lot worse than it really was and that ours was still far and away the best one on the planet
She could not have gotten much satisfaction from that reply
WHAT DO I myself make of that reply nowadays? It was an inane reply.
SHE ASKED ME about my own lecture in Chapel only a month earlier. She hadn’t attended and so hadn’t taped it. She was seeking confirmation of things other people had said I said. My lecture had been humorous recollections of my maternal grandfather, Benjamin Wills, the old-time Socialist.
She accused me of saying that all rich people were drunks and lunatics. This was a garbling of Grandfather’s saying that Capitalism was what the people with all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decided to do today. So I straightened that out, and explained that the opinion was my grandfather’s, not my own.
“I heard your speech was worse than Mr. Slazinger’s,” she said.
“I certainly hope not,” I said. “I was trying to show how outdated my grandfather’s opinions were. I wanted people to laugh. They did.”
“I heard you said Jesus Christ was un-American,” she said, her tape recorder running all the time.
So I unscrambled that one for her. The original had been another of Grandfather’s sayings. He repeated Karl Marx’s prescription for an ideal society, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” And then he asked me, meaning it to be a wry joke, “What could be more un-American, Gene, than sounding like the Sermon on the Mount?”
“WHAT ABOUT PUTTING all the Jews in a concentration camp in Idaho?” said Kimberley.
“What about what-what-what?” I asked in bewilderment. At last, at last, and too late, too late, I understood that this stupid girl was as dangerous as a cobra. It would be catastrophic if she spread the word that I was an anti-Semite, especially with so many Jews, having interbred with Gentiles, now sending their children to Tarkington.
“In all my life, I never said anything like that,” I promised.
“Maybe it wasn’t Idaho,” she said.
“Wyoming?” I said.
“OK, Wyoming,” she said. “Lock ’em all up, right?”
“I only said ‘Wyoming’ because I was married in Wyoming,” I said. “I’ve never been to Idaho or even thought about Idaho. I’m just trying to figure out what you’ve got so all mixed up and upside down. It doesn’t sound even a little bit like me.”
“Jews,” she said.
“That was my grandfather again,” I said.
“He hated Jews, right?” she said.
“No, no, no,” I said. “He admired a lot of them.”
“But he still wanted to put them in concentration camps,” she said. “Right?”
The origin of this most poisonous misunderstanding was in my account in Chapel of riding around with Grandfather in his car one Sunday morning in Midland City, Ohio, when I was a little boy. He, not I, was mocking all organized religions.
When we passed a Catholic