Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [35]
When we passed a Pentecostal church, he said, “The mental giants in there believe that every word is true in a book put together by a bunch of preachers 300 years after the birth of Christ. I hope you won’t be that dumb about words set in type when you grow up.”
I would later hear, incidentally, that the woman my father got involved with when I was in high school, when he jumped out a window with his pants down and got bitten by a dog and tangled in a clothesline and so on, was a member of that Pentecostal church.
WHAT HE SAID about Jews that morning was actually another kidding of Christianity. He had to explain to me, as I would have to explain to Kimberley, that the Bible consisted of 2 separate works, the New Testament and the Old Testament. Religious Jews gave credence only to what was supposedly their own history, the Old Testament, whereas Christians took both works seriously.
“I pity the Jews,” said Grandfather, “trying to get through life with only half a Bible.”
And then he added, “That’s like trying to get from here to San Francisco with a road map that stops at Dubuque, Iowa.”
I WAS ANGRY now. “Kimberley,” I asked, “did you by any chance tell the Board of Trustees that I said these things? Is that what they want to see me about?”
“Maybe,” she said. She was acting cute. I thought this was a dumb answer. It was in fact accurate. The Trustees had a lot more they wanted to discuss than misrepresentations of my Chapel lecture.
I found her both repulsive and pitiful. She thought she was such a heroine and I was such a viper! Now that I had caught on to what she had been up to, she was thrilled to show me that she was proud and unafraid. Little did she know that I had once thrown a man almost as big as she out of a helicopter. What was to prevent me from throwing her out a tower window? The thought of doing that to her crossed my mind. I was so insulted! That would teach her not to insult me!
The man I threw out of the helicopter had spit in my face and bitten my hand. I had taught him not to insult me.
SHE WAS PITIFUL because she was a dimwit from a brilliant family and believed that she at last had done something brilliant, too, in getting the goods on a person whose ideas were criminal. I didn’t know yet that her Rhodes Scholar father, a Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton, had put her up to this. I thought she had noted her father’s conviction, often expressed in his columns and on his TV show, and no doubt at home, that a few teachers who secretly hated their country were making young people lose faith in its future and leadership.
I thought that, just on her own, she had resolved to find such a villain and get him fired, proving that she wasn’t so dumb, after all, and that she was really Daddy’s little girl.
Wrong.
“Kimberley,” I said, as an alternative to throwing her out the window, “this is ridiculous.”
Wrong.
“ALL RIGHT,” I said, “we’re going to settle this in a hurry.”
Wrong.
I would stride into the Trustees’ meeting, I thought, shoulders squared, and radiant with righteous indignation, the most popular teacher on campus, and the only faculty member who had medals from the Vietnam War. When it comes right down to it, that is why they fired me, although I don’t believe they themselves realized that that was why they fired me: I had ugly, personal knowledge of the disgrace that was the Vietnam War.
None of the Trustees had been in that war, and neither had Kimberley’s father, and not one of them had allowed a son or a daughter to be sent over there. Across the lake in the prison, of course, and down in the town, there were plenty of somebody’s sons who had been sent over there.
12
I MET JUST 2 people when I crossed the Quadrangle to Samoza Hall. One was Professor Marilyn Shaw, head of the Department of Life Sciences. She was the only other faculty member who had served in Vietnam. She had been a nurse. The other was Norman Everett, an