Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [46]
Once again I was in deep trouble for merely repeating what somebody else had said. It wasn’t something my grandfather had said this time, or somebody else who couldn’t be hurt by the Trustees, like Paul Slazinger. It was something my best friend Damon Stern had said in a History class only a couple of months before.
If Jason Wilder thought I was an unteacher, he should have heard Damon Stern! Then again, Stern never told the awful truth about supposedly noble human actions in recent times. Everything he debunked had to have transpired before 1950, say.
So I happened to sit in on a class where he talked about Hitler’s being a devout Roman Catholic. He said something I hadn’t realized before, something I have since discovered most Christians don’t want to hear: that the Nazi swastika was intended to be a version of a Christian cross, a cross made out of axes. Stern said that Christians had gone to a lot of trouble denying that the swastika was just another cross, saying it was a primitive symbol from the primordial ooze of the pagan past.
And the Nazis’ most valuable military decoration was the Iron Cross.
And the Nazis painted regular crosses on all their tanks and airplanes.
I came out of that class looking sort of dazed, I guess. Who should I run into but Kimberley Wilder?
“What did he say today?” she said.
“Hitler was a Christian,” I said. “The swastika was a Christian cross.”
She got it on tape.
I DIDN’T RAT on Damon Stern to the Trustees. Tarkington wasn’t West Point, where it was an honor to squeal.
MADELAINE AGREED WITH Wilder, too, she said in her letter, that I should not have told my Physics students that the Russians, not the Americans, were the first to make a hydrogen bomb that was portable enough to be used as a weapon. “Even if it’s true,” she wrote, “which I don’t believe, you had no business telling them that.”
She said, moreover, that perpetual motion was possible, if only scientists would work harder on it.
She had certainly backslid intellectually since passing her orals for her Associate in the Arts and Sciences Degree.
I USED TO tell classes that anybody who believed in the possibility of perpetual motion should be boiled alive like a lobster.
I was also a stickler about the Metric System. I was famous for turning my back on students who mentioned feet or pounds or miles to me.
They hated that.
I DIDN’T DARE teach like that in the prison across the lake, of course.
Then again, most of the convicts had been in the drug business, and were either Third World people or dealt with Third World people. So the Metric System was old stuff to them.
RATHER THAN RAT on Damon Stern about the Nazis’ being Christians, I told the Trustees that I had heard it on National Public Radio. I said I was very sorry about having passed it on to a student. “I feel like biting off my tongue,” I said.
“What does Hitler have to do with either Physics or Music Appreciation?” said Wilder.
I might have replied that Hitler probably didn’t know any more about physics than the Board of Trustees, but that he loved music. Every time a concert hall was bombed, I heard somewhere, he had it rebuilt immediately as a matter of top priority. I think I may actually have learned that from National Public Radio.
I said instead, “If I’d known I upset Kimberley as much as you say I did, I would certainly have apologized. I had no idea, sir. She gave no sign.”
WHAT MADE ME weak was the realization that I had been mistaken to think that I was with family there in the Board Room, that all Tarkingtonians and their parents and guardians had come to regard me as an uncle. My goodness—the family secrets I had learned over the years and kept to myself! My lips were sealed. What a faithful old