Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [81]
“How so?” I said.
“All anybody can do with bodies is burn them or bury them,” he said. “There isn’t any nightmare afterwards, when you have to invest them and make them grow.”
“WHAT A CLEVER trap your Ruling Class set for us,” he went on. “First the atomic bomb. Now this.”
“Trap?” I echoed wonderingly.
“They looted your public and corporate treasuries, and turned your industries over to nincompoops,” he said. “Then they had your Government borrow so heavily from us that we had no choice but to send over an Army of Occupation in business suits. Never before has the Ruling Class of a country found a way to stick other countries with all the responsibilities their wealth might imply, and still remain rich beyond the dreams of avarice! No wonder they thought the comatose Ronald Reagan was a great President!”
HIS POINT WAS well taken, it seems to me.
When Jason Wilder and all the rest of the Trustees were hostages in the stable, and I paid them a call, I got the distinct impression that they regarded Americans as foreigners. What nationality that made them is hard to say.
THEY WERE ALL White, and they were all Male, since Lowell Chung’s mother had died of tetanus. She died before the doctors could understand what was killing her. None of them had ever seen a case of tetanus before, because practically everybody in this country in the old days had been immunized.
Now that public health programs have pretty much fallen apart, and no foreigners are interested in running them, which is certainly understandable, quite a number of cases of tetanus, and especially among children, are turning up again.
So most doctors know what it looks like now. Mrs. Chung had the misfortune to be a pioneer.
THE HOSTAGES TOLD me about that. One of the first things I said to them was, “Where is Madam Chung?”
I THOUGHT I should reassure the Trustees after the execution of Lyle Hooper. His corpse had been shown to them as a warning, I suppose, against their making any plans for derring-do. That body was surely icing on the cake of terror, so to speak. The College President, after all, was dangling from spikes in the loft above.
One of the hostages said in a TV interview after he was liberated that he would never forget the sound of Tex Johnson’s head bouncing on the steps as Tex was dragged up to the loft feet first. He tried to imitate the sound. He said, “Bloomp, bloomp, bloomp,” the same sound a flat tire makes.
What a planet!
THE HOSTAGES EXPRESSED pity for Tex, but none for Lyle Hooper, and none for all the other faculty members and Townies who were also dead. The locals were too insignificant for persons on their social level to think about. I don’t fault them for this. I think they were being human.
The Vietnam War couldn’t have gone on as long as it did, certainly, if it hadn’t been human nature to regard persons I didn’t know and didn’t care to know, even if they were in agony, as insignificant. A few human beings have struggled against this most natural of tendencies, and have expressed pity for unhappy strangers. But, as History shows, as History yells: “They have never been numerous!”
ANOTHER FLAW IN the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.
AND THE WORST flaw is that we’re just plain dumb. Admit it!
You think Auschwitz was intelligent?
WHEN I TRIED to tell the hostages a little about their captors, about their childhoods and mental illnesses, and their not caring if they lived or died, and what prison was like, and so on, Jason Wilder actually closed his eyes and covered his ears. He was being theatrical rather than practical. He didn’t cover his ears so well that he couldn’t hear me.
Others shook their heads and indicated in other ways that such information was not only tiresome but offensive. It was as though we were in a thunderstorm, and I had begun lecturing on the circulation of electrical charges in clouds, and the formation of raindrops, and the paths chosen by