Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [82]
What Warden Matsumoto had said about people like them was accurate. They had managed to convert their wealth, which had originally been in the form of factories or stores or other demanding enterprises, into a form so liquid and abstract, negotiable representations of money on paper, that there were few reminders coming from anywhere that they might be responsible for anyone outside their own circle of friends and relatives.
THEY DIDN’T RAGE against the convicts. They were mad at the Government for not making sure that escapes from prison were impossible. The more they ran on like that, the clearer it became that it was their Government, not mine or the convicts’ or the Townies’. Its first duty, moreover, was to protect them from the lower classes, not only in this country but everywhere.
Were people on Easy Street ever any different?
Think again about the crucifixions of Jesus and the 2 thieves, and the 6,000 slaves who followed the gladiator Spartacus.
COUGH.
MY BODY, AS I understand it, is attempting to contain the TB germs inside me in little shells it builds around them. The shells are calcium, the most common element in the walls of many prisons, including Athena. This place is ringed by barbed wire. So was Auschwitz.
If I die of TB, it will be because my body could not build prisons fast enough and strong enough.
Is there a lesson there? Not a cheerful one.
IF THE TRUSTEES were bad, the convicts were worse. I would be the last person to say otherwise. They were devastators of their own communities with gunfights and robberies and rapes, and the merchandising of brain-busting chemicals and on and on.
But at least they saw what they were doing, whereas people like the Trustees had a lot in common with B-52 bombardiers way up in the stratosphere. They seldom saw the devastation they caused as they moved the huge portion of this country’s wealth they controlled from here to there.
UNLIKE MY SOCIALIST grandfather Ben Wills, who was a nobody, I have no reforms to propose. I think any form of government, not just Capitalism, is whatever the people who have all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decide to do today.
WARDEN MATSUMOTO WAS an odd duck. Many of his quirks were no doubt a consequence of his having had an atomic bomb dropped on him in childhood. The buildings and trees and bridges and so on which had seemed so substantial vanished like fantasies.
As I’ve said, Hiroshima was suddenly a blank tableland with little dust devils spinning here and there.
After the flash, little Hiroshi Matsumoto was the only real thing on the table. He began a long, long walk in search of anything else that was also real. When he reached the edge of the city, he found himself among structures and creatures both real and fantastic, living people with their skins hanging on their exposed muscles and bones like draperies, and so on.
These images about the bombing are all his, by the way. But I wouldn’t hear them from him until I had been teaching at the prison and living next door to him by the lake for 2 long years.
WHATEVER ELSE BEING atom-bombed had done to him, it had not destroyed his conscience. He had hated turning away poor people from the emergency room at the hospital-for-profit he ran in Louisville. After he took over the prison-for-profit at Athena, he thought there ought to be some sort of educational program there, even though his corporation’s contract with New York State required him to keep the prisoners from escaping and nothing more.
HE WORKED FOR Sony. He never worked for anybody but Sony.
“NEW YORK STATE,” he said, “does not believe that education can rehabilitate the sort of criminal who ends up at Athena or Attica or Sing Sing.” Attica and Sing Sing were for Hispanics and Whites respectively, who, like the inmates at Athena, had been convicted of at least 1 murder and 2 other violent crimes. The other 2