Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [96]
SHE TOLD THE Trustees, who had surely vacationed in the Caribbean, about the Carib Indian chief who was about to be burned at the stake by Spaniards. His crime was his failure to see the beauty of his people’s becoming slaves in their own country.
This chief was offered a cross to kiss before a professional soldier or maybe a priest set fire to the kindling and logs piled up above his kneecaps. He asked why he should kiss it, and he was told that the kiss would get him into Paradise, where he would meet God and so on.
He asked if there were more people like the Spaniards up there.
He was told that of course there were.
In that case, he said, he would leave the cross unkissed. He said he didn’t want to go to yet another place where people were so cruel.
SHE TOLD THEM about Indonesian women who threw their jewelry to Dutch sailors coming ashore with firearms, in the hopes that they would be satisfied by such easily won wealth and go away again.
But the Dutch wanted their land and labor, too.
And they got them, which they called a plantation.
I had heard about that from Damon Stern.
“NOW,” SHE SAID to them, “you are selling this plantation because the soil is exhausted, and the natives are getting sicker and hungrier every day, begging for food and medicine and shelter, all of which are very expensive. The water mains are breaking. The bridges are falling down. So you are taking all your money and getting out of here.”
One Trustee, she didn’t know which, except that it wasn’t Wilder, said that he intended to spend the rest of his life in the United States.
“Even if you stay,” she said, “you and your money and your soul are getting out of here.”
SO SHE AND I, working independently, had noticed the same thing: That even our natives, if they had reached the top or been born at the top, regarded Americans as foreigners. That seems to have been true, too, of people at the top in what used to be the Soviet Union: to them their own ordinary people weren’t the kinds of people they understood and liked very much.
“What did Jason Wilder say to that?” I asked her. On TV he was always so quick to snatch any idea tossed his way, cover it with spit, so to speak, and throw it back with a crazy spin which made it uncatchable.
“He just let it lie there for a while,” she said.
I could see how he might have been flummoxed by this little black woman who spoke many more languages than he did, who knew 1,000 times more science than he did, and at least as much history and literature and music and art. He had never had anybody like that on his talk show. He may never have had to debate with a person whose destiny GRIOT™ would have described as unpredictable.
He said at last, “I am an American, not a European.”
And she said to him, “Then why don’t you act like one?”
38
YES, AND NOW the Japanese are pulling out. Their Army of Occupation in Business Suits is going home. The prison break at Athena was the straw that broke the camel’s back, I think, but they were already abandoning properties, simply walking away from them, before that expensive catastrophe.
Why they ever wanted to own a country in such an advanced state of physical and spiritual and intellectual dilapidation is a mystery. Maybe they thought that would be a good way to get revenge for our having dropped not 1 but 2 atomic bombs on them.
So that makes two groups so far who have given up on owning this country of their own free will, mainly, I think, because so many unhappy and increasingly lawless people of all races, who don’t own anything, turn out to come along with the properties.
IT LOOKS LIKE they will keep Oahu as a sort of memento of their empire’s high-water mark, just as the British have kept Bermuda.
SPEAKING OF UNHAPPY poor people