Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [97]
It seems to me that White convicts, though, might have wanted to kill them or at least beat them up for not caring what became of them any more than they cared what became of Blacks and Hispanics.
DR. DOLE WENT back to Berlin. At least that is where she said she was going.
I asked her where she had hidden during the siege. She said she had crawled into the firebox under an old boiler in the basement of this library. It hadn’t been used since before I taught here, but it would have cost a lot of money to move. The school hated to spend money on improvements that didn’t show.
SO DURING THE siege she was only a few meters away from me while I sat up here and engaged in the wonderful new science of Futurology.
DR. DOLE SURE didn’t think much of her own country. She ranted on about its sky-high rates of murder and suicide and drug addiction and infant mortality, its low rate of literacy, the fact that it had a higher percentage of its citizens in prison than any other country except for Haiti and South Africa, and didn’t know how to manufacture anything anymore, and put less money into research and primary education than Japan or Korea or any country in East or West Europe, and on and on.
“At least we still have freedom of speech,” I said.
And she said, “That isn’t something somebody else gives you. That’s something you have to give yourself.”
BEFORE I FORGET: During her job interview, she asked Jason Wilder where he had gone to college.
He said, “Yale.”
“You know what they ought to call that place?” she said.
“No,” he said.
And she said, “Plantation Owners’ Tech.”
WHEN SHE WAS living in Berlin, she told me, she had been appalled by how ignorant so many American tourists and soldiers were of geography and history, and the languages and customs of other countries. She asked me, “What makes so many Americans proud of their ignorance? They act as though their ignorance somehow made them charming.”
I had been asked the same general question by Alton Darwin when I was working at Athena. A World War II movie was being shown on all the TVs over there. Frank Sinatra had been captured by the Germans, and he was being interrogated by an SS Major who spoke English at least as well as Sinatra, and who played the cello and painted watercolors in his spare time, and who told Sinatra how much he looked forward to getting back, when the war was over, to his first love, which was lepidopterology.
Sinatra didn’t know what lepidopterology was. It is the study of moths and butterflies. That had to be explained to him.
And Alton Darwin asked me, “How come in all these movies the Germans and the Japanese are always the smart ones, and the Americans are the dumb ones, and still the Americans win the war?”
DARWIN DIDN’T FEEL personally involved. The American combat soldiers in the movie were all White. That wasn’t just White propaganda. That happened to be historically accurate. During the Finale Rack, American military units were segregated according to race. The feeling back then was that Whites would feel like garbage if they had to share quarters and dining facilities and so on with Blacks. That went for civilian life, too. The Black people had their own schools, and they were excluded from most hotels and restaurants and places of entertainment, except onstage, and polling booths.
They were also strung up or burned alive or whatever from time to time, as reminders that their place was at the very bottom of Society. They were thought, when they were given soldier suits, to be lacking in determination and initiative in battle. So they were employed mostly as common laborers or truck drivers behind the Duke Waynes and Frank Sinatras, who did the fearless stuff.
There was one all-Black fighter