Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [99]
Make Blacks, Jews, and everybody else look like Nazis, and see how that worked out.
“I CAN’T GOVERN,” I protested. “Nobody would pay any attention to me. I would be a joke.”
“Good point!” he cried. So loud!
He got the Governor’s Office in Albany on the radio. The Governor himself was on his way to Rochester by helicopter, in order to go on TV with the freed hostages. The Governor’s Office managed to patch through Harley III’s call to the Governor up in the sky. Harley III told the Governor who I was and what the situation was in Scipio.
It didn’t take long.
And then Harley III turned to me and said, “Congratulations! You are now a Brigadier General in the National Guard!”
“I’VE GOT A family on the other side of the lake,” I said. “I’ve got to go find out how they are.”
He was able to tell me how they were. He personally, the day before, had seen Margaret and Mildred loaded into the steel box on the back of a prison van, consigned to the Laughing Academy in Batavia.
“They’re fine!” he said. “Your country needs you more than they do now, so, General Hartke, strut your stuff!”
HE WAS SO full of energy! It was almost as though his coal-scuttle helmet contained a thunderstorm.
Never an idle moment! No sooner had he persuaded the Governor to make me a Brigadier than he was off to the stable, where captured Freedom Fighters were being forced to dig graves for all the bodies. The weary diggers had every reason to believe that they were digging their own graves. They had seen plenty of movies about the Finale Rack, in which soldiers in coal-scuttle helmets stood around while people in rags dug their own final resting places.
I heard Harley III barking orders at the diggers, telling them to dig deeper and make the sides straighter and so on. I had seen leadership of such a high order exercised in Vietnam, and I myself had exhibited it from time to time, so I am quite certain that Harley III had taken some sort of amphetamine.
THERE WASN’T MUCH for me to govern at first. This place, which had been the sole remaining business of any size in the valley, stood vacant and seemed likely to remain so. Most locals had managed to run away after the prison break. When they came back, though, there was no way to make a living. Those who owned houses or places of business couldn’t find anybody to sell them to. They were wiped out.
So most of the civilians I might have governed had soon packed the best of their belongings into cars and trailers, and paid small fortunes to black marketeers for enough gasoline to get them the heck out of here.
I HAD NO troops of my own. Those on my side of the lake were on loan from the commander of the National Guard Division, the 42nd Division, the “Rainbow Division,” Lucas Florio. He had his headquarters in Hiroshi Matsumoto’s old office at the prison. He wasn’t a graduate of West Point, and he was too young to have fought in Vietnam, and his home was in Schenectady, so we had never met before. His troops were all White, with Orientals classified as Honorary White People. The same was true of the 82nd Airborne. There were also Black and Hispanic units somewhere, the theory being, as with the prisons, that people were always more comfortable with those of their own race.
This resegregation, although I never heard any public figure say so, also made the Armed Forces more like a set of golf clubs. You could use this battalion or that one, depending on what color people they were supposed to fight.
The Soviet Union, of course, with citizenry, including every sort of a human being but a Black or Hispanic, found out the hard way that soldiers wouldn’t fight hard at all against people who looked and thought and talked like them.
THE RAINBOW DIVISION itself began during World War I, as an experiment integrating unlike Americans who weren’t Army Regulars. Reserve Divisions activated back then were all identified with specific