Palm Sunday_ An Autobiographical Collage - Kurt Vonnegut [29]
As for fire: Everybody knows what you do with unwanted fire. You put water on it.
But the bombing of Hiroshima compelled me to see that a trust in technology, like all the other great religions of the world, had to do with the human soul. I will bet you the one thousand crowns you have offered me for this piece that every one of the tales of lost innocence you receive will embody not only the startling discovery of the human soul, but of how diseased it can be.
How sick was the soul revealed by the flash at Hiroshima? And I deny that it was a specifically American soul. It was the soul of every highly industrialized nation on earth, whether at war or at peace. How sick was it? It was so sick that it did not want to live anymore. What other sort of soul would create a new physics based on nightmares, would place into the hands of mere politicians a planet so “destabilized,” to borrow a CIA term, that the briefest fit of stupidity could easily guarantee the end of the world?
It is supposed to be good to lose one’s innocence. I do not read them, but I think that is what my novels say, so it must be true. I, for one, now know what is really going on, so I can plan more shrewdly and be less open to surprise. But my morale has been lowered a good deal, so I am probably not any stronger than I used to be. Since Hiroshima, I have increased my amperes but decreased my volts, and wound up with the same number of watts, so to speak.
It is quite awful, really, to realize that perhaps most of the people around me find lives in the service of machines so tedious and exasperating that they would not mind much, even if they have children, if life were turned off like a light switch at any time. How many of your readers will deny that the movie Dr. Strangelove was so popular because its ending was such a happy one?
• • •
I am invited to all sorts of neo-Luddite gatherings, of course, and am sometimes asked to speak. I had this to say between rock and roll numbers at an antinuke rally in Washington, D.C., on May 6, 1979:
“I am embarrassed. We are all embarrassed. We Americans have guided our destinies so clumsily, with all the world watching, that we must now protect ourselves against our own government and our own industries.
“Not to do so would be suicide. We have discovered a brand-new method for committing suicide—family style, Reverend Jim Jones style, and by the millions. What is the method? To say nothing and do nothing about what some of our businessmen and military men are doing with the most unstable substances and the most persistent poisons to be found anywhere in the universe.
“The people who play with such chemicals are so dumb!
“They are also vicious. How vicious it is of them to tell us as little as possible about the hideousness of nuclear weapons and power plants!
“And, among all the dumb and vicious people, who jeopardizes all life on earth with hearts so light? I suggest to you that it is those who will lie for the nuclear industries, or who will teach their executives how to lie convincingly—for a fee. I speak of certain lawyers and communicators, and all public relations experts. The so-called profession of public relations, an American invention, stands entirely disgraced today.
“The lies we have been fed about nuclear energy have been as cunningly handcrafted as the masterpieces of Benvenuto Cellini. They have been a damned sight better built, I must say, than the atomic energy plants themselves.
“I say to you that the makers of such lies are filthy little monkeys. I hate them. They may think they are cute. They are not cute. They stink. If we let them, they will kill everything on this lovely blue-green planet with their rebuttals to what we say here today—with their vicious, stupid lies.”
4
TRIAGE
I WAS EDUCATED SOME in chemistry, and in biology and physics, too, at Cornell University. I did badly, and