Palm Sunday_ An Autobiographical Collage - Kurt Vonnegut [30]
An Indianapolis cousin of mine, who was also a high school classmate, did very badly at the University of Michigan while I did badly at Cornell. His father asked him what the trouble was, and he made what I consider an admirable reply: “Don’t you know, Father? I’m dumb!” It was the truth.
I did badly in the Army, remaining a preposterously tall private for the three years I served. I was a good soldier, an especially deadly marksman, but nobody thought to promote me. I learned all the dances of close-order drill. Nobody in the Army could dance better than I could in ranks. If a third world war comes, I am still spry enough to dance again.
• • •
Yes, and I was a mediocrity in the anthropology department of the University of Chicago after the Second World War. Triage was practiced there as it is practiced everywhere. There were those students who would surely be anthropologists, and the most winsome faculty members gave them intensive care. A second group of students, in the opinion of the faculty, just might become so-so anthropologists, but more probably, would use what they had learned about Homo sapiens to good advantage in some other field, such as medicine or law, say.
The third group, of which I was a member, might as well have been dead—or studying chemistry. We were given as a thesis advisor the least popular faculty member, un-tenured and justifiably paranoid. His position paralleled that of the waiter Mespoulets in the stories of Ludwig Bemelmans about the fictitious Hotel Splendid. Mespoulets had the table next to the kitchen, and his specialty was making sure that certain sorts of guests at the hotel restaurant never came back again.
This terrible faculty advisor of mine was surely the most exciting and instructive teacher I have ever had. He gave courses whose lectures were chapters in books he was writing about the mechanics of social change, and which no one, as it turned out, would ever publish.
After I left the university, I would visit him whenever business brought me to Chicago. He never remembered me, and seemed annoyed by my visits—especially, I suppose, when I brought the wonderful news of my having been published here and there.
One night on Cape Cod, when I was drunk and reeking of mustard gas and roses, and calling up old friends and enemies, as used to be my custom, I called up my beloved old thesis advisor. I was told he was dead—at the age of about fifty, I think. He had swallowed cyanide. He had not published. He had perished instead.
And I wish I had an unpublished essay of his on the mechanics of social change to paste into this collage of mine now.
I do not give his name, because I do not think he would like to see it here.
Or anywhere.
• • •
My mother, who was also a suicide and who never saw even the first of her eleven grandchildren, is another one, I gather, who would not like to see her name anywhere.
• • •
Am I angry at having had triage practiced on me? I am glad it was practiced on me at a university rather than at a battalion aid station behind the front lines. I might have wound up as a preposterously tall private expiring in a snow-bank outside the tent, while the doctors inside operated on those who had at least a fifty-fifty chance to survive. Why waste time and plasma on a goner?
And I myself have since practiced triage in university settings—in writing classes at the University of Iowa, at Harvard, at City College.
One third of every class was corpses as far as I was concerned. What’s more, I was right.
That would certainly be a better name for this planet than Earth, since it would give people who just got here a clearer idea of what they were in for: Triage.
Welcome to Triage.
• • •
What good is a planet called Earth, after all, if you own no land?
• • •
And let