Palm Sunday_ An Autobiographical Collage - Kurt Vonnegut [66]
“’The thirteen Gatlings began to vomit death into the fated ten thousand. They halted, they stood their ground a moment against that withering deluge of fire, and then they broke, faced about, and swept toward the ditch like chaff before a gale. A full fourth part of their force never reached the top of the lofty embankment; the three-fourths reached it and plunged over—to death by drowning.
“’Within ten short minutes after we had opened fire, armed resistance was totally annihilated, the campaign was ended, we fifty-four were masters of England! Twenty-five thousand men lay dead around us.’
“End quote.
“What a funny ending.
“Mark Twain died in 1910, at the age of seventy-five and four years before the start of World War One. I have heard it said that he predicted that war and all the wars after that in A Connecticut Yankee. It was not Twain who did that. It was his premise.
“How appalled this entertainer must have been to have his innocent joking about technology and superstition lead him inexorably to such a ghastly end. Suddenly and horrifyingly, what had seemed so clear throughout the book was not clear at all—who was good, who was bad, who was wise, who was foolish. I ask you, Who was most crazed by superstition and bloodlust, the men with the swords or the men with the Gatling guns?
“And I suggest to you that the fatal premise of A Connecticut Yankee remains a chief premise of Western civilization, and increasingly of world civilization, to wit: the sanest, most likeable persons, employing superior technology, will enforce sanity throughout the world.
“Shall I read the ending of A Connecticut Yankee to you yet again?
“No need.
“To return to mere storytelling, which never harmed anyone: It is the premise which shapes each story, yes, but the author must furnish the language and the mood.
“It seems clear to me, as an American writing one hundred years after this house was built, that we would not be known as a nation with a supple, amusing, and often beautiful language of our own, if it were not for the genius of Mark Twain. Only a genius could have misrepresented our speech and our wittiness and our common sense and our common decency so handsomely to ourselves and the outside world.
“He himself was the most enchanting American at the heart of each of his tales. We can forgive this easily, for he managed to imply that the reader was enough like him to be his brother. He did this most strikingly in the personae of the young riverboat pilot and Huckleberry Finn. He did this so well that the newest arrival to these shores, very likely a Vietnamese refugee, can, by reading him, begin to imagine that he has some of the idiosyncratically American charm of Mark Twain.
“This is a miracle. There is a name for such miracles, which is myths.
“Imagine, if you will, the opinion we would now hold of ourselves and the opinions others would hold of us, if it were not for the myths about us created by Mark Twain. You can then begin to calculate our debt to this one man.
“One man. Just one man.
“I named my firstborn son after him.
“I thank you for your attention.”
9
FUNNIER ON PAPER THAN MOST PEOPLE
I AM BETTER THAN MOST people in my trade at making jokes on paper.
For what it may be worth, I gave this graduation speech at Fredonia College, Fredonia, New York, on May 20, 1978, which contains, among other things, some of my theories about how jokes work, why jokes work:
“Your class spokesperson has just said that she is sick and tired of hearing people say, I’m glad I’m not a young person these days.’ All I can say is, I’m glad I’m not a young person these days.’
“President Beal wished to exclude all negative thinking from his own farewell to you, and so has asked me to make this announcement: ’All persons who still owe parking fees are to pay up before leaving the property, or there will be unpleasant monkey business with their transcripts.’
“When I was a boy in Indianapolis, there was a humorist there named Kin Hubbard. He wrote a few lines for The Indianapolis