Palm Sunday_ An Autobiographical Collage - Kurt Vonnegut [89]
This led the conversation into the area of heraldry in general, and the interviewer reminded the Senator of his campaign to eliminate the bald eagle as the national bird. The Senator explained that he didn’t like to have his country represented by a creature that obviously hadn’t been able to cut the mustard in modern times.
Asked to name a creature that had been able to cut the mustard, the Senator did better than that: he named two—the lamprey and the bloodworm. And, unbeknownst to him or to anybody, lampreys were finding the Great Lakes too vile and noxious even for them. While all the human beings were in their houses, watching the Big Space Fuck, lampreys were squirming out of the ooze and onto land. Some of them were nearly as long and thick as the Arthur C. Clarke.
And Grace Hoobler tore her wet eyes from what she had been reading, and she asked the sheriff the question he had been dreading to hear: “What made her do this to us?”
The sheriff told her, and then he cried out against cruel Fate, too. “This is the most horrible duty I ever had to carry out—” he said brokenly, “to deliver news this heartbreaking to friends as close as you two are—on a night that’s supposed to be the most joyful night in the history of mankind.”
He left sobbing, and stumbled right into the mouth of a lamprey. The lamprey ate him immediately, but not before he screamed. Dwayne and Grace Hoobler rushed outside to see what the screaming was about, and the lamprey ate them, too.
It was ironical that their television set continued to report the countdown, even though they weren’t around any more to see or hear or care.
“Nine!” said a voice. And then, “Eight!” And then, “Seven!” And so on.
• • •
That is a made-up story. Here is another true story:
When I was little, there was a female friend of my parents who was particularly admired for her vivacity and good taste and impeccable manners and so on. She married a German businessman.
When she came back to Indianapolis after the Second World War, she was as attractive as ever. She said vivaciously that Hitler had been right about most things, and that Germany should be admired for fighting so many powerful enemies all at once. “We almost won,” she reminded us.
I had just come back from Germany, too. I had been a prisoner of war there. So I took my father aside, and I said to him, “Father, I can’t help having mixed feelings about this old family friend.”
He told me that I should pay no attention to her when she spoke of political matters, that she understood nothing about them, that she was just a charming, silly, innocent little girl.
He was right. It was impossible for her to think coherently about assholes or Auschwitz or anything else that might be upsetting to a little girl.
That’s class.
13
CHILDREN
MY FIRST WIFE AND both my daughters are born-again Christians now—working white magic through rituals and prayers. That’s all right. I would be a fool to say that the Free Thinker ideas of Clemens Vonnegut remain as enchanting and encouraging as ever—not after the mortal poisoning of the planet, not after two world wars, with more to come.
Can I say now, with all my heart, what he said in his little book in 1900: “We believe in virtue, in perfectibility, in progress, in stability of the laws of nature, in the necessity of improving the social conditions and relations, which should be in harmony with that benevolence which conditions the coherence of me”?
No.
“Truth,” he says, “must always be recognized as the paramount requisite of human society.” As I myself said in another place, I began to have my doubts about truth after it was dropped on Hiroshima.
• • •
Clemens Vonnegut wrote of powerful and rich families founded by criminals. He despised them.