Palm Sunday_ An Autobiographical Collage - Kurt Vonnegut [91]
“When I thought I was going to talk about reference points, I had in mind the fixtures in a simpler and more stable civilization than what we have today. Examples: Shakepeare’s Hamlet, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn—the Great Wall of China, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Sphinx. These few works of art used to be enormous monuments in the minds of public school graduates in every corner of this country. They have now been drowned in our minds, like Atlantis, if you will, by the latest sensations on television and radio, and in our motion picture palaces and People magazine.
“Time was when a worker in the mental health field in America would have a few reference points in common with a native-born maniac, could begin a therapeutic conversation with comments on the smile of the Mona Lisa, say. It was a beginning. But nowadays, I would think, a therapist has to be prepared to discuss in depth Beach Blanket Bingo or The Texas Chainsaw Murders or Howdy Doody or Romper Room or Walter Cronkite—and just on and on and on. Farrah Fawcett-Majors. No subject of conversation lives much longer than a lightning bug these days. I have a son who is a gag writer on the West Coast, and he wrote what he thought was a very funny skit about Howdy Doody. I had to explain to him that there were millions of Americans older and younger than he was, who did not know or care who Howdy Doody was. He was shattered. When he was seven years old, Howdy Doody was God to him.
“But I have scrapped that particular speech, as I say. I didn’t have the brains to pull it off It was too ambitious—not only for me but for lunch at a New Jersey motel. So I have decided to talk instead about how honored I am to be here. If some of you are taking notes, you should write that down: ’Honored to be asked to speak on mental health’—something like that.
“I don’t know why you invited me. Perhaps it is because my son Mark went insane. He is not the gag writer. That is another son. The one who went insane is well now. He graduated from Harvard Medical School a year ago, and is an intern in Boston now. He, too, is a magnificent speaker. He loves to ask an audience of workers in the mental health field, ’How many of you have ever taken Thorazine?’ Almost no hands go up, and my son the doctor gives a little smile, and he says: ’It won’t hurt you. You really ought to try it sometime, just to get an inkling, anyway, of what your patients are going through.’
“Your organizers asked me what degrees I held. Even if I were a trapeze artist, they would have to ask me that, I guess. So I ransacked the drawers of my bedside table for documents. I found a long-lost pair of cuff links, unfortunately only gold-plated. I found a snapshot of my sister Alice when she was only sixteen. She died here in New Jersey at the age of forty-one, and not in the best of mental health. I found a diploma from the University of Chicago, which is west of here. It declared that I had earned a master’s degree in anthropology. I looked up the word in a dictionary. It turned out to be the study of man.
“At the University of Chicago so long ago, I had to select a specialty from these five fields in anthropology: archaeology, cultural anthropology, ethnology, linguistics, and physical anthropology. I chose cultural anthropology, since it offered the greatest opportunity to write high-minded balderdash. Culture, of course, is every object and idea which has been shaped by men and women and children, and not by God. Cultural anthropology is a broad specialty, you might say. I never heard of a cultural anthropologist who came down with claustrophobia.
“It was that damn fool diploma which made me believe for a moment that I could