Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [30]
The parents of my first wife Jane, Harvey and Riah Cox, did the same thing: sent their only daughter to Tudor Hall, and bought her rich girls’ clothes, and maintained for her sake membership in the Woodstock Golf and Country Club they could ill afford, so she could marry a man whose family had money and power.
When the Great Depression and then World War Two were over, the idea that a man from a rich and powerful Indianapolis family would be allowed to marry a woman whose family didn’t have a pot to piss in, as long as she had the manners and tastes of a rich girl, turned out to be as dumb as trying to sell balloons with blobs of moistened clay inside.
Business is business.
The best Allie could do for a husband was Jim Adams, a beautiful, charming, funny hunk with no money and no profession, who had served in Army Public Relations during the war. The best Jane could do, and it was a time of panic for unmarried women, was a guy who came home a PFC, who had been flunking all his courses at Cornell when he went off to war, and who didn’t have a clue as to what to do next, now that free will had kicked in again.
Get this: Not only did Jane have rich girls’ manners and clothes. She was a Phi Beta Kappa from Swarthmore, and had been the outstanding writer there!
I thought maybe I could be some kind of half-assed scientist, since that had been my education.
26
In the third edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772- 1834) speaks of “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” This acceptance of balderdash is essential to the enjoyment of poems, and of novels and short stories, and of dramas, too. Some assertions by writers, however, are simply too preposterous to be believed.
Who, for example, could believe Kilgore Trout when he wrote as follows in My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot: “There is a planet in the Solar System where the people are so stupid they didn’t catch on for a million years that there was another half to their planet. They didn’t figure that out until five hundred years ago! Only five hundred years ago! And yet they are now calling themselves Homo sapiens.
“Dumb? You want to talk dumb? The people in one of the halves were so dumb, they didn’t have an alphabet! They hadn’t invented the wheel yet!”
Give us a break, Mr. Trout.
He appears to be heaping scorn in particular on Native Americans, who have already been adequately penalized, one would think, for their stupidity. According to Noam Chomsky, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where my brother, my father, and my grandfather all earned advanced degrees, but where my maternal uncle Pete Lieber flunked out: “Current estimates suggest that there may have been about 80 million Native Americans in Latin America when Columbus ‘discovered’ the continent—as we say—and about 12 to 15 million more north of the Rio Grande.”
Chomsky continues: “By 1650, about 95 percent of the population of Latin America had been wiped out, and by the time the continental borders of the United States had been established, some 200,000 were left of the indigenous population.”
In my opinion, Trout, far from giving yet another high colonic to our aborigines, is raising the question, perhaps too subtly, of whether great discoveries, such as the existence of another hemisphere, or of accessible atomic energy, really make people any happier than they were before.
I myself say atomic energy has made people unhappier than they were before, and that having to live in a two-hemisphere planet has made our aborigines a lot less happy, without making the wheel-and-alphabet people who “discovered” them any fonder of being alive than they were before.
Then again, I am a monopolar depressive descended from monopolar depressives.