Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [41]
Let that be my epitaph.
In the waning summer of 1996, I ask myself if there were ideas I once held that I should now repudiate. I consider the example set by my father’s only brother, Uncle Alex, the childless, Harvard-educated Indianapolis insurance salesman. He had me reading high-level socialist writers like Shaw and Norman Thomas and Eugene Debs and John Dos Passos when I was a teenager, along with making model airplanes and jerking off. After World War Two, Uncle Alex became as politically conservative as the Archangel Gabriel.
But I still like what O’Hare and I said to German soldiers right after we were liberated: That America was going to become more socialist, was going to try harder to give everybody work to do, and to ensure that our children, at least, weren’t hungry or cold or illiterate or scared to death.
Lotsa luck!
I still quote Eugene Debs (1855-1926), late of Terre Haute, Indiana, five times the Socialist Party’s candidate for President, in every speech:
“While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
In recent years, I’ve found it prudent to say before quoting Debs that he is to be taken seriously. Otherwise many in the audience will start to laugh. They are being nice, not mean, knowing I like to be funny. But it is also a sign of these times that such a moving echo of the Sermon on the Mount can be perceived as outdated, wholly discredited horsecrap.
Which it is not.
37
Kilgore Trout’s rugged jungle sandals crunched on crystal fragments from the fallen chandelier as he loped across the face of the fallen steel front door and frame, which said “UCK AR.” Since there were crystal shards atop the door and frame instead of underneath them, a forensic scientist would have had to testify in a lawsuit, if one had ever been filed against the crooked contractor, that, the crook’s handiwork fell first. The chandelier must have dangled for a second or so before letting gravity do to it what gravity apparently would have liked to do to simply everything.
The smoke alarm in the picture gallery was still ringing, “presumably,” Trout would later say, “continuing to do so of its own free will.” He was joking, making fun, as was his wont, of the idea that there had ever been free will for anyone or anything, rerun or not.
The Academy doorbell had clammed up the moment Zoltan Pepper was hit by the fire truck. Trout’s words again: “Quoth the doorbell with its silence, ‘No comment at this time.’ ”
Trout himself, as I’ve said, was nevertheless espousing free will when he entered the Academy, and was invoking the Judeo-Christian deity as well: “Wake up! For God’s sake, wake up, wake up! Free will! Free will!”
He would say at Xanadu that even if he had been a hero that afternoon and night, his entering the Academy, “pretending,” in his words, “to be Paul Revere in the space-time continuum,” had been “an act of sheer cowardice.”
He was seeking shelter from the growing din on Broadway, half a block away, and from the sounds of really serious explosions from other parts of the city. A mile and a half to the south, near Grant’s Tomb, a massive Department of Sanitation truck, for want of sincere steering, plowed through the lobby of a condominium and into the apartment of the building superintendent. It knocked over his gas range. The ruptured pipe of that major appliance filled the stairwell and elevator shaft of the six-story structure with methane laced with skunk smell. Most of the tenants were on Social Security.
And then KA-BOOM!
“An accident waiting to happen,” as Kilgore Trout would say at Xanadu.
The old science fiction writer wanted to galvanize the armed and uniformed Dudley Prince into action, he later confessed, so that he himself wouldn’t have to do anything more. “Free will! Free will! Fire! Fire!