Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [5]
“Anything interesting happen at work today, Honey-bunch?”
“Yes. My bomb is going to work just great. And how are you doing with that kid with chicken pox?”
Andrei Sakharov was a sort of saint in 1975, a sort that is no longer celebrated, now that the Cold War is over. He was a dissident in the Soviet Union. He called for an end to the development and testing of nuclear weapons, and also for more freedoms for his people. He was kicked out of the USSR’s Academy of Sciences. He was exiled from Moscow to a whistlestop on the permafrost.
He was not allowed to go to Oslo to receive his Peace Prize. His pediatrician wife, Elena Bonner, accepted it for him there. But isn’t it time for us to ask now if she, or any pediatrician or healer, wasn’t more deserving of a Peace Prize than anyone who had a hand in creating an H-bomb for any kind of government anywhere?
Human rights? What could be more indifferent to the rights of any form of life than an H-bomb?
Sakharov was in June of 1987 awarded an honorary doctorate by Staten Island College in New York City. Once again his government wouldn’t let him accept in person. So I was asked to do that for him.
All I had to do was deliver a message he had sent. This was it: “Don’t give up on nuclear energy.” I spoke it like a robot.
I was so polite! But this was one year after this crazy planet’s most deadly nuclear calamity so far, at Chernobyl, Ukraine. Children all over northern Europe will be sickened or worse for years to come by that release of radiation. Plenty of work for pediatricians!
More heartening to me than Sakharov’s cockamamie exhortation was the behavior of firemen in Schenectady, New York, after Chernobyl. I used to work in Schenectady. The firemen sent a letter to their brother firemen over there, congratulating them on their courage and selflessness while trying to save lives and property.
Hooray for firemen!
Scum of the Earth as some may be in their daily lives, they can all be saints in emergencies.
Hooray for firemen.
3
In Timequake One, Kilgore Trout wrote a story about an atom bomb. Because of the timequake, he had to write it twice. The ten-year rerun following the timequake, remember, made him and me, and you, and everybody else, do everything we’d done from February 17th, 1991, to February 13th, 2001, a second time.
Trout didn’t mind writing it again. Rerun or not, he could tune out the crock of shit being alive was as long as he was scribbling, head down, with a ballpoint pen on a yellow legal pad.
He called the story “No Laughing Matter.” He threw it away before anybody else could see it, and then had to throw it away again during the rerun. At the clambake at the end of Timequake One, in the summer of the year 2001, after free will kicked in again, Trout said this about all the stories he had torn to pieces and flushed down toilets, or tossed into trash-strewn vacant lots, or whatever: “Easy come, easy go.”
“No Laughing Matter” got its title from what a judge in the story said during a top-secret court-martial of the crew of the American bomber Joy’s Pride, on the Pacific island of Banalulu, one month after the end of World War Two.
Joy’s Pride itself was perfectly OK, and in a hangar there on Banalulu. It was named in honor of the pilot’s mother, Joy Peterson, a nurse in obstetrics in a hospital in Corpus Christi, Texas. Pride had a double meaning. It meant self-respect. It meant a lion family, too.
Here’s the thing: After an atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and then another one was dropped on Nagasaki, Joy’s Pride was ordered to drop yet another one on Yokohama, on a couple of million “little yellow bastards.” The little yellow bastards were called “little yellow bastards” back then. It was wartime. Trout described the third atom bomb like this: “A purple motherfucker as big as a boiler in the basement of a mid-size junior high school.”
It was