Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [54]
Frankenstein jazzes them with electricity. The results in the book are exact opposites of those since achieved in real-life American state penitentiaries with real-life electric chairs. Most people think Frankenstein is the monster. He isn’t. Frankenstein is the scientist.
Prometheus in Greek mythology makes the first human beings from mud. He steals fire from Heaven and gives it to them so they can be warm and cook, and not, one would hope, so we could incinerate all the little yellow bastards in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which are in Japan.
In chapter 2 of this wonderful book of mine, I mention a commemoration in the chapel of the University of Chicago of the fiftieth anniversary of the atom-bombing of Hiroshima. I said at the time that I had to respect the opinion of my friend William Styron that the Hiroshima bomb saved his life. Styron was then a United States Marine, training for an invasion of the Japanese home islands, when that bomb was dropped.
I had to add, though, that I knew a single word that proved our democratic government was capable of committing obscene, gleefully rabid and racist, yahooistic murders of unarmed men, women, and children, murders wholly devoid of military common sense. I said the word. It was a foreign word. That word was Nagasaki.
Whatever! That, too, was a long, long time ago, and ten years longer ago than that, if you want to count the rerun. What I find worth exclaiming about right now is the continuing applicability to the human condition, years after free will has ceased to be a novelty, of what jazzed Dudley Prince back to life, of what is now known generally as Kilgore’s Creed: “You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to do.”
Teachers in public schools across the land, I hear, say Kilgore’s Creed to students after the students have recited the Pledge of Allegiance and the Lord’s Prayer at the beginning of each school day. Teachers say it seems to help.
A friend told me he was at a wedding where the minister said at the climax of the ceremony: “You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to do. I now pronounce you man and wife.”
Another friend, a biochemist for a cat food company, said she was staying at a hotel in Toronto, Canada, and she asked the front desk to give her a wake-up call in the morning. She answered her phone the next morning, and the operator said, “You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to do. It’s seven a.m., and the temperature outside is thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, or zero Celsius.”
On the afternoon of February 13th, 2001, alone, and then during the next two weeks or so, Kilgore’s Creed did as much to save life on Earth as Einstein’s E equals mc squared had done to end it two generations earlier.
Trout had Dudley Prince say the magic words to the other two armed guards on the day shift at the Academy. They went into the former Museum of the American Indian, and said them to the catatonic bums in there. A goodly number of the aroused sacred cattle, maybe a third of them, became anti-PTA evangelists in turn. Armed with nothing more than Kilgore’s Creed, these ragged veterans of unemployability fanned out through the neighborhood to convert more living statues to lives of usefulness, to helping the injured, or at least getting them the hell indoors somewhere before they froze to death.
“God is in the details,” Anonymous tells us in the sixteenth edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. The seemingly pipsqueak detail of what became of the armored limousine that delivered Zoltan Pepper to be creamed by the hook-and-ladder as he rang the doorbell of the Academy is a case in point. The limousine driver, Jerry Rivers, had moved it fifty yards to the west, toward the Hudson River, after unloading his paraplegic passenger and his wheelchair on the sidewalk.
That was still part of the rerun. Rerun or not, though, Jerry wasn’t to