Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [55]
But at what cost? The entrance to the Academy would not have been broached, giving Kilgore Trout access to Dudley Prince and the other armed guards. Trout could not have put on a spare guard’s uniform he found in there, which made him look like an authority figure. He would not have been able to arm himself with the Academy’s bazooka, with which he knocked out the braying burglar alarms of impacted but unoccupied parked vehicles.
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The American Academy of Arts and Letters owned a bazooka because the warlords who knocked over Columbia University spearheaded their attack with a tank stolen from the Rainbow Division of the National Guard. They were so audacious that they flew Old Glory, The Stars and Stripes.
It is conceivable that the warlords, with whom nobody messes, any more than anybody messes with the ten biggest corporations, consider themselves as American as anyone. “America,” wrote Kilgore Trout in MTYOAP, “is the interplay of three hundred million Rube Goldberg contraptions invented only yesterday.
“And you better have an extended family,” he added, although he himself had done without one between the time he was discharged from the Army, on September 11th, 1945, and March 1st, 2001, the day he and Monica Pepper and Dudley Prince and Jerry Rivers arrived by armored limousine, with an overloaded trailer wallowing behind, at Xanadu.
Rube Goldberg was a newspaper cartoonist during the terminal century of the previous Christian millennium. He drew pictures of absurdly complex and undependable machines, employing treadmills and trapdoors and bells and whistles, and domestic animals in harness and blowtorches and mailmen and light bulbs, and firecrackers and mirrors and radios and Victrolas, and pistols firing blank cartridges, and so on, in order to accomplish some simple task, such as closing a window blind.
Yes, and Trout harped on the human need for extended families, and I still do, because it is so obvious that we, because we are human, need them as much as we need proteins and carbohydrates and fats and vitamins and essential minerals.
I have just read about a teenage father who shook his baby to death because it couldn’t control its anal sphincter yet and wouldn’t stop crying. In an extended family, there would have been other people around, who would have rescued and comforted the baby, and the father, too.
If the father had been raised in an extended family, he might not have been such an awful father, or maybe not a father at all yet, because he was still too young to be a good one, or because he was too crazy to ever be a good one.
I was in southern Nigeria in 1970, at the very end of the Biafran War there, on the Biafran side, the losing side, the mostly Ibo side, long before the rerun. I met an Ibo father of a new baby. He had four hundred relatives! Even with a losing war going on, he and his wife were about to go on a trip, introducing the baby to all its relatives.
When the Biafran army needed replacements, big Ibo families met to decide who should go. In peacetime, the families met to decide who should go to college, often to Cal Tech or Oxford or Harvard, a long way off. And then a whole family chipped in to pay for the travel and tuition and clothing suitable for the climate and dominant society where a kid was going next.
I met the Ibo writer Chinua Achebe over there. He is teaching and writing at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, 12504, over here now. I asked him how the Ibos were now, with Nigeria run by a rapacious junta which regularly hangs its critics for having much too much free will.
Chinua said no Ibos had roles in the government, nor did they want any. He said Ibos survived in modest businesses unlikely to bring them into conflict