Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [56]
They must have held many meetings, in which ethics as well as survival schemes were debated.
And they still send their smartest kids off to the best universities far away.
When I celebrate the idea of a family and family values, I don’t mean a man and a woman and their kids, new in town, scared to death, and not knowing whether to shit or go blind in the midst of economic and technological and ecological and political chaos. I’m talking about what so many Americans need so frantically: what I had in Indianapolis before World War Two, and what the characters in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town had, and what the Ibos have.
In chapter 45, I proposed two amendments to the Constitution. Here are two more, little enough to expect from life, one would think, like the Bill of Rights:
Article XXX: Every person, upon reaching a statutory age of puberty, shall be declared an adult in a solemn public ritual, during which he or she must welcome his or her new responsibilities in the community, and their attendant dignities.
Article XXXI: Every effort shall be made to make every person feel that he or she will be sorely missed when he or she is gone.
Such essential elements in an ideal diet for a human spirit, of course, can be provided convincingly only by extended families.
53
The monster in Frankenstein—or, The Modern Prometheus turns mean because he finds it so humiliating to be alive and yet so ugly, so unpopular. He kills Frankenstein, who, again, is the scientist and not the monster. And let me hasten to say that my big brother Bernie never has been a Frankenstein-style scientist, never has worked nor would have worked on purposely destructive devices of any sort. He hasn’t been a Pandora, either, turning loose new poisons or new diseases or whatever.
According to Greek mythology, Pandora was the first woman. She was made by the gods who were angry with Prometheus for making a man out of mud and then stealing fire from them. Making a woman was their revenge. They gave Pandora a box. Prometheus begged her not to open it. She opened it. Every evil to which human flesh is heir came out of it.
The last thing to come out of the box was hope. It flew away.
I didn’t make that depressing story up. Neither did Kilgore Trout. Ancient Greeks did.
This is the point I want to make, though: Frankenstein’s monster was unhappy and destructive, whereas the people Trout energized in the neighborhood of the Academy, although most of them wouldn’t have won any beauty contests, were by and large cheerful and public-spirited.
I have to say most of them wouldn’t have won any beauty contests. There was at least one strikingly beautiful woman involved. That was a member of the Academy’s office staff. That was Clara Zine. Monica Pepper is certain that Clara Zine was the one who was smoking the cigar that set off the smoke alarm in the picture gallery. When confronted by Monica, Clara Zine swore that in her whole life she had never smoked a cigar, that she hated cigars, and she disappeared.
I have no idea what has become of her.
Clara Zine and Monica were tending the wounded in the former Museum of the American Indian, which Trout had turned into a hospital, when Monica asked Clara about the cigar, and then Clara departed in a huffmobile.
Trout, carrying what had become his bazooka, and accompanied by Dudley Prince and the other two armed guards, had thrown out all the bums who were still in the shelter. They did that in order to free up the cots for people with broken limbs or skulls or whatever, who needed and deserved to lie down where it was warm even more than the bums did.
It was triage, such as Kilgore Trout had seen practiced on World War Two battlefields. “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country,” said the American patriot Nathan Hale. “Fuck the bums!” said the American patriot Kilgore Trout.
It was Jerry Rivers, the chauffeur of the Peppers’ stretch limousine, however, who steered his dreamboat