Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) (16 page)

“Not every member of AA or GA has sunk quite that low, of course—but plenty have. Many, if not most, have done what they call ‘hitting bottom’ before admitting what it is that has been ruining their lives.

“I now wish to direct your attention to another form of addiction, which has not been previously identified. It is more like gambling than drinking, since the people afflicted are ravenous for situations that will cause their bodies to release exciting chemicals into their bloodstreams. I am persuaded that there are among us people who are tragically hooked on preparations for war.

“Tell people with that disease that war is coming and we have to get ready for it, and for a few minutes there, they will be as happy as a drunk with his martini breakfast or a compulsive gambler with his paycheck bet on the Super Bowl.

“Let us recognize how sick such people are. From now on, when a national leader, or even just a neighbor, starts talking about some new weapons system which is going to cost us a mere $29 billion, we should speak up. We should say something on the order of, ‘Honest to God, I couldn’t be sorrier for you if I’d seen you wash down a fistful of black beauties with a pint of Southern Comfort.’

“I mean it. I am not joking. Compulsive preparers for World War III, in this country or any other, are as tragically and, yes, as repulsively addicted as any stockbroker passed out with his head in a toilet in Port Authority Bus Terminal.

“For an alcoholic to experience a little joy, he needs maybe three ounces of grain alcohol. Alcoholics, when they are close to hitting bottom, customarily can’t hold much alcohol.

“If we know a compulsive gambler who is dead broke, we can probably make him happy with a dollar to bet on who can spit farther than someone else.

“For us to give a compulsive war-preparer a fleeting moment of happiness, we may have to buy him three Trident submarines and a hundred intercontinental ballistic missiles mounted on choo-choo trains.

“If Western Civilization were a person—

“If Western Civilization, which blankets the world now, as far as I can tell, were a person—

“If Western Civilization, which surely now includes the Soviet Union and China and India and Pakistan and on and on, were a person—

“If Western Civilization were a person, we would be directing it to the nearest meeting of War Preparers Anonymous. We would be telling it to stand up before the meeting and say, ‘My name is Western Civilization. I am a compulsive war-preparer. I have lost everything I ever cared about. I should have come here long ago. I first hit bottom in World War I.’

“Western Civilization cannot be represented by a single person, of course, but a single explanation for the catastrophic course it has followed during this bloody century is possible. We the people, because of our ignorance of the disease, have again and again entrusted power to people we did not know were sickies.

“And let us not mock them now, any more than we would mock someone with syphilis or smallpox or leprosy or yaws or typhoid fever or any of the other diseases to which the flesh is heir. All we have to do is separate them from the levers of power, I think.

“And then what?

“Western Civilization’s long, hard trip back to sobriety might begin.

“A word about appeasement, something World War II, supposedly, taught us not to practice: I say to you that the world has been ruined by appeasement. Appeasement of whom? Of the Communists? Of the Neo-Nazis? No! Appeasement of the compulsive war-preparers. I can scarcely name a nation that has not lost most of its freedom and wealth in attempts to appease its own addicts to preparations for war.

“And there is no appeasing an addict for very long: ‘I swear, man, just lay enough bread on me for twenty multiple-reentry vehicles and a fleet of B-1 bombers, and I’ll never bother you again.’

“Most addictions start innocently enough in childhood, under agreeable, reputable auspices—a sip of champagne at a wedding, a game of poker for matchsticks on a rainy afternoon. Compulsive war-preparers may have been encouraged as infants to clap their hands with glee at a campfire or a Fourth of July parade.

“Not every child gets hooked. Not every child so tempted grows up to be a drunk or a gambler or a babbler about knocking down the incoming missiles of the Evil Empire with laser beams. When I identify the war preparers as addicts, I am not calling for the exclusion of children from all martial celebrations. I doubt that more than one child in a hundred, having seen fireworks, for example, will become an adult who wants us to stop squandering our substance on education and health and social justice and the arts, and food and shelter and clothing for the needy, and so on—who wants us to blow it all on ammunition instead.

“And please understand that the addiction I have identified is to
preparations
for war. I repeat: to
preparations
for war—addiction to the thrills of de-mothballing battleships and inventing weapons systems against which there cannot possibly be a defense, supposedly, and urging the citizenry to hate this part of humanity or that one, and knocking over little governments that might aid and abet an enemy someday, and so on. I am not talking about an addiction to war itself, which is a very different matter. A compulsive preparer for war no more wants to go to big-time war than an alcoholic stockbroker wants to pass out with his head in a toilet in Port Authority Bus Terminal.

“Should addicts of any sort hold high offices in this or any other country? Absolutely not, for their first priority will always be to satisfy their addiction, no matter how terrible the consequences may be—even to themselves.

“Suppose we had an alcoholic President who still had not hit bottom and whose chief companions were drunks like himself. And suppose it were a fact, made absolutely clear to him, that if he took just one more drink, the whole planet would blow up.

“He has all the liquor thrown out of the White House, including his Aqua Velva shaving lotion. Late at night he is terribly restless, crazy for a drink but proud of not drinking. So he opens the White House refrigerator, looking for a Tab or a Diet Pepsi, he tells himself. And there, half hidden by a family-size jar of French’s mustard, is an unopened can of Coors beer.

“What do you think he’ll do?”

I wrote that seven years ago, and have used it in speeches many times since. (Even Jesus Christ, if He hadn’t been crucified, would have started repeating Himself.) It could be classed as a practical joke, since I was only pretending to be serious. (Then again, all wordplay or fiction or speeches or whatever is practical joking, since people are made to feel fear or love or satisfaction or whatever while they are simply sitting someplace and nothing much is really going on.)

The best practical joke I ever heard of (and it may have been Hugh Troy’s doing) involved a man in an ad agency who got a big promotion and went out and bought a homburg hat as a badge of rank. Some people in the office pooled their money to buy several identical homburgs, but of different sizes, which they substituted from time to time for the one the man had bought for himself. So when the man went out to lunch or whatever and put on his hat, it had to seem to him that his head was swelling or shrinking, since sometimes the hat sat way up high (like a gumdrop), and sometimes it came down over his eyes and ears (like a diving bell).

I used to say that the funniest word joke in the world was the one which asked, “Why is cream more expensive than milk?” Answer: “Because the cows hate to squat on those little bottles.” Technological changes in the dairy industry require me to take away the joke’s championship. Cream is no longer sold in glass bottles with wide mouths over which a cow might conceivably be forced to squat. So the new champion is an oldie from the golden age of radio comedy, during which Ed Wynn (“The Perfect Fool”) was cast as a Fire Chief. Each show began with Wynn’s conducting some sort of ridiculous Fire Department business on the telephone. One time a woman called up to say her house was on fire. Wynn asked her if she had tried putting water on it. She said she had, and he said, “I’m sorry, but that’s all we could do.” He hung up.

(So there’s the new World’s Champion.)

And get a load of this naive sermon I preached at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City:

“I will speak today about the worst imaginable consequences of doing without hydrogen bombs. This should be a relief. I am sure you are sick and tired of hearing how all living things sizzle and pop inside a radioactive fireball. We have known that for more than a third of this century—ever since we dropped an atom bomb on the yellow people of Hiroshima.
They
certainly sizzled and popped.

“After all is said and done, what was that sizzling and popping, despite the brilliant technology which caused it, but our old friend death? Let us not forget that St. Joan of Arc was made to sizzle and pop in old times with nothing more than firewood. She wound up dead. The people of Hiroshima wound up dead. Dead is dead.

“Scientists, for all their creativity, will never discover a method for making people deader than dead. So if some of you are worried about being hydrogen-bombed, you are merely fearing death. There is nothing new in that. If there weren’t any hydrogen bombs, death would still be after you. And what is death but an absence of life? That is all it ever can be.

“Death is nothing. What is all this fuss about?

“Let us ‘up the ante,’ as gamblers say. Let us talk about fates
worse
than death. When the Reverend Jim Jones saw that his followers in Guyana were facing fates worse than death, he gave them Kool-Aid laced with cyanide. If our government sees that we are facing fates worse than death, it will shower our enemies with hydrogen bombs, and then we will be showered in turn. There will be plenty of Kool-Aid for everyone, in a manner of speaking, when the right time comes.

“What will the right time look like?

“I will not waste your time with trivial fates, which are only marginally worse than death. Suppose we were conquered by an enemy, for example, who didn’t understand our wonderful economic system, and so Braniff airlines and International Harvester and so on all went bust, and millions of Americans who wanted to work couldn’t find any jobs anywhere. Or suppose we were conquered by an enemy who was too cheap to take good care of children and old people. Or suppose we were conquered by an enemy who wouldn’t spend money on anything but weapons for World War III. These are all tribulations we could live with, if we had to—although God forbid.

“But suppose we foolishly got rid of our nuclear weapons, our Kool-Aid, and an enemy came over here and crucified us. Crucifixion was the most painful thing the ancient Romans ever found to do to anyone. They knew as much about pain as we do about genocide. They sometimes crucified hundreds of people at one time. That is what they did to all the survivors of the army of Spartacus, which was composed mostly of escaped slaves. They crucified them all. There were several miles of crosses.

“If we were up on crosses, with nails through our feet and hands, wouldn’t we wish that we still had hydrogen bombs, so that life could be ended everywhere? Absolutely.

“We know of one person who was crucified in olden times, who was supposedly as capable as we or the Russians are of ending life everywhere. But He chose to endure agony instead. All He said was, ‘Forgive them, Father—they know not what they do.’

“He let life go on, as awful as it was for Him, because here we are, aren’t we?

“But He was a special case. It is unfair to use Jesus Christ as an exemplar of how much pain and humiliation we ordinary human beings should put up with before calling for the end of everything.

“I don’t believe that we
are
about to be crucified. No potential enemy we now face has anywhere near enough carpenters. Not even people at the Pentagon at budget time have mentioned crucifixion. I am sorry to have to put that idea into their heads. I will have only myself to blame if, a year from now, the Joint Chiefs of Staff testify under oath that we are on the brink of being crucified.

“But what if they said, instead, that we would be enslaved if we did not appropriate enough money for weaponry? That could be true. Despite our worldwide reputation for sloppy workmanship, wouldn’t some enemy get a kick out of forcing us into involuntary servitude, buying and selling us like so many household appliances or farm machines or inflatable erotic toys?

“And slavery would surely be a fate worse than death. We can agree on that, I’m sure. We should send a message to the Pentagon: ‘If Americans are about to become enslaved, it is Kool-Aid time.’

“They will know what we mean.

“Of course, at Kool-Aid time all higher forms of life on Earth, not just we and our enemies, will be killed. Even those beautiful and fearless and utterly stupid seabirds the defenseless blue-footed boobies of the Galapagos Islands will die, because we object to slavery.

“I have seen those birds, by the way—up close. I could have unscrewed their heads, if I had wanted to. I made a trip to the Galapagos Islands two months ago—in the company of, among other people, Paul Moore, Jr., the bishop of this very cathedral.

“That is the sort of company I keep these days—everything from bishops to blue-footed boobies. I have never seen a human slave, though. But my four great-grandfathers saw slaves. When they came to this country in search of justice and opportunity, there were millions of Americans who were slaves. The equation which links a strong defense posture to not being enslaved is laid down in that stirring fight song, much heard lately, ‘Rule, Britannia.’ I will sing the equation:

“ ‘Rule, Britannia; Britannia, rule the waves—’

“That, of course, is a poetic demand for a Navy second to none. I now sing the next line, which explains why it is essential to have a Navy that good:

“ ‘Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.’

“It may surprise some of you to learn what an old equation that is. The Scottish poet who wrote it, James Thomson, died in 1748—about a quarter of a century before there was such a country as the United States of America. Thomson promised Britons that they would never be slaves, at a time when the enslavement of persons with inferior weaponry was a respectable industry. Plenty of people were going to be slaves, and it would serve them right, too—but Britons would not be among them.