God bless you, Dr. Kevorkian (10 page)

after
this

morning s

near-death experience I am almost literally heartbroken that there was no way for me to take a tape recorder down the blue tunnel to Heaven and back again. Never before had there been a New

brass band,

led by the late Louis Armstrong, to greet a new arrival with a rousing rendition of "When the Saints Come Marching

recipient of this very rare and merry honor, accorded to only one in ten million newly dead people,

told, was an Australian Aborigine, with some white blood, named Birnum Birnum. When white settlers came in the nineteenth century, the natives of Australia and nearby Tasmania had the
27

simplest and most primitive cultures of any people then on

were regarded as vermin, with no

more minds and souls than

say. They were shot;

they were poisoned. Only in

practically the day

before

were the surviving Australian

Aborigines granted citizenship, thanks to demonstrations led by Birnum He was the first of his

people to attend law school.

There were no survivors on Tasmania. I asked him for a sound bite about the

to take back to

WNYC. He said they were victims of the only completely successful genocide of which we know. Louis Armstrong broke into our conversation to say the Tasmanians were as gifted and intelligent as anybody, given good

Two members of his current band,

he said, were Tasmanians. One played clarinet; the other one played a mean gutbucket, or slide trombone. This is Kurt Vonnegut,

reporter on the

Afterlife, signing off.

28