Hocus Pocus

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

‘While there is a lower class I am in it. While there is a criminal element I am of it. While there is a soul in prison I am not free.’

During that war, which was about nothing but the ammunition business, there was a microscopic possibility, I suppose, that I called in a white-phosphorus barrage or a napalm air strike on a returning Jesus Christ.

profanity and obscenity entitle people who don’t want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.

During my 3 years in Vietnam, I certainly heard plenty of last words by dying American footsoldiers. Not 1 of them, however, had illusions that he had somehow accomplished something worthwhile in the process of making the Supreme Sacrifice. One boy of only 18 said to me while he was dying and I was holding him in my arms, ‘Dirty joke, dirty joke.’

THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE

Alcohol and marijuana, if used in moderation, plus loud, usually low-class music, make stress and boredom infinitely more bearable.

She would be scared to death of getting AIDS, and I would give her TB instead. Wouldn’t that be nice?

My mother’s story is 1 of the few real success stories in this book. She joined Weight Watchers when she was 60, which is my age now. When the ceiling fell on her at Niagara Falls, she weighed only 52 kilograms!

He was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Combat Engineers. I wasn’t there, but they say he got it right between the eyes. Talk about marksmanship! Whoever shot him was a real winner.

What a footsoldier can do to a body with his pipsqueak technology is nothing, of course, when compared with the ordinary, unavoidable, perfectly routine effects of aerial bombing and artillery.

‘That’s the point,’ he said. ‘Every kind of animal thinks its own kind of animal is wonderful. So people getting married think they’re wonderful, and that they’re going to have a baby that’s wonderful, when actually they’re as ugly as rhinoceroses. Just because we think we’re so wonderful doesn’t mean we really are. We could be really terrible animals and just never admit it because it would hurt so much.’

I don’t mean to boast, but the whole time I was in Vietnam nobody offered to frag me.

I would have given anything to die in a war that meaningful.

So an appropriate sign to put over the gate to Athena might have been, instead of ‘Work Makes Free,’ for example: ‘Too bad you were born. Nobody has any use for you,’ or maybe: ‘Come in and stay in, all you burdens on Society.’

They could feast their eyes on whatever they liked, just so long as it wasn’t relevant.

And, of course, this enriched their dreams of escaping, but what were those but what we could call in any other context the virtue hope?

‘Life’s a bad dream,’ he said. ‘Do you know that?’

I knew people like that in Vietnam. Jack Patton had that sort of courage. I could be as brave as Jack over there. In fact, I am pretty sure that I was shot at more and killed more people. But I was worried sick most of the time. Jack never worried. He told me so. I asked him how he could be that way. He said, ‘I think I must have a screw loose. I can’t care about what might happen next to me or anyone.’

It was a beautiful shot, if Darwin was really the man the College President was shooting at. He could have been shooting at me, since he knew I used to make love to his wife Zuzu when he was out of the house. If he was shooting at Darwin instead of me, he solved one of the most difficult problems in marksmanship, the same problem solved by Lee Harvey Oswald when he shot President Kennedy, which is where to aim when you are high above your target. As I say, ‘Beautiful shot.’

‘Drugs were food,’ he said. ‘I was in the food business. Just because people on one planet eat a certain kind of food they’re hungry for, that makes them feel better after they eat it, that doesn’t mean people on other planets shouldn’t eat something else. On some planets I’m sure there are people who eat stones, and then feel wonderful for a little while afterwards. Then it’s time to eat stones again.’

In Vietnam, conversely, if I happened to be back with the artillery, and the guns were lobbing shells at who knows what in some jungle, it seemed very much like music, interesting noises for the sake of interesting noises, and nothing more. During a summer field exercise when Jack Patton and I were still cadets, I remember, we were asleep in a tent and the artillery opened up nearby. We awoke. Jack said to me, ‘They’re playing our tune, Gene. They’re playing our tune.’

What in fact will happen to me in 9 more years? That is like worrying about a cheese spoiling if you don’t put it in the refrigerator. What can happen to a pricelessly stinky cheese that hasn’t already happened to it?

I didn’t say so back then, but I am perfectly happy to say now that the trouble with the Ruling Class was that too many of its members were nitwits like Kimberley.

When we passed a Catholic church, I recalled, he said, ‘You think your dad’s a good chemist? They’re turning soda crackers into meat in there. Can your dad do that?’

Then again, most of the convicts had been in the drug business, and were either Third World people or dealt with Third World people. So the Metric System was old stuff to them.

the big trick of suicide.

‘you know darn well, and so does everybody else here, that you can follow the most patriotic, deeply religious American who ever lived with a tape recorder for a year, and then prove that he’s a worse traitor than Benedict Arnold, and a worshipper of the Devil. Who doesn’t say things in a moment of passion or absentmindedness that he doesn’t wish he could take back?

WE COULD HAVE SAVED IT, BUT WE WERE TOO DOGGONE CHEAP.

I think William Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank, though, that’s not saying much. We are impossibly conceited animals, and actually dumb as heck. Ask any teacher. You don’t even have to ask a teacher. Ask anybody. Dogs and cats are smarter than we are.

hocus pocus!

I told him I wanted to be buried with my 2 lists, so that, if there really was going to be a Judgment Day, I could say to the Judge, ‘Judge, I have found a way to save you some precious time in Eternity. You don’t have to look me up in the Book in Which All Things Are Recorded. Here’s a list of my worst sins. Send me straight to Hell, and no argument.’

Pamela wasn’t surprised to see me. She was insulated against surprises by alcohol.

I agree with the great Socialist writer George Orwell, who felt that rich people were poor people with money.

People who can eat people are the luckiest people in the world.

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

And the worst flaw is that we’re just plain dumb. Admit it! You think Auschwitz was intelligent?

A. J. Topf und Sohn

‘What is this place and who are these people, and what am I doing here?’

I dreaded a continuation of the shooting, which would have meant to me that the Japanese farm boys had developed a taste for killing with guns, which can suddenly become, for the uninitiated, easy and fun.

I didn’t expect to get wounded or killed, except by accident. All the combatants in Scipio would regard me as unthreatening, the Whites because of my color-coding and the Blacks because they knew and liked me. The issues were clear. They were Black and White.

Beer, of course, is actually a depressant. But poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.

This chief was offered a cross to kiss before a professional soldier or maybe a priest set fire to the kindling and logs piled up above his kneecaps. He asked why he should kiss it, and he was told that the kiss would get him into Paradise, where he would meet God and so on. He asked if there were more people like the Spaniards up there. He was told that of course there were. In that case, he said, he would leave the cross unkissed. He said he didn’t want to go to yet another place where people were so cruel.

I heard Harley III barking orders at the diggers, telling them to dig deeper and make the sides straighter and so on. I had seen leadership of such a high order exercised in Vietnam, and I myself had exhibited it from time to time, so I am quite certain that Harley III had taken some sort of amphetamine.

One real stroke of luck: the fire trucks all had full tanks of gasoline. You would have thought, in a society where everybody from top to bottom was stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down, that somebody would have siphoned off that priceless gasoline. Every so often, in the midst of chaos, you come across an amazing, inexplicable instance of civic responsibility. Maybe the last shred of faith people have is in their firemen.

This brings to mind another of Damon Stern’s lectures, which was about how the brutalized and starving poor people of Petrograd in Russia behaved after they broke into the palace of the Czars in 1917. They got to see for the first time all the treasures inside the palace, and they were so outraged they wanted to wreck them. But then one man got their attention by firing a gun at the ceiling, and he said, ‘Comrades! Comrades! This is all ours now! Don’t hurt anything!’

‘I like life to be simple,’ I said, ‘but if you went away without another word, that would be much too simple for me, and for you, too, I hope.’

Rob Roy said that the only thing he didn’t like about him was the way he raised calves for veal. The baby animals, scarcely out of the womb, were put in cages so cramped that they could hardly move, to make their muscles nice and tender. When they were big enough their throats were cut, and they had never run or jumped or made friends, or done anything that might have made life a worthwhile experience. What was their crime?

How embarrassing to be human.

He didn’t use a gun or poison. He committed hara-kiri with a knife, disemboweling himself in a ritual of self-loathing once practiced by humiliated members of the ancient caste of professional soldiers, the samurai. And yet, so far as I am able to determine, he never shirked his duty, never stole anything, and never killed or wounded anyone. Still waters run deep. R.I.P.

‘I thank you for sharing that with me.’