Sucker's Portfolio

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The great graphic artist Saul Steinberg, a native of Romania, now a resident of New York City, thanks to Christopher Columbus and Adolf Hitler, told me once that he could not commit political history to memory — when Caesar lived, when Napoleon lived, and so on — until he related it to what artists were doing at such and such a time. Art history was what he was born to care about. He made art history a spine to which to attach whatever else might have been going on. My big brother, the physical chemist Dr. Bernard Vonnegut, who studies the electrification of thunderstorms, gives his view of history a spine of scientific insights — Newton’s Laws of Motion and Einstein’s E=mc2 and so on — to which he attaches kings and generals and politicians and explorers and so on. I myself, as a writer, make a spine of works of literature. But most United States citizens, without such specialized enthusiasms, have been given by their teachers a spine of dates to memorize, most prominent among them 1066, when the Normans invaded England, since we all get English history and attitudes along with the language; and 1492, without which we wouldn’t exist; and 1776, when we became a beacon of liberty to the rest of the world, slavery and all; and 1941, December 7, to be exact, when the Japanese, without warning, sank a lot of our fleet at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands, on, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “a date which will live in infamy.” But making a spine for history out of memoriz...