Hocus Pocus

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Perhaps the only precept taught me by Grandfather Wills that I have honored all my adult life is that profanity and obscenity entitle people who don’t want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.

I am in fact pretty much an Atheist like my mother’s father, although I kept that to myself. Why argue somebody else out of the expectation of some sort of an Afterlife?

One boy of only 18 said to me while he was dying and I was holding him in my arms, “Dirty joke, dirty joke.”

My son

I have just looked up Harvard University. It has 13,000,000 bound volumes now. What a read! And almost every book written for or about the ruling class.

They were said to have died instantly. They never knew what hit them, which is the best way to go.

This library is full of stories of supposed triumphs, which makes me very suspicious of it. It’s misleading for people to read about great successes, since even for middle-class and upper-class white people, in my experience, failure is the norm.

There were plenty of other exits, and I should have headed for 1 of those. At that moment, every other exit led to the University of Michigan and journalism and music-making, and a lifetime of saying and wearing what I goshdarned pleased. Any other exit, in all probability, would have led me to a wife who wouldn’t go insane on me, and kids who gave me love and respect.

He was against everybody’s reproducing, since human beings were, in his own words, “about 1,000 times dumber and meaner than they think they are.” I myself, obviously, have finally come around to his point of view.

I am not writing this book for people below the age of 18, but I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing that is going to happen to them.

He hadn’t killed nearly as many people as I had. But then again, he hadn’t had my advantage, which was the full cooperation of our Government. Also, he had done all his killing for reasons of money. I had never stooped to that.

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?

If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other people’s vanity and foolishness.

The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes. I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterward, and he said, “There’s a Chaplain who never visited the front.”

I wonder if the Mohiga Valley hadn’t become the only home he ever knew after the bombing of Hiroshima. He lives in retirement now in his reconstructed native city, having lost both feet to frostbite after the prison break. Is it possible that he is thinking now what I have thought so often: “What is this place and who are these people, and what am I doing here?”

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.