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From the time I was 21 until I was 35 I was a professional soldier, a Commissioned Officer in the United States Army. During those 14 years I would have killed Jesus Christ Himself or Herself or Itself or Whatever, if ordered to do so by a superior officer. At the abrupt and humiliating and dishonorable end of the Vietnam War,
WHAT I WOULD really like to have been, given a perfect world, is a jazz pianist. I mean jazz. I don’t mean rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-way-twice music the American black people gave the world.
Our children, moreover, had every reason to suspect that they, too, might go crazy in middle age. Our children, full-grown now, can never forgive us for reproducing. What a mess.
and we took the 10 machines we agreed were the most beguiling, and we put them on permanent exhibit in the foyer of this library underneath a sign whose words can surely be applied to this whole ruined planet nowadays: THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE
AS JEAN-PAUL Sartre says in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, “Hell is other people.”
IF MY SOCIALIST grandfather, nothing but a gardener at Butler University, could read the letter from Mrs. de Wet and note its South African return address, he would be grimly gratified. There was a clear-as-crystal demonstration of a woman living high on profits from the labor of black miners, overworked and underpaid.
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.
There I was in late middle age, cut loose in a thoroughly looted, bankrupt nation whose assets had been sold off to foreigners, a nation swamped by unchecked plagues and superstition and illiteracy and hypnotic TV, with virtually no health services for the poor. Where to go? What to do?
“Being an American means never having to say you’re sorry.”
I had ugly, personal knowledge of the disgrace that was the Vietnam War. None of the Trustees had been in that war, and neither had Kimberley’s father, and not one of them had allowed a son or a daughter to be sent over there. Across the lake in the prison, of course, and down in the town, there were plenty of somebody’s sons who had been sent over there.
I was a genius of lethal hocus pocus!
They were members of a short-lived sect, mostly of German descent, who believed, as did my Grandfather Wills, that nothing but sleep awaited good and evil persons alike in the Afterlife, that science had proved all organized religions to be baloney, that God was unknowable, and that the greatest use a person could make of his or her lifetime was to improve the quality of life for all in his or her community.
how unspeakably cruel supposedly sane human beings can be when under orders from a superior authority.
that Humanity is going somewhere really nice was a myth for children under 6 years old, like the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus.
The Trustees were really angry about my having wobbled the students’ faith in the intelligence and decency of their country’s leadership by telling them the truth about the Vietnam War.
HOW MANY AMERICANS knew or cared anyway where or what the Mohiga Valley was, or Laos or Cambodia or Tripoli? Thanks to our great educational system and TV, half of them couldn’t even find their own country on a map of the world.
Europeans like them were robbers with guns who went all over the world stealing other people’s land, which they then called their plantations. And they made the people they robbed their slaves.
the Carib Indian chief who was about to be burned at the stake by Spaniards. His crime was his failure to see the beauty of his people’s becoming slaves in their own country. 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
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“At least we still have freedom of speech,” I said. And she said, “That isn’t something somebody else gives you. That’s something you have to give yourself.”
“What makes so many Americans proud of their ignorance? They act as though their ignorance somehow made them charming.”
And Alton Darwin asked me, “How come in all these movies the Germans and the Japanese are always the smart ones, and the Americans are the dumb ones, and still the Americans win the war?”
There were also Black and Hispanic units somewhere, the theory being, as with the prisons, that people were always more comfortable with those of their own race.
This resegregation, although I never heard any public figure say so, also made the Armed Forces more like a set of golf clubs. You could use this battalion or that one, depending on what color people they were supposed to fight.
His stepfather had been very good to him. 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?
neighbors, I asked the Warden why he never left this valley, why he didn’t get away from the prison and me and the ignorant young guards and the bells across the lake and all the rest of it. He had years of leave time he had never used. He said, “I would only meet more people.” “You don’t like any kind of people?” I said. We were talking in a sort of joshing mode, so I could ask him that. “I wish I had been born a bird instead,” he said. “I wish we had all been born birds instead.”
JUST BECAUSE SOME of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn’t mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.
