Palm Sunday, Welcome to the Monkey House

by Kurt Jr. Vonnegut

  "Our grandchildren will surely think of us as the Planet Gobblers. Poorer nations than America think of America as a Planet Gobbler right now. But that is going to change. There is welling up within us a willingness to say 'No, thank you' to our factories. We were once maniacs for possessions, imagining that they would somehow moderate or somehow compensate us for our loneliness.

  "The experiment has been tried in this most affluent nation in all of human history. Possessions help a little, but not as much as advertisers said they were supposed to, and we are now aware of how permanently the manufacture of some of those products hurts the planet.

  "So there is a willingness to do without them.

  "There is a willingness to do whatever we need to do in order to have life on the planet go on for a long, long time. I didn't used to think that. And that willingness has to be a religious enthusiasm, since it celebrates life, since it calls for meaningful sacrifices.

  "This is bad news for business, as we know it now. It should be thrilling news for persons who love to teach and lead. And thank God we have solid information in the place of superstition! Thank God we are beginning to dream of human communities which are designed to harmonize with what human beings really need and are.

  "And now you have just heard an atheist thank God not once, but twice. And listen to this:

  "God bless the class of 1974."

  Six years later I would still be, outwardly at least, an unwobbled Free Thinker, for I said this at the First Parish Unitarian Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on January 27, 1980, approximately the 200th anniversary of the birth of William Ellery Channing:

  "This will be very short. There will be almost no eye contact.

  "This is only a dream. I know that this is only a dream. I have had it before. It is a dream of cosmic embarrassment. I stand before a large and nicely dressed audience. I have promised to speak on the most profound and poetic of all human concerns—the dignity of human nature.

  "Only a maniac would make such a grandiose promise, but that is what I have done—in this dream.

  "Now it is time for me to speak. I have nothing to say. Nothing.

  "Dobedobedobedo.

  "I will wake up at any moment now, and I will tell my wife about the dream. 'Where was it, honeybunch?' she will ask me. 'In a Yankee church on Harvard Square,' I will reply, and we will laugh and laugh.

  "But every time I have had this dream before, I have been wearing nothing but olive drab, Army surplus undershorts. That detail is missing today—so this just might not be a dream after all. Who can say for certain?

  "In this dream, if it is a dream, it is the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of William Ellery Channing, a principal founder of Unitarianism in the United States. I wish that I had been born into a society like his—small and congenial and prosperous and self-sufficient. The people around here had ancestors in common then. They looked a lot like each other, dressed a lot like each other, enjoyed the same amusements and food. They were generally agreed as to what was good and what was evil—what God was like, who Jesus was.

  "Channing grew up in what the late anthropologist Robert Redfield called a folk society, a relatively isolated community of like-thinking friends and relatives, a stable extended family of considerable size. Redfield said that we were all descended from persons who lived in such societies, and that we were likely to hanker to live in one ourselves from time to time. A folk society, in his imagination and in our imaginations, too, is an ideal scheme within which people can take really good care of one another, can share fairly, and can distribute honors to one and all.

  "Maybe so. That could also be a dream, but I do not choose to think so.

  "Channing's folk society, with Harvard at its center, was quite possibly the most intelligent and creative folk society the Western Hemisphere has ever known. I have to say 'possibly,' since we know so little about the Incas and the Aztecs and the Mayans—and some other tribes. I am tempted to include the Indianapolis of my grandfather's youth.

  "But Channing's folk society is gone now. It has been drowned by tidal waves of strangers from simply everywhere —people like myself. Channing's folk society is now the American Atlantis, if you will.

  "One of the most durable American legends has to do with the last days of the drowning of that Atlantis. It is the story of the arrest and trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti —of how the natives of Atlantis made war on the waves.

  "That war on the waves came much too late. It happened only day before yesterday, practically. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in Charlestown Prison in 1927. This part of New England had ceased to be a genuine folk society, had begun to admit strangers with unfamiliar ideas and customs in large numbers, one hundred years before that—when William Ellery Channing was nearly fifty years old.

  "Channing did not live long enough to see the truly towering waves of immigrants come crashing in. But he did see, in my opinion, that the narrow, ethnocentric sermons suitable to a folk society should not be preached here anymore. Sermons deeply rooted in local history and sociology and politics are by and large harmless, and perhaps even charming in a relatively closed and isolated community. Why shouldn't a preacher in such a society raise the morale of his parishioners by implying that they are better servants of God than strangers are? That is a very old type of sermon—very old indeed. As old as the hills. Read the Old Testament. You can probably borrow a copy from the church next door.

  "When Channing began preaching a new sort of sermon in this town, a sort of sermon we now perceive as Unitarian, he was urging his parishioners to credit with human dignity as great as their own persons not at all like their friends and relatives. The time to acknowledge the dignity of strangers, even black ones, had come.

  "Couldn't strangers, even black ones, have human dignity without the acquiescence of Channing's congregation? No. Human dignity must be given by people to people. If you stand before me, and I do not credit you with dignity, then you have none. If I stand before you, and you do not credit me with dignity, then I have none. If Channing's parishioners felt that illiterate black slaves in the American South had negligible amounts of dignity, then those slaves would in fact be negligibly dignified—like chimpanzees, perhaps.

  "It is easy to see dignity in relatives and friends. It is inevitable that we see it in relatives and friends. What is human dignity, then? It is the favorable opinion, respectful and uncritical, which we hold of those most familiar to us. It has been found that we can hold that same good opinion of strangers, if those who teach us and otherwise lead us tell us to.

  "What could be more essential in a pluralistic society like ours than that every citizen see dignity in every other human being everywhere?

  "And let us consider for a moment a society which was the exact opposite of what ours is supposed to be—which was Hitler's Germany. He trained a generation of warriors and police to be blind to human dignity, to never see it anywhere. So wherever he sent his warriors and police, there was no dignity. If he had conquered the world, there would have been no dignity anywhere. The penalty for crediting anyone with dignity in such a society? Death. And that, too, since there would be nobody to see dignity in it, would be undignified.

  "Potter's field.

  "Doesn't God give dignity to everybody? No—not in my opinion. Giving dignity, the sort of dignity that is of some earthly use, anyway, is something that only people do. "Or fail to do.

  "What happens if you credit a bum with human dignity —a drunken bum with his pants full of shit and snot dangling from his nose? At least you haven't made yourself poorer in a financial sense. And he can't take whatever it is that you have given him and spend it on Thunderbird wine.

  "There is this drawback, though: If you give to that sort of a stranger the uncritical respect that you give to friends and relatives, you will also want to understand and help him. There is no way to avoid this.

  "Be warned: If you allow yourself to see dignity in someone, you have doomed you
rself to wanting to understand and help whoever it is.

  "If you see dignity in anything, in fact—it doesn't have to be human—you will still want to understand it and help it. Many people are now seeing dignity in the lower animals and the plant world and waterfalls and deserts—and even in the entire planet and its atmosphere. And now they are helpless not to want to understand and to help those things.

  "Poor souls!

  "I am descended from fairly recent immigrants. My first American ancestor, an atheistic merchant from Münster, arrived here about five years after William Ellery Channing died. Channing died in 1842, a reluctant Abolitionist who did not live to see all the murdering in the Civil War. I am a drop of spray from one of the waves which swamped the American Atlantis.

  "The faith of my ancestors, going back at least four generations, has been the most corrosive sort of agnosticism— or worse. When I was a child, all my relatives, male and female, agreed with H. L. Mencken when he said that he thought religious people were comical. Mencken said that he had been widely misunderstood as hating religious people. He did not hate them, he said. He merely found them comical.

  "What is so comical about religious people in modern times? They believe so many things which science has proved to be unknowable or absolutely wrong.

  "How on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash? For one thing, I guess, the balderdash is usually beautiful—and therefore echoes excitingly in the more primitive lobes of our brains, where knowledge counts for nothing.

  "More important, though: the acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a congregation. It is a way to fight loneliness. Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore.

  "I read an essay by Harvey Cox recently, in which he quoted an early Church father as having said, 'One Christian is no Christian.' Mr. Cox said that one of the most distinctive and attractive features of Christianity for him was its insistence on forming congregations.

  "We might also say that one human being is no human being.

  "Many people have found a solution to loneliness by joining the paratroops. Membership in that particular family is gained and maintained by jumping out of airplanes and shouting 'Geronimo!' Not even the commanding general knows why everybody is supposed to shout 'Geronimo!' It does not matter.

  "In a lonely society, the main thing is not to make sense. The main thing is to get rid of loneliness. I certainly sympathize.

  "I have not mentioned love yet. I have been saving that for close to the end.

  "Love was invented by a chef at the Brown Derby Restaurant in Hollywood, California, in 1939. It consists of overripe jumbo peaches with San Fernando Valley honey and chocolate jimmies on top. It is traditionally served in heated purple bowls.

  "As every married person here knows, love is a rotten substitute for respect.

  "I have spoken of the long tradition of religious skepticism in my family. One of my two daughters has recently turned her back on all that. Living alone and far from home, she has memorized an arbitrary Christian creed, Trinitarianism, by chance. She now has her human dignity regularly confirmed by the friendly nods of a congregation. I am glad that she is not so lonely anymore. This is more than all right with me.

  "She believes that Jesus was the Son of God, or perhaps God Himself—or however that goes. I have had even more trouble with the Trinity than I had with college algebra. I refer those who are curious about it to what is known about the Council of Nicea, which took place in anno Domini 325. It was there that the Trinity was hammered into its present shape. Unfortunately, the minutes have been lost. It is known that the emperor Constantine was there, and probably spoke a good deal. He gave us the first Christian army. He may have given us the Holy Ghost as well.

  "No matter. I do not argue with my Christian daughter about religion at all. Why should I? I have, however, begun to write a passion play for her which leaves God out entirely, but which manages to be spiritual anyway. It is still about Jesus Christ.

  "I will tell you only about the last scene:

  "The Roman soldiers, using ancient police methods, have done all they can to prove to Jesus that he has absolutely no dignity, so far as they can see. They have stripped him and whipped him. They have crowned him with thorns. They have made him drag his heavy cross through the streets. They have nailed his hands and feet to the cross. They have set the cross upright, so that he dangles in air.

  "A group of ordinary people, who out of pity would like to take him from the cross and lay him down somewhere, and bandage his wounds and give him food and water and so on, approach the cross. The Roman soldiers stop them, tell them that they can go to the foot of the cross if they like but that they must not touch Jesus in any way, lest they give him comfort of some kind.

  "That is the law.

  "So the ordinary people—men, women, and children-gather beneath Jesus. They talk to him, sing to him, in the hopes that some of it will help a little. They say how sorry for him they are. They try to feel some of his pain—as though whatever they could feel of it he would not have to feel. "They go down on their knees after a while. They are exhausted.

  "Now a rich Roman tourist, a man, a successful speculator in Mesopotamian millet futures, comes upon the scene. I make him rich, because everybody hates rich people so much. He is blasé about crucifixions, since he has seen so many strangers crucified all over the Roman Empire. Crosses then were as common as lampposts are today.

  "It seems to the tourist that the people on their knees, sighing and moaning, are worshiping this particular man on a cross. He says to them jocularly: 'My goodness! The way you are worshiping him, you would think he was the Son of your God.'

  "A spokesperson for the kneelers, perhaps Mary Magdalene, says to him, 'Oh no, sir. If he were the Son of our God, he would not need us. It is because he is a common human being exactly like us that we are here—doing, as common people must, what little we can.'

  "In this case this is not a dream. I thank you for your attention."

  OBSCENITY

  RIAH Pagan Cox was a gallant and pretty little woman from Columbia City, Indiana, which is in the northeast corner of the state, about halfway between Fort Wayne and Winona Lake. She was born into a so-called "good family," but her father was an alcoholic. He could not hold a job.

  So, although little more than a child, Riah set out to rescue herself and her brother and eventually their descendents from want and obscurity. She sent herself to the University of Wisconsin, and took a master's degree in the classics. Her thesis was a high school textbook on the Latin and Greek roots of common words in English. It was adopted by many school systems all over the country, and earned enough money to enable Riah to put her brother through medical school. He set up practice in Hollywood, and became the beloved obstetrician of many famous movie stars.

  She married a lawyer in Indianapolis who did not make much money. She took jobs teaching Latin and Greek and English, and became the Indianapolis representative for touring lecturers and musicians. She also sold silly, witty short stories to magazines from time to time. Thus was she able to send her son and daughter to the best private schools, even during the Great Depression. Her daughter became a Phi Beta Kappa at Swarthmore.

  She died three years ago, and is buried in Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis, somewhere between John Dillinger, the bank robber, and James Whitcomb Riley, the "Hoosier Poet." I liked her a lot. She was a good friend of mine. She was my first mother-in-law.

  I mention her in this chapter on obscenity because she imagined that I used certain impolite words in my books in order to cause a sensation, in order to make the books more popular. She told me as a friend that the words were having the opposite effect in her circle of friends, at least. Her friends could not bear to read me anymore.

  Indianapolis M
agazine said much the same thing in its article about me, from which I quoted in a previous chapter. It praised the themes of my early books, Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan, and Mother Night: "… anger at war and killing, at the void that technology is creating in contemporary life." But it went on to say: "From then on, though the themes remained constant, his style began to change. Small obscenities crept in, and four-letter words became frequent in Breakfast of Champions in a riot of indecorous line drawings and misbegotten words that were suggestive of a small boy sticking out his tongue at the teacher."

  This small boy, sticking out his tongue, was fifty years old at the time. It has been many decades since I have wished to shock a teacher or anyone. I did want to make the Americans in my books talk as Americans really do talk. I wanted to make jokes about our bodies. Why not? Why not, I ask again, especially since Riah Fagan Cox, God rest her soul, assured me that she herself was not wobbled by dirty words.

  If I had gone to Riah's friends, they would have told me, too, that they had heard all the dirty words I used many times before, that the words did not astonish them. They would have insisted that the words should not be published anyway. It was bad manners to use such words. Bad manners should be punished.

  But even when I was in grammar school, I suspected that warnings about words that nice people never used were in fact lessons in how to keep our mouths shut not just about our bodies, but about many, many things—perhaps too many things.

  When I was in the fourth grade or so, I had this hunch confirmed. My father hit me for my bad manners in front of guests. It was the only time either one of my parents ever hit me. I hadn't said "shit" or "piss" or "fart" or "fuck" or anything like that in front of the guests. I had asked them a question in the field of economics. But my father was so offended by my question that I might as well have called the guests "silly shitheads." They really were silly shitheads, by the way.