Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

by Kurt Vonnegut

  “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 Hider’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 yourself 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 ’Gerónimo!’ 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, Trinitarian-ism, 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.

&
nbsp; “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.”

  12

  OBSCENITY

  RIAH FAGAN 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 Magazine 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.

  The Great Depression was going on. The year would have been 1932. I had been taken out of private school a couple of years before, so that my classmates were no longer the children of the rich and the powerful. They were the children of mechanics and clerks and mailmen and so on. I thought it was wonderful that their mothers could cook. That was more than my own mother could do. Also, their fathers could fart around with motors and so on. Peer pressure, which is the most powerful force in the universe, had actually made me a scorner of my parents’ class.

  But I was polite enough when these two silly upper-class shitheads came over to our house one night. They were husband and wife. I remember their names well enough, but I will call them “Bud and Mary Swan.” This was at a time when securities had become nearly worthless, when many banks had closed forever. Factories and stores were dead. But the Swans had arrived in a new Marmon, and Mrs. Swan had a new fur coat and a new star sapphire ring.

  We all had to look out through the front door at the car, and then at the coat and the ring. So Mother and Father, with their nice manners, said they were glad that things were going so well for the Swans. The whole thing looked fishy to me. Everybody else was broke. Where would the Swans get all that money? It was as though this one couple had been allowed to defy the law of gravity.

  Mother and Father told me to take another look at the sapphire, so I could see the beautiful star in there. So I did. But then, to get a better understanding of what was going on, I asked Mr. Swan how much the ring had cost him. That was when Father hit me. He hit me with an underhand blow to the seat of my pants. It lofted me in the direction of the staircase, and I just kept on going upstairs to my bedroom. I was mad.

  Now then: As my parents would eventually discover, to their grief, the Swans were cat’s-paws for confidence men. They had been bankrolled by crooks to put on a show for friends of theirs who might still have a little money squirreled away somewhere. My parents would want to know where the Swans got all their easy money. My parents needed some easy money, too. If they didn’t find it somewhere, they would be bounced forever from the upper class. As I say, I myself had already sunk into the lower orders.

  The Swans said that they had invested what little they had left after the crash of the securities market in a wonderful company which wanted to keep itself a secret. It was quietly putting together a coal monopoly which would be as rich and powerful as Standard Oil. It was buying mines and barge lines and controlling interest in coal-hauling railroads, was getting them for a minor fraction of their true value since it was paying cash. Almost nobody else had cash. The cash was coming from individuals like the Swans and my parents, who could keep a secret, and who could scrape up a little something from the bottoms of their barrels, if they really tried.

  The value of the company would increase at least a hundred times, the instant prosperity returned to the world. Meanwhile, the company was already paying dividends because it was so efficient. It was the dividends which had bought the Marmon and the coat and the star sapphire ring.

  My parents of course invested. They found buyers somewhere, I suppose, for some of their oil paintings or oriental rugs, or for some of Father’s fine guns. During the boom years, Father had been a collector of guns.

  My parents had been taught such nice manners in childhood that it was actually impossible for them
to suspect that these old friends of theirs were in league with crooks. They had no simple and practical vocabularies for the parts and functions of their excretory and reproductive systems, and no such vocabularies for treachery and hypocrisy, either. Good manners had made them defenseless against predatory members of their own class.

  There we have our old friend peer pressure again, of course.

  And there was no coal monopoly, of course. Whoever got my parents’ money spent most of it on racehorses and chorus girls, probably, except for maybe a quarter of it, which they sent to the Swans as dividends.

  • • •

  I had a telephone conversation recently with a young Indianapolis cousin, a married woman, during which I said that I dreaded coming out there, since I did not consider it possible that my older relatives could love me but hate my books so. She replied that I had to understand that they were all Victorians and too old to change. They could not help themselves when it came to loathing dirty books.

  So I thought about Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and the Empress of India, who lived from 1819, long before my first ancestor arrived in this country, until 1901, when my father was a junior in Shortridge High School. And I asked myself why any mention of bodily functions should have pained this queen so.

  I cannot believe that Victoria herself would have suffered a moment’s genuine dismay if I had shown her the picture of my asshole which I drew for my book Breakfast of Champions. My asshole looks like this:

  I also feature my asshole in my signature, which looks like this:

  What would Queen Victoria really feel in the presence of what she had declared to be obscenities? That her power to intimidate was being attacked ever so slightly, far, far from its center, was being attacked where it could not matter much as yet—was being attacked way out on the edge. She created arbitrary rules for that outermost edge to warn her of the approach of anyone so crude, so rash as to bring to her attention the suffering of the Irish, or the cruelties of the factory system, or the privileges of the nobility, or the approach of a world war, and on and on? If she would not even acknowledge that human beings sometimes farted, how could she be expected to hear without swooning of these other things?