If This Isn't Nice, What Is?

by Kurt Vonnegut

  All he had to do was say he would not cut and run, no matter what happened in Iraq or Afghanistan. Where in heck can you cut and run to from Crawford, Texas? Dubuque, Iowa? Spokane?

  And you know why I think he was so pissed off at Arabs? They invented algebra.

  Arabs also invented the numbers we use, including a symbol for nothing, which nobody else had ever had before.

  You think Arabs are dumb? Try doing long division with Roman numerals.

  We’re spreading democracy, are we? Same way European explorers brought Christianity to the Indians, what we now call “Native Americans.” There’s this story about Spaniards who were about to burn a Native American alive because he had been uppity some way. And he was lashed to the stake, about to entertain, and a Spaniard tied a cross to the end of a long stick, and he held it up so the Native American could kiss it.

  And the Native American asked why he should kiss it, and the Spaniard said if he kissed it he could get into Heaven. And the Native American asked if there were Spaniards in Heaven. He was told there were, and the Native American said he certainly didn’t want to go there.

  How ungrateful he was! How ungrateful are the people of Baghdad.

  So let’s give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That’ll teach Al Qaeda a lesson it won’t soon forget. Hail to the Chief.

  That chief and his cohorts had as little to do with democracy as those Spaniards had to do with Jesus. We the people had absolutely no say in whatever they chose to do next. In case you hadn’t noticed, they cleaned out the treasury, passing it out to pals in the war and national security rackets, leaving your generation and the next one with a perfectly enormous debt which you’ll be asked to repay.

  Nobody let out a peep when they did that to you, because big money and TV have disconnected every burglar alarm in the Constitution: The House, the Senate, the Supreme Court and the FBI, and We the People.

  About my own history of foreign substance abuse. By the grace of God or whatever, I am not an alcoholic, largely a matter of genes. I take a couple of drinks now and then, and will do it again tonight. But two is my limit. No problem.

  I am of course notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other.

  And I’ve been a coward about heroin and cocaine and LSD and so on, afraid they might put me over the edge, and, unlike my son Mark, I might never come back again. I did smoke a joint of marijuana one time with Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, just to be sociable. It didn’t seem to do anything to me, one way or the other, so I never did it again.

  But I’ll tell you one thing: I once had a high that not even crack cocaine could match. That was when I got my first driver’s license! Look out, world, here comes Kurt Vonnegut. I’m what a car is now. I’m a hundred horsepower now, which is eleven hundred manpower, so don’t mess with me. Hiya, Babe, you want a lift somewhere?

  And my car back then, a Studebaker, as I recall, was powered, as are almost all means of transportation and other machinery today, and electric power plants and furnaces, by the most addictive and destructive drugs of all, which are fossil fuels, so easy to set afire.

  When you got here, even when I got here, the industrialized world was already hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there won’t be any more of those. Cold turkey.

  You’ve heard of “crack babies”? Those are babies who come into the world already hooked on crack because their mothers were hooked on crack. Well, we are all fossil fuel babies.

  As I speak, we are burning the last whiffs and drops and chunks of fossil fuels in a binge of thermodynamic whoopee. And while we do that, our waste products continue to make the air unbreathable and the water undrinkable, and more and more life forms are dying because of us.

  This is a university, isn’t it? Isn’t it OK to tell young people the truth here? I mean this isn’t like TV news, is it?

  And here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.

  And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, we are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.

  But relax. I’ve got a joke that will dispel the gloom. It’s another Martian joke. This is it, and no matter what, we’ve still got music and our sense of humor:

  There’s bad news and good news tonight, my friends. The bad news is the Martians have landed in New York City and are staying at the Waldorf-Astoria.

  The good news is they only eat homeless people and they pee gasoline.

  Put some of that pee in a Ferrari, and you can go a hundred miles an hour. If you’re a guy, you can have babes like you can’t believe. Put some in an airplane and you can go as fast as a bullet, and drop all kinds of crap on the Arabs below. Put some in a school bus, it’ll get the kids to and from school. Put some in a fire engine, and it will get firemen to a fire, so they can put the fire out. Put some in a Honda, and it’ll get you to work, and then back home again.

  And wait till you hear what the Martians poop. It’s uranium. Just one of them can light and heat every home and school and church and business in Tacoma.

  What’s it like to be my age? I can’t parallel park worth a darn anymore, so please don’t watch while I try to do it. And gravity has become a lot less friendly and manageable than it used to be.

  I have also become a flaming neuter. I am as celibate as fifty percent of the heterosexual Roman Catholic clergy. And celibacy is no root canal. It’s so cheap and convenient. You don’t have to do or say anything afterwards, because there is no afterwards.

  And when my tantrum, which is what I call my TV set, flashes boobs and smiles in my face, and says everybody but me is going to get laid tonight, and this is a national emergency, so I’ve got to rush out and buy a car or pills, or a folding gymnasium I can hide under my bed, I laugh like a hyena. I know and you know that millions and millions of good Americans, present company not excepted, are not going to get laid tonight.

  And we flaming neuters vote! So I am looking forward to the day when the President of the United States, no less, who probably isn’t going to get laid that night, declares a National Neuter Pride Day. And out of our closets we’ll come by the millions. Shoulders squared, chins held high, we’ll go marching up Main Streets all over this boob-crazed democracy of ours, and laughing like hyenas.

  But hey, listen: I got a letter from a sappy woman a while back. She knew I was sappy, too, a Franklin Roosevelt Democrat, a friend of the working stiffs. She was about to have a baby, not mine. She wanted to know if it was a mistake to bring an innocent little baby into a world as awful as this one is. I told her that what made life almost worth living for me was the saints I met. These were people who behaved compassionately and capably, no matter what, and they could be anywhere.

  So maybe some of you tonight are or may became saints for her child to meet. Most of us are loaded with Original Sin. But a surprising number of us, not me, God knows, are loaded with Original Virtue. Ain’t that sweet?

  So now it’s time for me to teach creative writing.

  First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.

  And I realize that some of you may be having trouble deciding whether I am kidding or not. So from now on I will thumb my nose at you like when I’m kidding.

  For instance? Join the National Guard or the Marines and teach democracy. (NOSE)

  If I give you the finger, (FINGER) it means Spokane is about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. In that case wave flags, if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. Please don’t get the two signals mixed up, or you might accidentally start World War III.

  I will now exit while The Blue Danube comes over the PA system. Please waltz out as you leave.

  DON’T DESPAIR IF YOU NEVER WENT TO COLLEGE!

  The Indiana author celebrates some self-taught Midwesterners w
ho made waves from sea to shining sea. As a young man, Vonnegut once considered becoming a labor organizer, and he admired and honored those who fought for the rights of wage earners everywhere. As a member of PEN International, he fought for the rights of writers around the world.10

  We are America’s Great Lakes people, her freshwater people, not an oceanic but a continental people. Whenever I swim in an ocean, I feel as though I am swimming in chicken soup.

  I thank you for this honor11, although it is a reminder that I am not nearly the passionate and effective artist Carl Sandburg was. And we are surely grateful for his fog which came in on little cat feet. But tonight seems an apt occasion as well for celebrating what he and other American socialists did during the first half of the past century, with art, with eloquence, with organizing skills, to elevate the self-respect, the dignity, and political acumen of American wage earners, of our working class.

  That wage earners, without social position or higher education or wealth, are of inferior intellect is surely belied by the fact that two of the most splendid writers and speakers on the deepest subjects in American history were self-taught workmen. I speak, of course, of Carl Sandburg of Illinois, and Abraham Lincoln, of Kentucky, then Indiana, and finally Illinois. Both, may I say, were continental, freshwater people like ourselves.

  Hooray for our team!

  I know upper-class graduates of Yale University who can’t talk or write worth a nickel.

  Socialism is no more an evil word than Christianity. Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal, and should not starve.

  Adolf Hitler, incidentally, was a two-fer. He named his party the National Socialists, the Nazis. Hitler also had crosses painted on his tanks and airplanes. The swastika wasn’t a pagan symbol, as so many people believe. It was a working person’s Christian cross, made of axes, of tools.

  About Stalin’s shuttered churches, and those in China today: Such suppression of religion was supposedly justified by Karl Marx’s statement that “Religion is the opium of the people.” Marx said that back in 1844, when opium and opium derivatives were the only effective pain killers anyone could take. Marx himself had taken them. He was grateful for the temporary relief they had given him. He was simply noticing, and surely not condemning, the fact that religion could also be comforting to those in economic or social distress. It was a casual truism, not a dictum.

  When Marx wrote those words, by the way, we hadn’t even freed our slaves yet. Whom do you imagine was more pleasing in the eyes of a merciful God back then? Karl Marx or the United States of America?

  Stalin was happy to take Marx’s truism as a decree, and Chinese tyrants as well, since it seemingly empowered them to put preachers out of business who might speak ill of them or their goals.

  The statement has also entitled many in this country to say that socialists are anti-religion, are anti-God, and therefore absolutely loathsome.

  I never met Carl Sandburg, and wish I had. I would have been tongue-tied in the presence of such a national treasure. I did get to know one socialist of his generation, who was Powers Hapgood of Indianapolis. After graduating from Harvard, he went to work as a coal miner, urging his working-class brothers to organize, in order to get better pay and safer working conditions. He also led protesters at the execution of the anarchists Nicolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in Massachusetts in 1927.

  Another of our freshwater ancestors was Eugene Victor Debs, of Terre Haute, Indiana. A former locomotive fireman, Eugene Debs ran for President of the United States four times, the fourth time in 1920, when he was in prison. He said, “As long as there is a lower class, I’m in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it. As long as there’s a soul in prison, I am not free.” Some platform.

  A paraphrase of the Beatitudes.

  And again: Hooray for our team.

  And our own beloved Carl Sandburg had this to say about the fire-belching evangelist Billy Sunday:

  You come along—tearing your shirt—yelling about Jesus. I want to know what the hell you know about Jesus?

  Jesus had a way of talking soft, and everybody except a few bankers and higher-ups among the con men of Jerusalem liked to have Jesus around because he never made any fake passes, and he helped the sick and gave people hope.

  You come along calling us all damn fools—so fierce the froth of your own spit slobbers over your lips—always blabbering we’re all going to hell straight off and you know all about it.

  I’ve read Jesus’ words. I know what he said. You don’t throw any scare into me. I’ve got your number. I know how much you know about Jesus.

  You tell people living in shanties Jesus is going to fix it up all right with them by giving them mansions in the skies after they’re dead and the worms have eaten ’em.

  You tell $6 a week department store girls all they need is Jesus. You take a steel trust wop, dead without having lived, gray and shrunken at forty years of age, and you tell him to look at Jesus on the cross and he’ll be all right.

  You tell poor people they don’t need any more money on pay day, and even if it’s fierce to be out of a job, Jesus’ll fix that all right, all right—all they gotta do is take Jesus the way you say.

  Jesus played it different. The bankers and corporation lawyers of Jerusalem got their murderers to go after Jesus because Jesus wouldn’t play their game.

  I don’t want a lot of gab from a bunkshooter in my religion.

  Hooray for our team.

  And I now take advantage of your hospitality by declaring myself a child of the Chicago Renaissance, powerfully humanized not only by Carl Sandburg, but by Edgar Lee Masters and Jane Addams and Louis Sullivan and Lake Michigan, and on and on.

  And I propose a toast to an individual who wasn’t an artist or working stiff of any description. She wasn’t even a human being. Ladies and gentlemen of Chicago, I give you Mrs. O’Leary’s cow12.

  WHAT THE “GHOST DANCE” OF THE NATIVE AMERICANS AND THE CUBIST MOVEMENT OF FRENCH PAINTERS HAD IN COMMON

  In which Vonnegut tells how his own fiction writing was inspired by the professor who was “low man on the totem pole” in the University of Chicago Anthropology Department.13

  A young woman told me a couple of years ago that she had applied for admission here. The man who interviewed her asked her why she had found the place attractive. She said it was because Philip Roth and I had both gone here, along with many other considerations, of course. He replied that Philip and I were precisely the sorts of persons who never should have gone here. What could he have meant by that? If he is in this audience, I would appreciate meeting and talking to him afterwards.

  I came here14 in 1946, immediately following my participation in a war. It was the Second World War, a name and event worthy of H.G. Wells. That war ended with our dropping atomic bombs on the civilians, and their pets and house plants, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, quite a surprise to one and all. That such bombs were possible was first demonstrated in the abandoned football stadium of this very university, where the importance of contact sports had been discounted. The university president at that time, Robert Maynard Hutchins, was famous for saying that, whenever he felt in need of exercise, he lay down until the feeling passed. He finally wound up in a California think tank.

  So far as I know, the only Second World War weapon worth a nickel to come out of Harvard, which thinks it’s such hot stuff, was Napalm or jellied gasoline.

  I came here from Indianapolis. In those days, that was like a provincial Frenchman’s coming to Paris, or an Austrian bumpkin’s coming to Vienna, or, as in the case of Adolf Hitler, to Munich, Germany.

  In those days, thanks again to Robert Maynard Hutchins, the undergraduate course consisted of only two years devoted to a study of the so-called Great Books. Philip Roth i
s a product of that short course. We would not meet until many years afterwards. The graduate school was everything past what would have been the sophomore year at other American institutions. Like many returning veterans with more than two years’ worth of credits from someplace else, I was admitted to this unconventional graduate school, with three or four years to go before qualifying for an MA.

  The credits I brought with me were near-flunks in chemistry, physics, math, and biology. I had actually twice flunked a course whose purpose is to exclude people like me from careers as scientists, which is thermodynamics.

  Despite my inability to o’er-leap the intellectual barrier of thermodynamics, or pile of shit, if you like, I still wanted to be respected as a person who thought scientifically, who loved the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It was obvious that only a pseudoscience was a possibility for me. Ideally, I thought, it should be a pseudoscience socially superior to astrology, meteorology, hairdressing, economics, or embalming.

  The two most prominent such, then as now, were psychoanalysis and cultural anthropology. Both were based, then as now, on what had regularly sent innocent persons to the electric chair or the hot squat, which is human testimony, which is blah-blah-blah. I chose cultural anthropology. The result now stands before you.

  Much has been written about the effects on institutions of higher learning of the sudden influx of veterans after my war. One thing it did was bamboozle many teachers whose authority and glamour was based on their having seen a lot more of life and the world than their students had. In seminars I would occasionally try to talk about something I had observed about human beings while a soldier, as a prisoner of war, as a family man. I had a wife and kid then. This turned out to be very bad manners, like coming to a crap game with loaded dice. No fair.

  Also: We were so innocent.

  In retrospect, my trying to become a member of the Anthropology Department was like visiting a kibbutz, a kibbutz as described by Bruno Bettelheim in The Children of the Dream. We returning veterans were mildly interesting strangers to be treated politely, with our understanding and theirs that we would soon go away again. And we did.