Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series)

by Kurt Vonnegut

  “If we were up on crosses, with nails through our feet and hands, wouldn’t we wish that we still had hydrogen bombs, so that life could be ended everywhere? Absolutely.

  “We know of one person who was crucified in olden times, who was supposedly as capable as we or the Russians are of ending life everywhere. But He chose to endure agony instead. All He said was, ‘Forgive them, Father—they know not what they do.’

  “He let life go on, as awful as it was for Him, because here we are, aren’t we?

  “But He was a special case. It is unfair to use Jesus Christ as an exemplar of how much pain and humiliation we ordinary human beings should put up with before calling for the end of everything.

  “I don’t believe that we are about to be crucified. No potential enemy we now face has anywhere near enough carpenters. Not even people at the Pentagon at budget time have mentioned crucifixion. I am sorry to have to put that idea into their heads. I will have only myself to blame if, a year from now, the Joint Chiefs of Staff testify under oath that we are on the brink of being crucified.

  “But what if they said, instead, that we would be enslaved if we did not appropriate enough money for weaponry? That could be true. Despite our worldwide reputation for sloppy workmanship, wouldn’t some enemy get a kick out of forcing us into involuntary servitude, buying and selling us like so many household appliances or farm machines or inflatable erotic toys?

  “And slavery would surely be a fate worse than death. We can agree on that, I’m sure. We should send a message to the Pentagon: ‘If Americans are about to become enslaved, it is Kool-Aid time.’

  “They will know what we mean.

  “Of course, at Kool-Aid time all higher forms of life on Earth, not just we and our enemies, will be killed. Even those beautiful and fearless and utterly stupid seabirds the defenseless blue-footed boobies of the Galapagos Islands will die, because we object to slavery.

  “I have seen those birds, by the way—up close. I could have unscrewed their heads, if I had wanted to. I made a trip to the Galapagos Islands two months ago—in the company of, among other people, Paul Moore, Jr., the bishop of this very cathedral.

  “That is the sort of company I keep these days—everything from bishops to blue-footed boobies. I have never seen a human slave, though. But my four great-grandfathers saw slaves. When they came to this country in search of justice and opportunity, there were millions of Americans who were slaves. The equation which links a strong defense posture to not being enslaved is laid down in that stirring fight song, much heard lately, ‘Rule, Britannia.’ I will sing the equation:

  “ ‘Rule, Britannia; Britannia, rule the waves—’

  “That, of course, is a poetic demand for a Navy second to none. I now sing the next line, which explains why it is essential to have a Navy that good:

  “ ‘Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.’

  “It may surprise some of you to learn what an old equation that is. The Scottish poet who wrote it, James Thomson, died in 1748—about a quarter of a century before there was such a country as the United States of America. Thomson promised Britons that they would never be slaves, at a time when the enslavement of persons with inferior weaponry was a respectable industry. Plenty of people were going to be slaves, and it would serve them right, too—but Britons would not be among them.

  “So that isn’t really a very nice song. It is about not being humiliated, which is all right. But it is also about humiliating others, which is not a moral thing to do. The humiliation of others should never be a national goal.

  “There is one poet who should have been ashamed of himself.

  “If the Soviet Union came over here and enslaved us, it wouldn’t be the first time Americans were slaves. If we conquered the Russians and enslaved them, it wouldn’t be the first time Russians were slaves.

  “And the last time Americans were slaves, and the last time Russians were slaves, they displayed astonishing spiritual strengths and resourcefulness. They were good at loving one another. They trusted God. They discovered in the simplest, most natural satisfactions reasons to be glad to be alive. They were able to believe that better days were coming in the sweet by-and-by. And here is a fascinating statistic: They committed suicide less often than their masters did.

  “So Americans and Russians can both stand slavery, if they have to—and still want life to go on and on.

  “Could it be that slavery isn’t a fate worse than death? After all, people are tough. Maybe we shouldn’t send that message to the Pentagon—about slavery and Kool-Aid time.

  “But suppose enemies came ashore in great numbers because we lacked the means to stop them, and they pushed us out of our homes and off our ancestral lands, and into swamps and deserts. Suppose that they even tried to destroy our religion, telling us that our Great God Jehovah, or whatever we wanted to call Him, was as ridiculous as a piece of junk jewelry.

  “Again: This is a wringer millions of Americans have already been through—or are still going through. It is another catastrophe Americans can endure, if they have to—still, miraculously, maintaining some measure of dignity, or self-respect.

  “As bad as life is for our Indians, they still like it better than death.

  “So I haven’t had much luck, have I, in identifying fates worse than death? Crucifixion is the only clear winner so far, and we aren’t about to be crucified. We aren’t about to be enslaved, either—to be treated the way white Americans used to treat black Americans. And no potential enemy that I have heard of wants to come over here to treat all of us the way we still treat American Indians.

  “What other fates worse than death could I name? Life without petroleum?

  “In melodramas of a century ago, a female’s loss of virginity outside of holy wedlock was sometimes spoken of as a fate worse than death. I hope that isn’t what the Pentagon or the Kremlin has in mind—but you never know.

  “I would rather die for virginity than for petroleum, I think. It’s more literary, somehow.

  “I may be blinding myself to the racist aspects of hydrogen bombs, whose only function is to end everything. Perhaps there are tribulations that white people should not be asked to tolerate. But the Russians’ slaves were white. The supposedly unen-slavable Britons were enslaved by the Romans. Even proud Britons, if they were enslaved now, would have to say, ‘Here we go again.’ Armenians and Jews have certainly been treated hideously in modern as well as ancient times—and they have still wanted life to go on and on and on. About a third of our own white people were robbed and ruined and scorned after our Civil War. They still wanted life to go on and on and on.

  “Have there ever been large numbers of human beings of any sort who have not, despite everything, done all they could to keep life going on and on and on?

  “Soldiers.

  “ ‘Death before dishonor’ was the motto of several military formations during the Civil War—on both sides. It may be the motto of the 82nd Airborne Division right now. A motto like that made a certain amount of sense, I suppose, when military death was what happened to the soldier on the right or the left of you—or in front of you, or in back of you. But military death now can easily mean the death of everything, including, as I have already said, the blue-footed boobies of the Galapagos Islands.

  “The webbed feet of those birds really are the brightest blue, by the way. When two blue-footed boobies begin a courtship, they show each other what beautiful bright blue feet they have.

  “If you go to the Galapagos Islands, and see all the strange creatures, you are bound to think what Charles Darwin thought when he went there: How much time Nature has in which to accomplish simply anything. If we desolate this planet, Nature can get life going again. All it takes is a few million years or so, the wink of an eye to Nature.

  “Only humankind is running out of time.

  “My guess is that we will not disarm, even though we should, and that we really will blow up everything by and by. History shows that human be
ings are vicious enough to commit every imaginable atrocity, including the construction of factories whose only purpose is to kill people and burn them up.

  “It may be that we were put here on Earth to blow the place to smithereens. We may be Nature’s way of creating new galaxies. We may be programmed to improve and improve our weapons, and to believe that death is better than dishonor.

  “And then, one day, as disarmament rallies are being held all over the planet, ka-blooey! A new Milky Way is born.

  “Perhaps we should be adoring instead of loathing our hydrogen bombs. They could be the eggs for new galaxies.

  “What can save us? Divine intervention, certainly—and this is the place to ask for it. We might pray to be rescued from our inventiveness, just as the dinosaurs may have prayed to be rescued from their massiveness.

  “But the inventiveness which we so regret now may also be giving us, along with the rockets and warheads, the means to achieve what has hitherto been an impossibility, the unity of mankind. I am talking mainly about television sets.

  “Even in my own lifetime, it used to be necessary for a young soldier to get into fighting before he became disillusioned about war. His parents back home were equally ignorant, and believed him to be slaying monsters. But now, thanks to modern communications, the people of every industrialized nation are nauseated by the idea of war by the time they are ten years old. America’s first generation of television viewers has gone to war and come home again—and we have never seen veterans like them before.

  “What makes the Vietnam veterans so somehow spooky? We could describe them almost as being ‘unwholesomely mature.’ They have never had illusions about war. They are the first soldiers in history who knew even in childhood, from having heard and seen so many pictures of actual and restaged battles, that war is meaningless butchery of ordinary people like themselves.

  “It used to be that veterans could shock their parents when they came home, as Ernest Hemingway did, by announcing that everything about war was repulsive and stupid and dehumanizing. But the parents of our Vietnam veterans were disillusioned about war, too, many of them having seen it firsthand before their children went overseas. Thanks to modern communications, Americans of all ages were dead sick of war even before we went into Vietnam.

  “Thanks to modern communications, the poor, unlucky young people from the Soviet Union, now killing and dying in Afghanistan, were dead sick of war before they ever got there.

  “Thanks to modern communications, the same must be true of the poor, unlucky young people from Argentina and Great Britain, now killing and dying in the Falkland Islands. The New York Post calls them ‘Argies’ and ‘Brits.’ Thanks to modern communications, we know that they are a good deal more marvelous and complicated than that, and that what is happening to them down there, on the rim of the Antarctic, is a lot more horrible and shameful than a soccer match.

  “When I was a boy it was unusual for an American, or a person of any nationality for that matter, to know much about foreigners. Those who did were specialists—diplomats, explorers, journalists, anthropologists. And they usually knew a lot about just a few groups of foreigners, Eskimos maybe, or Arabs, or what have you. To them, as to the schoolchildren of Indianapolis, large areas of the globe were terra incognita.

  “Now look what has happened. Thanks to modern communications, we have seen sights and heard sounds from virtually every square mile of landmass on this planet. Millions of us have actually visited more exotic places than had explorers during my childhood. Many of you have been to Timbuktu. Many of you have been to Katmandu. My dentist just got home from Fiji. He told me all about Fiji. If he had taken his fingers out of my mouth, I would have told him about the Galapagos Islands.

  “So we now know for certain that there are no potential human enemies anywhere who are anything but human beings almost exactly like ourselves. They need food. How amazing. They love their children. How amazing. They obey their leaders. How amazing. They think like their neighbors. How amazing.

  “Thanks to modern communications, we now have something we never had before: reason to mourn deeply the death or wounding of any human being on any side in any war.

  “It was because of rotten communications and malicious, racist ignorance that we were able to celebrate the killing of almost all the inhabitants in Hiroshima, Japan, thirty-seven years ago. We thought they were vermin. They thought we were vermin. They would have clapped their little yellow hands with glee and grinned with their crooked buckteeth if they could have incinerated everybody in Kansas City, say.

  “Thanks to how much the people of the world now know about all the other people of the world, the fun of killing enemies has lost its zing. It has so lost its zing that no sane citizen of the Soviet Union, if we were to go to war with that society, would feel anything but horror if his country were to kill practically everybody in New York and Chicago and San Francisco. Killing enemies has so lost its zing that no sane citizen of the United States would feel anything but horror if our country were to kill practically everybody in Moscow and Leningrad and Kiev.

  “Or in Nagasaki, Japan, for that matter.

  “We have often heard it said that people would have to change, or we would go on having world wars. I bring you good news this morning: People have changed.

  “We aren’t so ignorant and bloodthirsty anymore.

  “I dreamed last night of our descendants a thousand years from now, which is to say all of humanity. If you’re at all into reproduction, as was the Emperor Charlemagne, you can pick up an awful lot of relatives in a thousand years. Every person in this cathedral who has a drop of white blood is a descendant of Charlemagne.

  “A thousand years from now, if there are still human beings on Earth, every one of those human beings will be descended from us—and from everyone who has chosen to reproduce.

  “In my dream, our descendants are numerous. Some of them are rich, some are poor, some are likable, some are insufferable.

  “I ask them how humanity, against all odds, managed to keep going for another millennium. They tell me that they and their ancestors did it by preferring life over death for themselves and others at every opportunity, even at the expense of being dishonored. They endured all sorts of insults and humiliations and disappointments without committing either suicide or murder. They are also the people who do the insulting and humiliating and disappointing.

  “I endear myself to them by suggesting a motto they might like to put on their belt buckles or T-shirts or whatever. They aren’t all hippies, by the way. They aren’t all Americans, either. They aren’t even all white people.

  “I give them a quotation from that great nineteenth-century moralist and robber baron, Jim Fisk, who may have contributed money to this cathedral.

  “Jim Fisk uttered his famous words after a particularly disgraceful episode having to do with the Erie Railroad. Fisk himself had no choice but to find himself contemptible. He thought this over, and then he shrugged and said what we all must learn to say if we want to go on living much longer: ‘Nothing is lost save honor.’

  “I thank you for your attention.”

  Here is how I happened to have the use of the high pulpit and public-address system of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (the biggest Gothic church in the world): The management invited several persons famously opposed to nuclear weaponry to preach on sequential Sundays in the spring of 1983. I was one of those, and I must have blown a gasket while solemnly mounting the pulpit stairs. Why do I say that? I was so blith-eringly optimistic! I was like a hack politician, saying what I thought would most please a particular audience, Lithuanian-Americans, leather workers, Daughters of the American Revolution, or whatever. My narrowly specialized audience was a gathering of war-haters on the edge of an enormously rich nation whose most fascinating projects and popular entertainments had to do with war, war, war.

  Three-quarters of my speech was truthful. But then came this whopper: That TV was a pacifier. If I had been i
n the congregation, and some other preacher had said that, I would have walked right out of that cathedral and slammed the two-ton door behind me. American TV, operating in the Free Market of Ideas (which I have said elsewhere is so good for us), was holding audiences with simulations of one of the two things most human beings, and especially young ones, can’t help watching when given the opportunity: murder. TV, and of course movies, too, were and still are making us as callous about killing and death as Hitler’s propaganda made the German people during the frenzied prelude to the death camps and World War II.

  Who needs a Joseph Goebbels to make us think killing is as quotidian an activity as tying one’s shoes? All that is needed is a TV industry which is self-supporting, which can’t make enough money to survive unless it gets a great big audience.

  What I should have said from the pulpit was that we weren’t going to Hell. We were in Hell, thanks to technology which was telling us what to do, instead of the other way around. And it wasn’t just TV. It was weapons which could actually kill everything half a world away. It was vehicles powered by glurp from underground which could make a fat old lady go a mile a minute while picking her nose and listening to the radio. And so on. (In what spiritual detail, I should have asked, did the glurp-powered automobile or Harley-Davidson differ from freebased cocaine? And was there anything we wouldn’t do to ensure that the glurp kept on coming? And were we all going to go positively apeshit when there was no more glurp?)

  On the subject of how casual technology had made us about war, I should have called attention to the transmogrification of my birthday, November 11, from Armistice Day to Veterans Day. When I was a boy, all human activity in Indianapolis (except for fucking, I suppose) stopped for one minute. That was the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was during that same minute back in 1918 when World War I stopped. (It wouldn’t start up again until 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland, or maybe in 1931, when the Japanese occupied Manchuria. What a mess!) On Armistice Day, children used to be told how horrible war was, how shameful and heartbreaking, which was right. The proper way to commemorate any war would be to paint ourselves blue and roll in the mud and grunt like pigs.