Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage

  Such a sop to civilian sensibilities nowadays would seem as unintentionally hilarious as a love scene between Gloria Swan-son and Rudolph Valentino. Consider the flying machines built since World War II on exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum. Everybody knows that the main business of the manufacturers of all of them has been the creation of devices both manned and unmanned whose purpose is to kill everything, whether animal or vegetable, within an enormous radius. (I am aware that the Soviet Union has made the same sorts of doomsday darts.)

  I was told sotto voce by a female museologist (with great legs) at Air and Space that the museum’s biggest supporters (weapons manufacturers) were not happy to have strategic bombing (dead and wounded civilians) discussed on that particular property, even though Tom Jones’s and my gloom was about to be dispelled by the sunshine of General Curtis LeMay, retired commander of the Strategic Air Command (who wanted to bomb North Vietnam back to the Stone Age). Why bring up the subject at all? They felt that the emphasis should be on high-speed transportation (“on errands not conspicuously improved,” according to Henry David Thoreau) and the exploration of space. Before my speech, in fact, my daughter Lily (later to be a standin for Muammar Qaddafi’s much younger dead Arab kid) watched a little bit of a movie about the opportunities in space, narrated by Walter Cronkite. (I know him. I know everybody.) Yes, and I may now have put my finger (although I doubt it) on why President George Bush took no notice in public of the departure of Voyager 2 from its native Solar System forever (“My work is done”). A whole lot of proud and well-heeled (thanks to the public treasury) voters in the space boondoggle might be thrown out of work (homeless) if it became generally known that the dove (Voyager 2) we sent out from this Ark floating in a flood of nothingness reported that there was only death and more death out there.

  Also: Children and neighbors of planet wreckers (polluters and clear-cutters and destroyers of salt marshes, and uranium miners and so on) might start looking at them askance if the President drew attention to the fact that this is the only inhabitable planet available to us within the next trillion years, give or take a few. (I am aware that everybody laughed at Christopher Columbus, who opened a lightly defended hemisphere to piracy and privateering which go on to this very day. Ever talk to a Hopi selling jewelry in a hotel lobby out in Santa Fe?) If I haven’t said so in print before (and I can’t stand to read myself), let me say now that most people find life so hard and disappointing (because they can’t make money or they hate their jobs or they can’t dance or can’t have as much fun fucking as we’re all supposed to, or they are no good at sports or are just plain sick, or their kids are a mess, or their mates hate them the way Xanthippe hated Socrates and Father’s mate hated him) that they don’t care if life goes on or not. So that is one reason why repairing this sinking Ark (with half the animals dead already) will be urgently discussed in some quarters but never implemented. (Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, a New York Times daily book reviewer, told me at a party maybe five years ago that he couldn’t stand to read me anymore, so that makes two of us.)

  So when the American ad agency for Volkswagen asked me (along with several other fogbound futurologists) to compose a letter to Earthlings a century from now which would be used in a series of institutional ads in Time (no friends of mine), I wrote as follows:

  “Ladies & Gentlemen of A.D. 2088:

  “It has been suggested that you might welcome words of wisdom from the past, and that several of us in the twentieth century should send you some. Do you know this advice from Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: ‘This above all: to thine own self be true’? Or what about these instructions from St. John the Divine: ‘Fear God, and give glory to Him; for the hour of His judgment has come’? The best advice from my own era for you or for just about anybody anytime, I guess, is a prayer first used by alcoholics who hoped to never take a drink again: ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.’

  “Our century hasn’t been as free with words of wisdom as some others, I think, because we were the first to get reliable information about the human situation: how many of us there were, how much food we could raise or gather, how fast we were reproducing, what made us sick, what made us die, how much damage we were doing to the air and water and topsoil on which most life forms depended, how violent and heartless nature can be, and on and on. Who could wax wise with so much bad news pouring in?

  “For me, the most paralyzing news was that Nature was no conservationist. It needed no help from us in taking the planet apart and putting it back together some different way, not necessarily improving it from the viewpoint of living things. It set fire to forests with lightning bolts. It paved vast tracts of arable land with lava, which could no more support life than big-city parking lots. It had in the past sent glaciers down from the North Pole to grind up major portions of Asia, Europe, and North America. Nor was there any reason to think that it wouldn’t do that again someday. At this very moment it is turning African farms to deserts, and can be expected to heave up tidal waves or shower down white-hot boulders from outer space at any time. It has not only exterminated exquisitely evolved species in a twinkling, but drained oceans and drowned continents as well. If people think Nature is their friend, then they sure don’t need an enemy.

  “Yes, and as you people a hundred years from now must know full well, and as your grandchildren will know even better: Nature is ruthless when it comes to matching the quantity of life in any given place at any given time to the quantity of nourishment available. So what have you and Nature done about overpopulation? Back here in 1988, we were seeing ourselves as a new sort of glacier, warm-blooded and clever, unstoppable, about to gobble up everything and then make love—and then double in size again.

  “On second thought, I am not sure I could bear to hear what you and Nature may have done about too many people for too small a food supply.

  “And here is a crazy idea I would like to try on you: Is it possible that we aimed rockets with hydrogen bomb warheads at each other, all set to go, in order to take our minds off the deeper problem—how cruelly Nature can be expected to treat us, Nature being Nature, in the by-and-by?

  “Now that we can discuss the mess we are in with some precision, I hope you have stopped choosing abysmally ignorant optimists for positions of leadership. They were useful only so long as nobody had a clue as to what was really going on—during the past seven million years or so. In my time, they have been catastrophic as heads of sophisticated institutions with real work to do.

  “The sort of leaders we need now are not those who promise ultimate victory over Nature through perseverance in living as we do right now, but those with the courage and intelligence to present to the world what appear to be Nature’s stern but reasonable surrender terms:

  Reduce and stabilize your population.

  Stop poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil.

  Stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems.

  Teach your kids, and yourselves, too, while you’re at it, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.

  Stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.

  Stop thinking your grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is really mean and stupid.

  And so on. Or else.

  “Am I too pessimistic about life a hundred years from now? Maybe I have spent too much time with scientists and not enough time with speechwriters for politicians. For all I know, even bag ladies and bag gentlemen will have their own personal helicopters or rocket belts in A.D. 2088. Nobody will have to leave home to go to work or school, or even stop watching television. Everybody will sit around all day punching the keys of computer terminals connected to everything there is, and sip orange drink through straws like the astronauts.”

  So ends my letter to t
he people of 2088. Lily Vonnegut might still be alive to receive it. But she would be 105 years old by then!

  As though I hadn’t already given the world more than enough reasons to feel miserable, I sold this bouquet of sunbeams and bubbling laughter to Lear’s magazine:

  “In the children’s fable The White Deer, by the late American humorist James Thurber, the Royal Astronomer in a medieval court reports that all the stars are going out. What has really happened is that the astronomer has grown old and is going blind. That was Thurber’s condition, too, when he wrote his tale. He was making fun of a sort of old poop who imagined that life was ending not merely for himself but for the whole universe. Inspired by Thurber, then, I choose to call any old poop who writes a popular book saying that the world, or at least his own country, is done for, a ‘Royal Astronomer’ and his subject matter ‘Royal Astronomy.’

  “Since I myself have become an old poop at last, perhaps I, too, should write such a book. But it is hard for me to follow the standard formula for successful Royal Astronomy, a formula going back who knows how far, maybe to the invention of printing by the Chinese a couple of thousand years ago. The formula is, of course: ‘Things aren’t as good as they used to be. The young people don’t know anything and don’t want to know anything. We have entered a steep decline!’

  “But have we? Back when I was a kid, lynchings of black people were reported almost every week, and always went unpunished. Apartheid was as sternly enforced in my hometown, which was Indianapolis, as it is in South Africa nowadays. Many great universities, including those in the Ivy League, rejected most of the Jews who applied for admission solely because of their Jewishness, and had virtually no Jews and absolutely no blacks, God knows, on their faculties.

  “I am going to ask a question—and President Reagan, please don’t answer: Those were the good old days?

  “When I was a kid during the Great Depression, when it was being demonstrated most painfully that prosperity was not a natural by-product of liberty, books by Royal Astronomers were as popular as they are today. They said, as most of them do today, that the country was falling apart because the young people were no longer required to read Plato and Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius and St. Augustine and Montaigne and the like, whose collective wisdom was the foundation of any decent and just and productive society.

  “Back in the Great Depression, the Royal Astronomers used to say that a United States deprived of that wisdom was nothing but a United States of radio quiz shows and music straight out of the jungles of Darkest Africa. They say now that the same subtraction leaves us a United States of nothing but television quiz shows and rock and roll, which leads, they say, inexorably to dementia. But I find uncritical respect for most works by great thinkers of long ago unpleasant, because they almost all accepted as natural and ordinary the belief that females and minority races and the poor were on earth to be uncomplaining, hardworking, respectful, and loyal servants of white males, who did the important thinking and exercised leadership.

  “Such wisdom is a foundation on which only white males can build. And there is a lot of it in the Holy Bible, I’m sorry to say.

  “I went to a big luncheon last week for a vice-president of the filmmakers’ union of the USSR, a kind and hopeful man as nearly as I could tell. Everybody was asking him about glasnost and all that. Would there really be more freedom in his country? And what about all the political prisoners still in the gulag and the mental hospitals? And what about the Jews who weren’t allowed to emigrate? And so on.

  “The experiment with more freedom and justice was just beginning, he said, but there were encouraging signs in the arts. All sorts of suppressed books and movies were being released. The demand was so great for writings previously taboo, he said, that there was a terrific paper shortage. Artists and intellectuals were elated. But most ordinary workers, to whom freedom of expression wasn’t so important, were waiting to see if glasnost was somehow going to get them better food and shelter and clothing, and cars and appliances and other things of that sort, which, unfortunately, were not among the inevitable results of increased freedom.

  “Alcoholism continues to make a lot of trouble over there, just as alcoholism and cocaine addiction are making a lot of trouble over here. Both are severe public-health problems not notably responsive to whether the sufferer is politically free or not.

  “So what is going on over there is really a touching thing for us to watch and hear about, an honest effort to give the common people of a powerful nation more liberty than they or their ancestors have ever known. If the experiment goes on for any length of time—and just a few people could shut it down instantly—we can expect to see it dawn on the citizens of the Soviets that liberty, like virtue, is its own reward, which can be a disappointment. There as here and, in fact, almost everywhere on the planet, the great mass of human beings yearns for rewards that are more substantial.

  “After that lunch I pondered my own country’s continuing experiments with liberty, which have been going on for more than two centuries. The Soviet Union has been a Workers’ Paradise only since 1922, coincidentally the same year I was born into this so-called Beacon of Liberty to the Rest of the World.

  “And I said to the guest of honor, through an interpreter, that maybe the Soviet Union wasn’t doing half badly, since in my own country slavery was perfectly legal for almost a hundred years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I said that even the saintly Thomas Jefferson owned slaves.

  “I did not mention our genocide of Indians back in my great-grandfather’s time. That would have been too much. I talk about that and think about that as little as possible. Thank God it isn’t taught in school much.

  “Our own country has a glasnost experiment going on, too, of course. It consists of making women and racial minorities the equals of white males, in terms of both the civility and respect to be accorded them and their rights under the law. This would seem an abomination to the ancient wise men whose works our young people are dangerously, supposedly, neglecting in favor of rock and roll.

  “A proper reply by the American people to Royal Astronomers who denounce that neglect, it seems to me, would go something like this: ‘Almost none of the ancient wise men believed in real equality, and neither do you—but we believe in it.’

  “Is there nothing about the United States of my youth, aside from youth itself, that I miss sorely now? There is one thing I miss so much that I can hardly stand it, which is freedom from the certain knowledge that human beings will very soon have made this moist, blue-green planet uninhabitable by human beings. There is no stopping us. We will continue to breed like rabbits. We will continue to engage in technological nincompoopery with hideous side effects unforeseen. We will make only token repairs on our cities now collapsing. We will not clean up much of the poisonous mess that we ourselves have made.

  “If flying-saucer creatures or angels or whatever were to come here in a hundred years, say, and find us gone like the dinosaurs, what might be a good message for humanity to leave for them, maybe carved in great big letters on a Grand Canyon wall?

  “Here is this old poop’s suggestion:

  WE PROBABLY COULD HAVE SAVED OURSELVES,

  BUT WERE TOO DAMNED LAZY TO TRY VERY HARD.

  “We might well add this:

  AND TOO DAMN CHEAP.

  “So it’s curtains not just for me as i grow old. it’s curtains for everyone. how’s that for full-strength royal astronomy?”

  XII

  “MIT has played an important part in the history of my branch of the Vonnegut family. My father and grandfather took degrees in architecture here. My Uncle Pete flunked out of here. My only brother Bernard, nine years my senior, took a doctor’s degree in chemistry here. Father and Grandfather became self-employed architects and partners. Uncle Pete became a building contractor, also self-employed. My brother knew early on that he would be a research scientist, and so could not be self-employed. If he was to have room enough and
equipment enough to do what he did best, then he was going to have to work for somebody else. Who would that be?”

  Such was what I considered a tantalizing beginning of a speech I gave at MIT back in 1985. (There have been times when I was nutty enough to believe that I might change the course of history a tiny bit, and this was one of them.) There in Kresge Auditorium I had a full house of young people who could do what the magician Merlin could only pretend to do in the Court of King Arthur, in Camelot. They could turn loose or rein in enormous forces (invisible as often as not) in the service or disservice of this or that enterprise (such as Star Wars).

  “Most of you,” I went on, “will soon face my brother’s dilemma when he graduated from here. In order to survive and even prosper, most of you will have to make somebody else’s technological dreams come true—along with your own, of course. You will have to form that mixture of dreams we call a partnership—or more romantically, a marriage.

  “My brother got his doctorate in 1938, I think. If he had gone to work in Germany after that, he would have been helping to make Hitler’s dreams come true. If he had gone to work in Italy, he would have been helping to make Mussolini’s dreams come true. If he had gone to work in Japan, he would have been helping to make Tojo’s dreams come true. If he had gone to work in the Soviet Union, he would have been helping to make Stalin’s dreams come true. He went to work for a bottle manufacturer in Butler, Pennsylvania, instead. It can make quite a difference not just to you but to humanity: the sort of boss you choose, whose dreams you help come true.