Strange
Weather Lately
By Kurt Vonnegut
In These Times
09 May, 2003
'The following
is adapted from a Clemens Lecture presented in April for the Mark Twain
House in Hartford, Connecticut.
First things first: I want it clearly understood that this mustache
Im wearing is my fathers mustache. I should have brought
his photograph. My big brother Bernie, now dead, a physical chemist
who discovered that silver iodide can sometimes make it snow or rain,
he wore it, too.
Speaking of weather: Mark
Twain said some readers complained that there wasnt enough weather
in his stories. So he wrote some weather, which they could insert wherever
they thought it would help some.
Mark Twain was said to have
shed a tear of gratitude and incredulousness when honored for his writing
by Oxford University in England. And I should shed a tear, surely, having
been asked at the age of 80, and because of what I myself have written,
to speak under the auspices of the sacred Mark Twain House here in Hartford.
What other American landmark
is as sacred to me as the Mark Twain House? The Lincoln Memorial in
Washington, D.C. Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln were country boys from
Middle America, and both of them made the American people laugh at themselves
and appreciate really important, really moral jokes.
I note that construction
has stopped of a Mark Twain Museum here in Hartford behind the
carriage house of the Mark Twain House at 351 Farmington Avenue.
Work persons have been sent
home from that site because American conservatives, as they
call themselves, on Wall Street and at the head of so many of our corporations,
have stolen a major fraction of our private savings, have ruined investors
and employees by means of fraud and outright piracy.
Shock and awe.
And now, having installed
themselves as our federal government, or taken control of it from outside,
they have squandered our public treasury and then some. They have created
a public debt of such appalling magnitude that our descendants, for
whom we had such high hopes, will come into this world as poor as church
mice.
Shock and awe.
What are the conservatives
doing with all the money and power that used to belong to all of us?
They are telling us to be absolutely terrified, and to run around in
circles like chickens with their heads cut off. But they will save us.
They are making us take off our shoes at airports. Can anybody here
think of a more hilarious practical joke than that one?
Smile, America. Youre
on Candid Camera.
And they have turned loose
a myriad of our high-tech weapons, each one costing more than a hundred
high schools, on a Third World country, in order to shock and awe human
beings like us, like Adam and Eve, between the Tigris and Euphrates
Rivers.
The other day I asked former
Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton what he thought of our great victory over
Iraq, and he said, Mohammed Ali versus Mr. Rogers.
What are conservatives? They
are people who will move heaven and earth, if they have to, who will
ruin a company or a country or a planet, to prove to us and to themselves
that they are superior to everybody else, except for their pals. They
take good care of their pals, keep them out of jailand so on.
Conservatives are crazy as
bedbugs. They are bullies.
Shock and awe.
Class war? You bet.
They have proved their superiority
to admirers of Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain and Jesus of Nazareth,
with an able assist from television, making inconsequential our protests
against their war.
What has happened to us?
We have suffered a technological calamity. Television is now our form
of government.
On what grounds did we protest
their war? I could name many, but I need name only one, which is common
sense.
Be that as it may, construction
of the Mark Twain Museum will sooner or later be resumed. And I, the
son and grandson of Indiana architects, seize this opportunity to suggest
a feature which I hope will be included in the completed structure,
words to be chiseled into the capstone over the main entrance.
Here is what I think would
be fun to put up there, and Mark Twain loved fun more than anything.
I have tinkered with something famous he said, which is: Be good
and you will be lonesome. That is from Following the Equator.
OK?
So envision what a majestic
front entrance the Mark Twain Museum will have someday. And imagine
that these words have been chiseled into the noble capstone and painted
gold:
Be good and you will be lonesome
most places, but not here, not here.
One of the most humiliated
and heartbroken pieces Twain ever wrote was about the slaughter of 600
Moro men, women and children by our soldiers during our liberation of
the people of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War. Our brave
commander was Leonard Wood, who now has a fort named after him. Fort
Leonard Wood.
What did Abraham Lincoln
have to say about such American imperialist wars? Those are wars which,
on one noble pretext or another, actually aim to increase the natural
resources and pools of tame labor available to the richest Americans
who have the best political connections.
And it is almost always a
mistake to mention Abraham Lincoln in a speech about something or somebody
else. He always steals the show. I am about to quote him.
Lincoln was only a Congressman
when he said in 1848 what I am about to echo. He was heartbroken and
humiliated by our war on Mexico, which had never attacked us.
We were making California
our own, and a lot of other people and properties, and doing it as though
butchering Mexican soldiers who were only defending their homeland against
invaders wasnt murder.
What other stuff besides
California? Well, Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and parts
of Colorado and Wyoming.
The person congressman Lincoln
had in mind when he said what he said was James Polk, our president
at the time. Abraham Lincoln said of Polk, his president, our armed
forces commander-in-chief: Trusting to escape scrutiny by
fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory,
that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood that serpents
eye, that charms to destroy, he plunged into war.
Holy smokes! I almost said,
Holy shit! And I thought I was a writer!
Do you know we actually captured
Mexico City during the Mexican War? Why isnt that a national holiday?
And why isnt the face of James Polk up on Mount Rushmore, along
with Ronald Reagans?
What made Mexico so evil
back in the 1840s, well before our Civil War, is that slavery was illegal
there. Remember the Alamo?
My great-grandfathers
name was Clemens Vonnegut. Small world, small world. This piquant coincidence
is not a fabrication. Clemens Vonnegut called himself a freethinker,
an antique word for humanist. He was a hardware merchant in Indianapolis.
So, 120 years ago, say, there
was one man who was both Clemens and Vonnegut. I would have liked being
such a person a lot. I only wish I could have been such a person tonight.
I claim no blood relationship
with Samuel Clemens of Hannibal, Missouri. Clemens, as a
first name, is, I believe, like the name Clementine, derived
from the adjective clement. To be clement is to be lenient
and compassionate, or, in the case of weather, perfectly heavenly.
So theres weather again.