Vonnegut on Twain

a good read.

http://inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=191_0_4_0_C

By Kurt Vonnegut | 5.9.03
Strange Weather Lately
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 I’m
wearing is my father’s 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 wasn’t 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. You’re 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
jail—and 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 wasn’t 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
serpent’s 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
isn’t that a national holiday? And why isn’t the face of
James Polk up on
Mount Rushmore, along with Ronald Reagan’s?

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-grandfather’s 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 there’s weather again.

***