Kurt Vonnegut - God Bless You Mr Rosewater

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GOD BLESS YOU, MR. ROSEWATER

by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

without the prior written permission of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in connection

with reviews written specifically for inclusion in a magazine or newspaper.

_Reprinted by arrangement with the Author._

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

_For Alvin Davis,_

_the telepath, the hoodlums' friend_

GOD BLESS YOU,

MR. ROSEWATER,

_or Pearls Before Swine_

All persons, living and dead,

are purely coincidental,

and should not be construed.

_"The Second World War was over -- and there I was at high noon, crossing Times Square

with a Purple Heart on."_

-- ELIOT ROSEWATER

PRESIDENT, THE ROSEWATER FOUNDATION

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ONE

A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey

might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees.

The sum was $87,472,033.61 on June 1, 1964, to pick a day. That was the day it caught the

soft eyes of a boy shyster named Norman Mushari. The income the interesting sum produced was

$3,500,000 a year, nearly $10,000 a day -- Sundays, too.

The sum was made the core of a charitable and cultural foundation in 1947, when Norman

Mushari was only six. Before that, it was the fourteenth largest family fortune in America, the

Rosewater fortune. It was stashed into a foundation in order that tax-collectors and other

predators not named Rosewater might be prevented from getting their hands on it. And the baroque

masterpiece of legal folderol that was the charter of the Rosewater Foundation declared, in

effect, that the presidency of the Foundation was to be inherited in the same manner as the

British Crown. It was to be handed down throughout all eternity to the closest and oldest heirs of

the Foundation's creator, Senator Lister Ames Rosewater of Indiana.

Siblings of the President were to become officers of the Foundation upon reaching the age

of twenty-one. All officers were officers for life, unless proved legally insane. They were free

to compensate themselves for their services as lavishly as they pleased, but only from the

Foundation's income.

As required by law, the charter prohibited the Senator's heirs having anything to do with

the management of the Foundation's capital. Caring for the capital became the responsibility of a

corporation that was born simultaneously with the Foundation. It was called, straightforwardly

enough, The Rosewater Corporation. Like almost all corporations, it was dedicated to prudence and

profit, to balance sheets. Its employees were very well paid. They were cunning and happy and

energetic on that account. Their main enterprise was the churning of stocks and bonds of other

corporations. A minor activity was the management of a saw factory, a bowling alley, a motel, a

bank, a brewery, extensive farms in Rosewater County, Indiana, and some coal mines in northern

Kentucky.

The Rosewater Corporation occupied two floors at 500 Fifth Avenue, in New York, and

maintained small branch offices in London, Tokyo, Buenos Aires and Rosewater County. No member of

the Rosewater Foundation could tell the Corporation what to do with the capital. Conversely, the

Corporation was powerless to tell the Foundation what to do with the copious profits the

Corporation made.

These facts became known to young Norman Mushari when, upon graduating from Cornell Law

School at the top of his class, he went to work for the Washington, D.C., law firm that had

designed both the Foundation and the Corporation, the firm of McAllister, Robjent, Reed and McGee.

He was of Lebanese extraction, the son of a Brooklyn rug merchant. He was five feet and three

inches tall. He had an enormous ass, which was luminous when bare.

He was the youngest, the shortest, and by all odds the least Anglo-Saxon male employee in

the firm. He was put to work under the most senile partner, Thurmond McAllister, a sweet old poop

who was seventy-six. He would never have been hired if the other partners hadn't felt that

McAllister's operations could do with just a touch more viciousness.

No one ever went out to lunch with Mushari. He took nourishment alone in cheap cafeterias,

and plotted the violent overthrow of the Rosewater Foundation. He knew no Rosewaters. What engaged

his emotions was the fact that the Rosewater fortune was the largest single money package

represented by McAllister, Robjent, Reed and McGee. He recalled what his favorite professor,

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Leonard Leech, once told him about getting ahead in law. Leech said that, just as a good airplane

pilot should always be looking for places to land, so should a lawyer be looking for situations

where large amounts of money were about to change hands.

"In every big transaction," said Leech, "there is a magic moment during which a man has

surrendered a treasure, and during which the man who is due to receive it has not yet done so. An

alert lawyer will make that moment his own, possessing the treasure for a magic microsecond,

taking a little of it, passing it on. If the man who is to receive the treasure is unused to

wealth, has an inferiority complex and shapeless feelings of guilt, as most people do, the lawyer

can often take as much as half the bundle, and still receive the recipient's blubbering thanks."

The more Mushari rifled the firm's confidential files relative to the Rosewater

Foundation, the more excited he became. Especially thrilling to him was that part of the charter

which called for the immediate expulsion of any officer adjudged insane. It was common gossip in

the office that the very first President of the Foundation, Eliot Rosewater, the Senator's son,

was a lunatic. This characterization was a somewhat playful one, but as Mushari knew, playfulness

was impossible to explain in a court of law. Eliot was spoken of by Mushari's co-workers variously

as "The Nut," "The Saint," "The Holy Roller," "John the Baptist," and so on.

"By all means," Mushari mooned to himself, "we must get this specimen before a judge."

From all reports, the person next in line to be President of the Foundation, a cousin in

Rhode Island, was inferior in all respects. When the magic moment came, Mushari would represent

him.

Mushari, being tone-deaf, did not know that he himself had an office nickname. It was

contained in a tune that someone was generally whistling when he came or went. The tune was "Pop

Goes the Weasel."

Eliot Rosewater became President of the Foundation in 1947. When Mushari began to

investigate him seventeen years later, Eliot was forty-six. Mushari, who thought of himself as

brave little David about to slay Goliath, was exactly half his age. And it was almost as though

God Himself wanted little David to win, for confidential document after document proved that Eliot

was crazy as a loon.

In a locked file inside the firm's vault, for instance, was an envelope with three seals

on it -- and it was supposed to be delivered unopened to whomever took over the Foundation when

Eliot was dead.

Inside was a letter from Eliot, and this is what it said:

Dear Cousin, or whoever you may be --

Congratulations on your great good fortune. Have fun. It may increase your perspective to

know what sorts of manipulators and custodians your unbelievable wealth has had up to now.

Like so many great American fortunes, the Rosewater pile was accumulated in the beginning

by a humorless, constipated Christian farm boy turned speculator and briber during and after the

Civil War. The farm boy was Noah Rosewater, my great-grandfather, who was born in Rosewater

County, Indiana.

Noah and his brother George inherited from their pioneer father six hundred acres of

farmland, land as dark and rich as chocolate cake, and a small saw factory that was nearly

bankrupt. War came.

George raised a rifle company, marched away at its head.

Noah hired a village idiot to fight in his place, converted the saw factory to the

manufacture of swords and bayonets, converted the farm to the raising of hogs. Abraham Lincoln

declared that no amount of money was too much to pay for the restoration of the Union, so Noah

priced his merchandise in scale with the national tragedy. And he made this discovery: Government

objections to the price or quality of his wares could be vaporized with bribes that were pitifully

small.

He married Cleota Herrick, the ugliest woman in Indiana, because she had four hundred

thousand dollars. With her money he expanded the factory and bought more farms, all in Rosewater

County. He became the largest individual hog farmer in the North. And, in order not to be

victimized by meat packers, he bought controlling interest in an Indianapolis slaughterhouse. In

order not to be victimized by steel suppliers, he bought controlling interest in a steel company

in Pittsburgh. In order not to be victimized by coal suppliers, he bought controlling interest in

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several mines. In order not to be victimized by money lenders, he founded a bank.

And his paranoid reluctance to be a victim caused him to deal more and more in valuable

papers, in stocks and bonds, and less and less in swords and pork. Small experiments with

worthless papers convinced him that such papers could be sold effortlessly. While he continued to

bribe persons in government to hand over treasuries and national resources, his first enthusiasm

became the peddling of watered stock.

When the United States of America, which was meant to be a Utopia for all, was less than a

century old, Noah Rosewater and a few men like him demonstrated the folly of the Founding Fathers

in one respect: those sadly recent ancestors had not made it the law of the Utopia that the wealth

of each citizen should be limited. This oversight was engendered by a weak-kneed sympathy for

those who loved expensive things, and by the feeling that the continent was so vast and valuable,

and the population so thin and enterprising, that no thief, no matter how fast he stole, could

more than mildly inconvenience anyone.

Noah and a few like him perceived that the continent was in fact finite, and that venal

office-holders, legislators in particular, could be persuaded to toss up great hunks of it for

grabs, and to toss them in such a way as to have them land where Noah and his kind were standing.

Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in

America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless

American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as

bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved

henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against

which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to

the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went _bang_ in the noonday sun.

_E pluribus unum_ is surely an ironic motto to inscribe on the currency of this Utopia

gone bust, for every grotesquely rich American represents property, privileges, and pleasures that

have been denied the many. An even more instructive motto, in the light of history made by the

Noah Rosewaters, might be: _Grab much too much, or you'll get nothing at all_.

And Noah begat Samuel, who married Geraldine Ames Rockefeller. Samuel became even more

interested in politics than his father had been, served the Republican Party tirelessly as a king-

maker, caused that party to nominate men who would whirl like dervishes, bawl fluent Babylonian,

and order the militia to fire into crowds whenever a poor man seemed on the point of suggesting

that he and a Rosewater were equal in the eyes of the law.

And Samuel bought newspapers, and preachers, too. He gave them this simple lesson to

teach, and they taught it well: _Anybody who thought that the United States of America was

supposed to be a Utopia was a piggy, lazy, God-damned fool_. Samuel thundered that no American

factory hand was worth more than eighty cents a day. And yet he could be thankful for the

opportunity to pay a hundred thousand dollars or more for a painting by an Italian three centuries

dead. And he capped this insult by giving paintings to museums for the spiritual elevation of the

poor. The museums were closed on Sundays.

And Samuel begat Lister Ames Rosewater, who married Eunice Eliot Morgan. There was

something to be said for Lister and Eunice: unlike Noah and Cleota and Samuel and Geraldine, they

could laugh as though they meant it. As a curious footnote to history, Eunice became Woman's Chess

Champion of the United States in 1927, and again in 1933.

Eunice also wrote an historical novel about a female gladiator, _Ramba of Macedon_, which

was a best-seller in 1936. Eunice died in 1937, in a sailing accident in Cotuit, Massachusetts.

She was a wise and amusing person, with very sincere anxieties about the condition of the poor.

She was my mother.

Her husband, Lister, never was in business. From the moment of his birth to the time I am

writing this, he has left the manipulation of his assets to lawyers and banks. He has spent nearly

the whole of his adult life in the Congress of the United States, teaching morals, first as a

Representative from the district whose heart is Rosewater County, and then as Senator from

Indiana. That he is or ever was an Indiana person is a tenuous political fiction. And Lister begat

Eliot.

Lister has thought about the effects and implications of his inherited wealth about as

much as most men think about their left big toes. The fortune has never amused, worried, or

tempted him. Giving ninety-five per cent of it to the Foundation you now control didn't cause him

a twinge.

And Eliot married Sylvia DuVrais Zetterling, a Parisienne beauty who came to hate him. Her

mother was a patroness of painters. Her father was the greatest living cellist. Her maternal

grandparents were a Rothschild and a DuPont.

And Eliot became a drunkard, a Utopian dreamer, a tinhorn saint, an aimless fool.

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Begat he not a soul.

_Bon voyage_, dear Cousin or whoever you are. Be generous. Be kind. You can safely ignore

the arts and sciences. They never helped anybody. Be a sincere, attentive friend of the poor.

The letter was signed,

The late Eliot Rosewater.

His heart going like a burglar alarm, Norman Mushari hired a large safe-deposit box, and

he put the letter into it. That first piece of solid evidence would not be lonesome long.

Mushari went back to his cubicle, reflected that Sylvia was in the process of divorcing

Eliot, with old McAllister representing the defendant. She was living in Paris, and Mushari wrote

a letter to her, suggesting that it was customary in friendly, civilized divorce actions for

litigants to return each other's letters. He asked her to send him any letters from Eliot that she

might have saved.

He got fifty-three such letters by return mail.

TWO

Eliot Rosewater was born in 1918, in Washington, D.C. Like his father, who claimed to

represent the Hoosier State, Eliot was raised and educated and entertained on the Eastern Seaboard

and in Europe. The family visited the so-called "home" in Rosewater County very briefly every

year, just long enough to reinvigorate the lie that it was home.

Eliot had unremarkable academic careers at Loomis and Harvard. He became an expert sailor

during summers in Cotuit, on Cape Cod, and an intermediate skier during winter vacations in

Switzerland.

He left Harvard Law School on December 8, 1941, to volunteer for the Infantry of the Army

of the United States. He served with distinction in many battles. He rose to the rank of captain,

was a company commander. Near the end of the war in Europe, Eliot suffered what was diagnosed as

combat fatigue. He was hospitalized in Paris, where he wooed and won Sylvia.

After the war, Eliot returned to Harvard with his stunning wife, took his law degree. He

went on to specialize in international law, dreamed of helping the United Nations in some way. He

received a doctorate in that field, and was handed simultaneously the presidency of the new

Rosewater Foundation. His duties, according to the charter, were exactly as flimsy or as

formidable as he himself declared them to be.

Eliot chose to take the Foundation seriously. He bought a town house in New York, with a

fountain in the foyer. He put a Bentley and a Jaguar in the garage. He hired a suite of offices in

the Empire State Building. He had them painted lime, burnt-orange and oyster white. He proclaimed

them the headquarters for all the beautiful, compassionate and scientific things he hoped to do.

He was a heavy drinker, but no one worried about it. No amount of booze seemed to make him

drunk.

From 1947 until 1953, the Rosewater Foundation spent fourteen million dollars. Eliot's

benefactions covered the full eleemosynary spectrum from a birth control clinic in Detroit to an

El Greco for Tampa, Florida. Rosewater dollars fought cancer and mental illness and race prejudice

and police brutality and countless other miseries, encouraged college professors to look for

truth, bought beauty at any price.

Ironically, one of the studies Eliot paid for had to do with alcoholism in San Diego. When

the report was submitted, Eliot was too drunk to read it. Sylvia had to come down to his office to

escort him home. A hundred people saw her trying to lead him across the sidewalk to a waiting cab.

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And Eliot recited for them a couplet he had spent all morning composing:

"Many, many good things have I bought!

Many, many bad things have I fought!"

Eliot stayed contritely sober for two clays after that, then disappeared for a week. Among

other things, he crashed a convention of science-fiction writers in a motel in Milford,

Pennsylvania. Norman Mushari learned about this episode from a private detective's report that was

in the files of McAllister, Robjent, Reed and McGee. Old McAllister had hired the detective to

retrace Eliot's steps, to find out if he had done things that might later legally embarrass the

Foundation.

The report contained Eliot's speech to the writers word-for-word. The meeting, including

Eliot's drunken interruption, had been taken down on tape.

"I love you sons of bitches," Eliot said in Milford. "You're all I read any more. You're

the only ones who'll talk about the _really_ terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough

to know that life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that'll last for

billions of years. You're the only ones with guts enough to _really_ care about the future, who

_really_ notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple

ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstandings, mistakes, accidents and catastrophes do to us.

You're the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distances without limit, over mysteries

that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for

the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell."

Eliot admitted later on that science-fiction writers couldn't write for sour apples, but

he declared that it didn't matter. He said they were poets just the same, since they were more

sensitive to important changes than anybody who was writing well. "The hell with the talented

sparrowfarts who write delicately of one small piece of one mere lifetime, when the issues are

galaxies, eons, and trillions of souls yet to be born."

"I only wish Kilgore Trout were here," said Eliot, "so I could shake his hand and tell him

that he is the greatest writer alive today. I have just been told that he could not come because

he could not afford to leave his job! And what job does this society give its greatest prophet?"

Eliot choked up, and, for a few moments, he couldn't make himself name Trout's job. "They have

made him a stock clerk in a trading stamp redemption center in Hyannis!"

This was true. Trout, the author of eighty-seven paperback books, was a very poor man, and

unknown outside the science-fiction field. He was sixty-six years old when Eliot spoke so warmly

of him.

"Ten thousand years from now," Eliot predicted boozily, "the names of our generals and

presidents will be forgotten, and the only hero of our time still remembered will be the author of

2BRO2B." This was the title of a book by Trout, a title which, upon examination, turned out to be

the famous question posed by Hamlet.

Mushari dutifully went looking for a copy of the book for his dossier on Eliot. No

reputable bookseller had ever heard of Trout. Mushari made his last try at a smut-dealer's hole in

the wall. There, amidst the rawest pornography, he found tattered copies of every book Trout had

ever written. 2BRO2B, which had been published at twenty-five cents, cost him five dollars, which

was what _The Kama Sutra of Vitsayana_ cost, too.

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Mushari glanced through the _Kama Sutra_, the Jong-suppressed oriental manual on the art

and techniques of love, read this:

If a man makes a sort of jelly with the juices of the fruit cassia fistula and eugenic

jambolina and mixes the powder of the plants soma, veronia anthelminica, eclipta prostata, lohopa-

juihirka, and applies this mixture to the yoni of a woman with whom he is about to have

intercourse, he will instantly cease to love her.

Mushari didn't see anything funny in that. He never saw anything funny in anything, so

deeply immured was he by the utterly unplayful spirit of the law.

And he was witless enough, too, to imagine that Trout's books were very dirty books, since

they were sold for such high prices to such queer people in such a place. He didn't understand

that what Trout had in common with pornography wasn't sex but fantasies of an impossibly

hospitable world.

So Mushari felt swindled as he wallowed through the garish prose, lusted for sex, learned

instead about automation. Trout's favorite formula was to describe a perfectly hideous society,

not unlike his own, and then, toward the end, to suggest ways in which it could be improved. In

2BRO2B he hypothecated an America in which almost all of the work was done by machines, and the

only people who could get work had three or more Ph.D's. There was a serious overpopulation

problem, too.

All serious diseases had been conquered. So death was voluntary, and the government, to

encourage volunteers for death, set up a purple-roofed Ethical Suicide Parlor at every major

intersection, right next door to an orange-roofed Howard Johnson's. There were pretty hostesses in

the parlor, and Barca-Loungers, and Muzak, and a choice of fourteen painless ways to die. The

suicide parlors were busy places, because so many people felt silly and pointless, and because it

was supposed to be an unselfish, patriotic thing to do, to die. The suicides also got free last

meals next door.

And so on. Trout had a wonderful imagination.

One of the characters asked a death stewardess if he would go to Heaven, and she told him

that of course he would. He asked if he would see God, and she said, "Certainly, honey."

And he said, "I sure hope so. I want to ask Him something I never was able to find out

down here."

"What's that?" she said, strapping him in.

"What in hell are people _for_?"

In Milford, Eliot told the writers that he wished they would learn more about sex and

economics and style, but then he supposed that people dealing with really big issues didn't have

much time for such things.

And it occurred to him that a really good science-fiction book had never been written

about money. "Just think of the wild ways money is passed around on Earth!" he said. "You don't

have to go to the Planet Tralfamadore in Anti-Matter Galaxy 508 G to find weird creatures with

unbelievable powers. Look at the powers of an Earthling millionaire! Look at me! I was born naked,

just like you, but my God, friends and neighbors, I have thousands of dollars a day to spend!"

He paused to make a very impressive demonstration of his magical powers, writing a smeary

check for two hundred dollars for every person there.

"_There's_ fantasy for you," he said. "And you go to the bank tomorrow, and it will all

come true. It's insane that I should be able to do such a thing, with money so important." He lost

his balance for a moment, regained it, and then nearly fell asleep on his feet. He opened his eyes

with great effort. "I leave it to you, friends and neighbors, and especia to the immortal Kilgore

Trout: think about the silly ways money gets passed around now, and then think up better ways."

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Eliot lurched away from Milford, hitchhiked to Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. He went into a

small bar there, announced that anyone who could produce a volunteer fireman's badge could drink

with him free. He built gradually to a crying jag, during which he claimed to be deeply touched by

the idea of an inhabited planet with an atmosphere that was eager to combine violently with almost

everything the inhabitants held dear. He was speaking of Earth and the element oxygen.

"When you think about it, boys," he said brokenly, "that's what holds us together more

than anything else, except maybe gravity. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers -- joined in

the serious business of keeping our food, shelter, clothing and loved ones from combining with

oxygen. I tell you, boys, I used to belong to a volunteer fire department, and I'd belong to one

now, if there were such a human thing, such a _humane_ thing, in New York City." This was bunk

about Eliot's having been a fireman. The closest he had ever come to that was during his annual

childhood visits to Rosewater County, to the family fief. Sycophants among the townies had

flattered little Eliot by making him mascot of the Volunteer Fire Department of Rosewater. He had

never fought a fire.

"I tell you, boys," he went on, "if those Russian landing barges come barging in some day,

and there isn't any way to stop 'em, all the phony bastards who get all the good jobs in this

country by kissing ass will be down to meet the conquerers with vodka and caviar, offering to do

any kind of work the Russians have in mind. And you know who'll take to the woods with hunting

knives and Springfields, who'll go on fighting for a hundred years, by God? The volunteer firemen,

that's who."

Eliot was locked up in Swarthmore on a drunk and disorderly charge. When he awoke the next

morning, the police called his wife. He apologized to her, slunk home.

But he was off again in a month, carousing with firemen in Clover Lick, West Virginia, one

night, and in New Egypt, New Jersey, the next. And on that trip he traded clothes with another

man, swapped a four-hundred-dollar suit for a 1939 double-breasted blue chalk-stripe, with

shoulders like Gibraltar, lapels like the wings of the Archangel Gabriel, and with the creases in

the trousers permanently sewed in.

"You must be crazy," said the New Egypt fireman.

"I don't want to look like me," Eliot replied. "I want to look like you. You're the salt

of the earth, by God. You're what's good about America, men in suits like that. You're the soul of

the U.S. Infantry."

And Eliot eventually traded away everything in his wardrobe but his tails, his dinner

jacket, and one gray flannel suit. His sixteen-foot closet became a depressing museum of

coveralls, overalls, Robert Hall Easter specials, field jackets, Eisenhower jackets, sweatshirts

and so on. Sylvia wanted to burn them, but Eliot told her, "Burn my tails, my dinner jacket and my

gray flannel suit instead."

Eliot was a flamboyantly sick man, even then, but there was no one to hustle him off for

treatment, and no one was as yet entranced by the profits to be made in proving him insane. Little

Norman Mushari was only twelve in those troubled days, was assembling plastic model airplanes,

masturbating, and papering his room with pictures of Senator Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn. Eliot

Rosewater was the farthest thing from his mind.

Sylvia, raised among rich and charming eccentrics, was too European to have him put away.

And the Senator was in the political fight of his life, rallying the Republican forces of reaction

that had been shattered by the election of Dwight David Eisenhower. When told of his son's bizarre

way of life, the Senator refused to worry, on the grounds that the boy was well-bred. "He's got

fiber, he's got spine," the Senator said. "He's experimenting. He'll come back to his senses any

time he's good and ready. This family never produced and never will produce a chronic drunk or a

chronic lunatic."

Having said that, he went into the Senate Chamber to deliver his fairly famous speech on

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the Golden Age of Rome, in which he said, in part:

I should like to speak of the Emperor Octavian, of Caesar Augustus, as he came to be

known. This great humanitarian, and he was a humanitarian in the profoundest sense of the word,

took command of the Roman Empire in a degenerate period strikingly like our own. Harlotry,

divorce, alcoholism, liberalism, homosexuality, pornography, abortion, venality, murder, labor

racketeering, juvenile delinquency, cowardice, atheism, extortion, slander, and theft were the

height of fashion. Rome was a paradise for gangsters, perverts, and the lazy working man, just as

America is now. As in America now, forces of law and order were openly attacked by mobs, children

were disobedient, had no respect for their parents or their country, and no decent woman was safe

on any street, even at high noon! And cunning, sharp-trading, bribing foreigners were in the

ascendency everywhere. And ground under the heels of the big city money-changers were the honest

farmers, the backbone of the Roman Army and the Roman soul.

What could be done? Well, there were soft-headed liberals then as there are bubble-headed

liberals now, and they said what liberals always say after they have led a great nation to such a

lawless, self-indulgent, polyglot condition: "Things have never been better! Look at all the

freedom! Look at all the equality! Look how sexual hypocrisy has been driven from the scene! Oh

boy! People used to get all knotted up inside when they thought about rape or fornication. Now

they can do both with glee!"

And what did the terrible, black-spirited, non-fun-loving conservatives of those happy

days have to say? Well, there weren't many of them left. They were dying off in ridiculed old age.

And their children had been turned against them by the liberals, by the purveyors of synthetic

sunshine and moonshine, by the something-for-nothing political strip-teasers, by the people who

loved everybody, including the barbarians, by people who loved the barbarians so much they wanted

to open all the gates, have all the soldiers lay their weapons down, and let the barbarians come

in!

That was the Rome that Caesar Augustus came home to, after defeating those two sex

maniacs, Antony and Cleopatra, in the great sea battle of Actium. And I don't think I have to

recreate the things he thought when he surveyed the Rome he was said to rule. Let us take a moment

of silence. and let each think what he will of the stews of today.

There was a moment of silence, too, about thirty seconds that seemed to some like a

thousand years.

And what methods did Caesar Augustus use to put this disorderly house in order? He did

what we are so often told we must never, ever do, what we are told will never, ever work: he wrote

morals into law, and he enforced those unenforceable laws with a police force that was cruel and

unsmiling. He made it illegal for a Roman to behave like a pig. Do you hear me? It became illegal!

And Romans caught acting like pigs were strung up by their thumbs, thrown down wells, fed to

lions, and given other experiences that might impress them with the desirability of being more

decent and reliable than they were. Did it work? You bet your boots it did! Pigs miraculously

disappeared! And what do we call the period that followed this now-unthinkable oppression? Nothing

more nor less, friends and neighbors, than "The Golden Age of Rome."

Am I suggesting that we follow this gory example? Of course I am. Scarcely a day has

passed during which I have not said in one way or another: "Let us force Americans to be as good

as they should be." Am I in favor of feeding labor crooks to lions? Well, to give those who get

such satisfaction from imagining that I am covered with primordial scales a little twinge of

pleasure, let me say, "Yes. Absolutely. This afternoon, if it can be arranged." To disappoint my

critics, let me add that I am only fooling. I am not entertained by cruel and unusual punishments,

not in the least. I am fascinated by the fact that a carrot and a stick can make a donkey go, and

that his Space Age discovery may have some application in the world of human beings.

And so on. The Senator said that the carrot and the stick had been built into the Free

Enterprise System, as conceived by the Founding Fathers, but that do-gooders, who thought people

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shouldn't ever have to struggle for anything, had buggered the logic of the system beyond all

recognition.

In summation: _he said_, I see two alternatives before us. We can write morals into law,

and enforce those morals harshly, or we can return to a true Free Enterprise System, which has the

sink-or-swim justice of Caesar Augustus built into it. I emphatically favor the latter

alternative. We must be hard, for we must become again a nation of swimmers, with the sinkers

quietly disposing of themselves. I have spoken of another hard time in ancient history. In case

you have forgotten the name of it, I shall refresh your memories: "The Golden Age of Rome,"

friends and neighbors, "The Golden Age of Rome."

As for friends who might have helped Eliot through his time of troubles: he didn't have

any. He drove away his rich friends by telling them that whatever they had was based on dumb luck.

He advised his artist friends that the only people who paid any attention to what they did were

rich horses' asses with nothing more athletic to do. He asked his scholarly friends, "Who has time

to read all the boring crap you write and listen to all the boring things you say?" He alienated

his friends in the sciences by thanking them extravagantly for scientific advances he had read

about in recent newspapers and magazines, by assuring them, with a perfectly straight face, that

life was getting better and better, thanks to scientific thinking.

And then Eliot entered psychoanalysis. He swore off drinking, took pride in his appearance

again, expressed enthusiasm for the arts and sciences, won back many friends.

Sylvia was never happier. But then, one year after the treatments had begun, she was

astonished by a call from the analyst. He was resigning the case because, in his taut Viennese

opinion, Eliot was unbeatable.

"But you've cured him!"

"If I were a Los Angeles quack, dear lady, I would most demurely agree. However, I am not

a Swami. Your husband has the most massively defended neurosis I have ever attempted to treat.

What the nature of that neurosis is I can't imagine. In one solid year of work, I have not

succeeded in even scratching its armor plate."

"But he always comes home from your office so cheerful!"

"Do you know what we talk about?"

"I thought it better not to ask."

"American history! Here is a very sick man, who, among other things, killed his mother,

who has a terrifying tyrant for a father. And what does he talk about when I invite him to let his

mind wander where it will? American history."

The statement that Eliot had killed his beloved mother was, in a crude way, true. When he

was nineteen, he took his mother for a sail in Cotuit Harbor. He jibed. The slashing boom knocked

his mother overboard. Eunice Morgan Rosewater sank like a stone.

"I ask him what he dreams about," the doctor continued, "and he tells me, 'Samuel Gompers,

Mark Twain, and Alexander Hamilton.' I ask him if his father ever appears in his dreams, and he

says, 'No, but Thorsten Veblen often does.' Mrs. Rosewater, I'm defeated. I resign."

Eliot seemed merely amused by the doctor's dismissal. "It's a cure he doesn't understand,

so he refuses to admit it's a cure," he said lightly.

That evening, he and Sylvia went to the Metropolitan Opera for the opening of a new

staging of _Aida_. The Rosewater Foundation had paid for the costumes. Eliot looked sleekly

marvelous, tall, tailcoated, his big, friendly face pink, and his blue eyes glittering with mental

hygiene.

Everything was fine until the last scene of the opera, during which the hero and heroine

were placed in an airtight chamber to suffocate. As the doomed pair filled their lungs, Eliot

called out to them, "You will last a lot longer, if you don't try to sing." Eliot stood, leaned

far out of his box, told the singers, "Maybe you don't know anything about oxygen, but I do.

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file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Kurt%20Vonnegut%20-%20God%20Bless%20You%20Mr%20Rosewater.txtGODBLESSYOU,MR.ROSEWATERbyKurtVonnegut,Jr.COPYRIGHT(c)1965BYKURTVONNEGUT,JR.Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthisbookmaybereproducedina yformorbyanymeanswithoutthepriorwrittenpermissionofthePublisher,exc...

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