But Enough About You: Essays (32 page)

As a writer of science fiction—a label he tried strenuously to shed, lest his books be shelved in the genre ghetto—he was curiously blasé, even antagonistic, about the moon landing on July 20, 1969. On a broadcast with Walter Cronkite, Gloria Steinem, and others, he dissed the entire enterprise and reiterated his view that the $33 billion should have been spent “cleaning up our filthy colonies here on Earth.” The avuncular Cronkite let it go, but CBS was swamped with furious letters. (For the record, many of the writers felt that Steinem, too, had been “un-American.”)

But this was
echt
Vonnegut: not with a bang or a whimper but with a shrug. If he, like Twain, was angry at the universe—and had every reason to be—he wasn’t going to yell himself hoarse or make himself a spectacle in the process. He possessed more ambivalence than passion; odd, perhaps, in someone of German ancestry. (Seems more . . . French, somehow.) But then the line with which he will always be remembered, from
Slaughterhouse-Five
, is “So it goes,” as close an English-language phrase as there is to denote hunching shoulders.

As to whether he wrote for the kids, or for—pardon—kids of all ages, and for the ages, perhaps that’s more definitively answered by the Library of America’s recent publication of
Kurt Vonnegut: Novels and Stories 1963–1973
, ably edited by Sidney Offit. Turn to the first sentences of
Slaughterhouse-Five
:

“All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really
was
shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn’t his. Another guy I knew really
did
threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I’ve changed all the names.”

There’s an echo there of another voice—Holden Caulfield’s, and didn’t the guy who came up with him also have a reputation for writing for kids?

—
The New York Times
, November 2011

As annus mirabilis 2000 approaches, we’d best start dealing with the fact that there will be Elijahs on every street corner, and cable channels and Web sites urging us to repent—repent!—for the end is at hand. There’s just something about an impending millennium that brings out the gloom and doom.

The year 999 was a boom year for monasteries. Penitents flocked in, hysterically bearing jewels, coins, and earthly possessions by the oxcartful, hoping to cadge a little last-minute grace before Judgment Day. The year 1999 may turn out to be a similarly good one for the coffers of fundamentalist Christian churches—especially if Pat Robertson’s apocalyptic novel,
The End of the Age
, is any indication of what the faithful think is going to happen when the ball atop the Times Square tower plunges into triple zeros.

Mr. Robertson is no ordinary street-corner Elijah. He’s a graduate of the Yale Law School and chairman of both the Christian Broadcasting Network and International Family Entertainment (the Family Channel). He has his own daily television show,
The 700 Club
, and is the author of nine previous books. In 1988, he ran for president in the Republican primaries, giving the non-fire-breathing Episcopalian George Bush a brief case of the heebie-jeebies during the Iowa caucuses and establishing the Christian Right as an electoral force to be reckoned with. So when he ventures forth into pop-fictional eschatology, attention must be paid—if only for the pleasure of hearing a president of the United States tell the nation in a televised address, “We are the world,” and to watch as an advertising executive is transformed into an angel.

It’s hard to define
The End of the Age
exactly. It’s a sort of cross between
Seven Days in May
and
The Omen
, with the prose style of a Hallmark card. The good guys are a born-again advertising executive and his wife, a black pro basketball player and a Hispanic television technician, all led by one Pastor Jack, a descendant of the
eighteenth-century American preacher Jonathan Edwards. They tend to sound like a bunch of Stepford wives who have wandered onto the set of
The 700 Club
, eerily polite and constantly telling one another to please turn to the book of Revelation:

“That’s right, Manuel. Every bit of it is in the Bible. As a matter of fact, whole books have been written about a diabolical world dictator called the Antichrist. He got that name because he will try to perform for Satan what Christ performed for God.”

“Wow, I hope he fails,” Cathy said.

The bad guys tend to sound like the villains in a Charlie Chan movie being simultaneously translated from some sinister Indo-Iranian tongue:

“Panchal, sorry to wake you. Get your people ready. Tonight the gods have given America into our hands.”

That “sorry to wake you” is one of the many hilarious moments that relieve the general tedium. For all the apocalyptic pyrotechnics, the book leaves the eyeballs as glazed as a Christmas ham. But just when you start wondering if there’s something more interesting on C-SPAN 2, there’s a reason to go on:

“The Antichrist raged within his palace. . . . The final battle was coming. He would march on Jerusalem at the head of his armies. ‘Then,’ he said to Joyce Cumberland Wong, ‘I will win! At last I will have my revenge!’ ”

The book begins with a bang in the form of a 300-billion-pound meteor that lands in the Pacific Ocean with the force of five thousand nuclear bombs, setting off a three-thousand-foot tsunami, earthquakes, fires, nuclear plant meltdowns, volcano eruptions, ash in the atmosphere, floods, and food shortages. All in all, a bad hair day for Mother Earth, sending the Antichrist ouching toward Bethlehem to be born. Meanwhile, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, things are getting a bit sticky:

“Well, here’s the story,” the secretary of defense explains to his top general over lime and sodas while the world burns. “As you
know, we had one president commit suicide. The next was killed by a snakebite, and then the man who left the cobra on the president’s desk was murdered. They say he committed suicide, but don’t you believe it.”

At this point, if I were the general, I’d have asked for some scotch to go with my soda, but in evangelical literature the good guys don’t drink.

“Now,” the secretary continues, “we’ve got this ex–campus radical in the White House, and if you heard the speech tonight, you know he’s got some mighty big plans.”

That would be the aforementioned “We are the world” speech, and, yes, President Mark Beaulieu (as in “mark of the beast”) does indeed have big plans: a one-world government with its own currency and a police force in United Nations–ish uniforms, a grand new $25 billion world headquarters palace in Babylon (natch) with some positively kinky special effects, computer-tattoo ID markings for everyone, drugs and orgies for schoolchildren, vintage wines for the grown-ups.

Your basic liberal agenda, right down to the chardonnay. President Mark of the Beast’s cabinet would certainly provide for memorable nomination hearings:

“For secretary of education, the president had selected a Buddhist monk who shaved his head and dressed in a saffron robe and sandals. For secretary of agriculture, he asked for a shepherd from Nevada who lived alone in the hills and spoke broken English. The man’s only known ‘credential’ was that he had once played jai alai in Las Vegas. For secretary of energy, he named a Lebanese Shiite Muslim who was a member of the terrorist group Hezbollah and ran a filling station in Dearborn, Michigan.

“For drug czar, he picked a man who had spent his life crusading for the legalization of all narcotics. For secretary of state, a professor of Eastern religions from Harvard University”—a Yale man just can’t help himself—“who had close ties to Shoko Asahara, the leader of the Japanese cult of Shiva worshipers known as Aum Shinri Kyo, or Supreme Truth. They had been linked with a poisonous gas attack in a Tokyo subway in 1995. And he chose for attorney general a militant
black feminist attorney who advocated abolishing the death penalty and closing all prisons.”

And you know, I’d bet not one of them paid Social Security tax on the nanny.

The End of the Age
is to Dante what Sterno is to
The Inferno
. When you have a hard time keeping a straight face while reading a novel about the death of a billion human beings, something is probably amiss.

But lest we be smug, bear in mind two recent events:

In March 1989, a large asteroid passed within 450,000 miles of Earth. Had it landed in an ocean, according to scientists quite genuinely rattled by 1989FC’s sudden appearance, it would have created three-hundred-foot tidal waves. If you think 450,000 miles is a country mile, consider that Earth had been in the asteroid’s path just six hours earlier.

Then there was Hurricane Gloria. In September 1985, this violent storm was working its way up the Atlantic, headed for Virginia Beach, headquarters of the Christian Broadcasting Network, with murderous force. Mr. Robertson went on the air and prayed, commanding the storm to stay at sea. It did—and came ashore at Fire Island, demolishing the summer house of Calvin Klein.

—
The New York Times
, February 1996

One of the first Latin quotations schoolchildren of my generation were given to translate—and indeed meditate upon for the good of our souls—was the Chaucerian chestnut
Radix malorum est cupiditas
. Greed is the root of all evil. Greed, of course, being synonymous with “money.”

The sentiment sounded plausible enough back in the fifth grade. Now that I have a fifth grader of my own, I would translate it differently: “Money is the root of all tuition.” It would be preposterous, not to say downright idiotic, in the context of
New Yorker
cartoons on this subject, to attempt to strike a more high-minded pose.

Money has certainly always been the root of humor at the magazine that since 1925 has published more than sixty thousand cartoons. In the beginning, its founding editor, Harold Ross, scraped together a meager operating budget, which did not provide the staff with a working environment that could be called lavish. Certainly none of them ever accused it of that. The late Brendan Gill, an aboriginal
New Yorker
staffer, used to regale listeners with a hilarious description of how he had to walk over the desks of three other staffers in order to reach his own. One day, Ross demanded of Dorothy Parker why she had not handed in the article that was due. She replied, “Someone else was using the pencil.”

The root of all evil continued to be the root of great mirth among
The New Yorker
’s legendary staff. After James Thurber’s short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” was turned into a big box-office movie success starring Danny Kaye, Samuel Goldwyn tried to hire Thurber away from the magazine to be one of his studio contract writers. Goldwyn offered him $500 a week, a princely salary that in 1947 would have weakened the knees of most
New Yorker
—or for that matter, New York—writers. But Thurber cabled back: “Mr. Ross has met the increase.”

Goldwyn knew Hollywood, but he clearly did not know Harold Ross, who would no more have paid a writer $500 a week than he would have bought another pencil. He cabled back, offering Thurber $1,000 dollars a week. Thurber wired back that again Mr. Ross had met the increase. Goldwyn upped his offer to $1,500. Again Thurber sent an identical cable. Finally Goldwyn offered $2,500. (That’s almost $25,000 a week in today’s dollars.) Still Thurber wouldn’t budge.

Goldwyn gave up. But then later, he renewed his siren-singing, this time offering Thurber $1,500, apparently forgetting his previous offer of $2,500.

“I’m sorry,” Thurber cabled back, “but Mr. Ross has met the decrease.”

Twentieth-century literature and culture are the better off for Thurber’s remarkable resistance. However, a number of
New Yorker
staffers did succumb to the lure of Hollywood. As John McNulty headed west, Ross’s valedictory comment to him was, “Well, God bless you, McNulty, goddamn it.”

Robert Mankoff, cartoon editor of
The New Yorker
since 1986, estimates that of the thirteen thousand cartoons the magazine has run since that year, about a quarter of them have been on the subjects of business and money. Most
New Yorker
cartoonists, he points out wryly, have never gotten
near
business. This obdurate reality no doubt accounts for their tone of—shall we say—ironic detachment. As Sydney Smith wrote, “I read Seneca’s
On the Contempt of Wealth
. What intolerable nonsense!”

Twenty-five percent seems like a lot when you consider the other available themes, such as, say, Love, Death, Lawyers, and Cats. But Mr. Mankoff explains that, until fairly recently (1992 and the arrival of Tina Brown as editor),
The New Yorker
’s cartoons never touched on another of life’s truly major themes. (Sex.) He attributes the cartoonists’ obsession with business and money as a “sublimation” of this forbidden territory. One grasps his point. If you can’t have sex, you might as well make do with money. As Hillaire Belloc put it:

I’m tired of Love; I’m still more tired of Rhyme,

But money gives me pleasure all the time.

Or as Jack Benny, in his signature skit, says to the impatient mugger who has given him the choice of his money or his life: “I’m
thinking
 . . .”

The 1980s was all about Wall Street money. The 1990s have been about—money. According to
The
Wall Street Journal
, over the last five years, U.S. households have created $13 trillion of net new wealth. If that strikes you as a lot, or to put it as Alan Greenspan would say, a “s—load” of money, you are in fact correct. Thirteen trillion equals the entire U.S. bond market. Or put it this way: the entire U.S. Gross Domestic Product (that is, the value of the work performed by maids, butlers, cooks, gardeners, nannies, etc.) in 1998 was $8.5 trillion.