RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER

So it Goes

Kurt Vonnegut is dead.

In the past couple weeks I changed my favicon to a piece of his artwork, visited his site a dozen times, had several conversations about his books and started re-reading Mother Night. I went to bed reading it and woke up at 5:30 this morning trying to decide which piece of his artwork I wanted to buy for my new apartment… (which I’ll now never be able to afford) But that’s more than enough about myself.

Here’s a passage from Slaughterhouse Five. The scene takes place in a hospital. Rumfoord is a military historian; Billy Pilgrim is a veteran of WWII whose experience mirrors Vonnegut’s. Dresden was a civilian city in Germany that was bombed into rubble on February 13, 1945.

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Rumfoord talked to Lily about the bombing of Dresden one time, and Billy heard it all. Rumfoord had a problem about Dresden. His one-volume history of the Army Air Force in the Second World War was supposed to be a readable condensation of the twenty-seven-volume Official History of the Army Air Force in World War Two. The thing was, though, there was almost nothing in the twenty-seven volumes about the Dresden raid, even though it had been such a howling success. The extent of the success had been kept a secret for many years after the war-a secret from the American people. It was no secret from the Germans, of course, or from the Russians, who occupied Dresden after the war, who are in Dresden still.

‘Americans have finally heard about Dresden.,’ said Rumfoord, twenty-three years after the raid. ‘A lot of them know now how much worse it was than Hiroshima. So I’ve got to put something about it in my book. From the official Air Force standpoint., it’ll all be new.’

‘Why would they keep it a secret so long?’ said Lily.

‘For fear that a lot of bleeding hearts’ said Rumfoord, ‘might not think it was such a wonderful thing to do.’

It was now that Billy Pilgrim spoke up intelligently. ‘I was there’ he said.

It was difficult for Rumfoord to take Billy seriously, since Rumfoord, had so long considered Billy a repulsive non-person who would be much better off dead. Now, with Billy speaking clearly and to the point, Rumfoord’s ears wanted to treat the words as a foreign language that was not worth learning.

‘What did he say?’ said Rumfoord.

Lily had to serve as an ‘interpreter. ‘He said he was there.’ she explained.

‘He was where?

‘I don’t know,’ said Lily. ‘Where were you?’ she asked Billy.

‘Dresden’ said Billy.

‘Dresden,’ Lily told Rumfoord.

‘He’s simply echoing things we say,’ said Rumfoord.

‘Oh, ‘ said Lily.

‘He’s got echolalia now.’

‘Oh.’

Echolalia is a mental disease which makes people immediately repeat things that well people around them say. But Billy didn’t really have it. Rumfoord simply insisted, for his own comfort, that Billy had it. Rumfoord was thinking in a military manner: that an inconvenient person, one whose death he wished for very much, for practical reasons, was suffering from a repulsive disease.

Rumfoord went on insisting for several hours that Billy had echolalia-told nurses and a doctor that Billy had echolalia now. Some experiments were performed on Billy. Doctors and nurses tried to get Billy to echo something, but Billy wouldn’t make a sound for them.

‘He isn’t doing it now,’ said Rumfoord peevishly. ‘The minute you go away, he’ll start doing it again.’

Nobody took Rumfoord’s diagnosis seriously. The staff thought Rumfoord was a hateful old man, conceited and cruel. He often said to them, in one way or another, that people who were weak deserved to die. Whereas the staff, of course, was devoted to the idea that weak people should be helped as much as possible, that nobody should die.

There in the hospital, Billy was having an adventure very common among people without power in time of war: He was trying to prove to a wilfully deaf and blind enemy that he was interesting to hear and see. He kept silent until the lights went’ out at night, and then, when there had been a long silence containing nothing to echo, he said to Rumfoord, ‘I was in Dresden when it was bombed. I was a prisoner of war.’ Rumfoord sighed impatiently.

‘Word of honor.,’ said Billy Pilgrim. ‘Do you believe me?’

‘Must we talk about it now?’ said Rumfoord. He had heard. He didn’t believe.

‘We don’t ever have to talk about it,’ said Billy. ‘I just want you to know: I was there.’