Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Precisely,” he said. “You obviously do not understand how easily discouraged the typical Tarkington student is, how sensitive to suggestions that he or she should quit trying to be smart. That’s what the word ‘futile’ means: ‘Quit, quit, quit.’

“And what does ‘ignorance’ mean?” I said.

“If you put it up on the wall and give it the prominence you have,” he said, “it’s a nasty echo of what so many Tarkingtonians were hearing before they got here: ‘You’re dumb, you’re dumb, you’re dumb.’ And of course they aren’t dumb.”

“I never said they were,” I protested.

“You reinforce their low self-esteem without realizing what you are doing,” he said. “You also upset them with humor appropriate to a barracks, but certainly not to an institution of higher learning.”

“You mean about Yen and fellatio?” I said. “I would never have said it if I’d thought a student could hear me.”

“I am talking about the entrance hail of the library again,” he said.

“I can’t think of what else is in there that might have offended you,” I said.

“It wasn’t I who was offended,” he said. “It was my daughter.”

“I give up,” I said. I wasn’t being impudent. I was abject.

“On the same day Kimberley heard you talk about Yen and fellatio, before classes had even begun,” he said, “a senior led her and the other freshmen to the library and solemnly told them that the bell clappers on the wall were petrified penises. That was surely barracks humor the senior had picked up from you.”

For once I didn’t have to defend myself. Several of the Trustees assured Wilder that telling freshmen that the clappers were penises was a tradition that antedated my arrival on campus by at least 20 years.

But that was the only time they defended me, although I of them had been my student, Madelaine Astor, née Peabody, and 5 of them were parents of those I had taught. Madelaine dictated a letter to me afterward, explaining that Jason Wilder had promised to denounce the college in his column and on his TV show if the Trustees did not fire me.

So they dared not come to my assistance.

She said, too, that since she, like Wilder, was a Roman Catholic, she was shocked to hear me say on tape that Hitler was a Roman Catholic, and that the Nazis painted crosses on their tanks and airplanes be-cause they considered themselves a Christian army. Wilder had played that tape right after I had been cleared of all responsibility for freshmen’s being told that the clappers were penises.

Once again I was in deep trouble for merely repeating what somebody else had said. It wasn’t something my grandfather had said this time, or somebody else who couldn’t be hurt by the Trustees, like Paul Slazinger. It was something my best friend Damon Stern had said in a History class only a couple of months before.

If Jason Wilder thought I was an unteacher, he should have heard Damon Stern! Then again, Stern never told the awful truth about supposedly noble human actions in recent times. Everything he debunked had to have transpired before 1950, say.

So I happened to sit in on a class where he talked about Hitler’s being a devout Roman Catholic. He said something I hadn’t realized before, something I have since discovered most Christians don’t want to hear:

that the Nazi swastika was intended to be a version of a Christian cross, a cross made out of axes. Stern said that Christians had gone to a lot of trouble denying that the swastika was just another cross, saying it was a primitive symbol from the primordial ooze of the pagan past.

And the Nazis’ most valuable military decoration was the Iron Cross.

And the Nazis painted regular crosses on all their tanks and airplanes.

I came out of that class looking sort of dazed, I guess. Who should I run into but Kimberley Wilder?

“What did he say today?” she said.

“Hitler was a Christian,” I said. “The swastika was a Christian cross.”

She got it on tape.

I didn’t rat on Damon Stern to the Trustees. Tarkington wasn’t West Point, where it was an honor to squeal.

Madelaine agreed with Wilder, too, she said in her letter, that I should not have told my Physics students that the Russians, not the Americans, were the first to make a hydrogen bomb that was portable enough to be used as a weapon. “Even if it’s true,” she wrote, “which I don’t believe, you had no business teffing them that.”

She said, moreover, that perpetual motion was possible, if only scientists would work harder on it.

She had certainly backslid intellectually since passing her orals for her Associate in the Arts and Sciences Degree.

I used to tell classes that anybody who believed in the possibility of perpetual motion should be boiled alive like a lobster.

I was also a stickler about the Metric System. I was famous for turning my back on students who mentioned feet or pounds or miles to me.

They hated that.

I didn’t dare teach like that in the prison across the lake, of course.

Then again, most of the convicts had been in the drug business, and were either Third World people or dealt with Third World people. So the Metric System was old stuff to them.

Rather than rat on Damon Stern about the Nazis’ being Christians, I told the Trustees that I had heard it on National Public Radio. I said I was very sorry about having passed it on to a student. “I feel like biting off my tongue,” I said.

“What does Hitler have to do with either Physics or Music Appreciation?” said Wilder.

I might have replied that Hitler probably didn’t know any more about physics than the Board of Trustees, but that he loved music. Every time a concert hail was bombed, I heard somewhere, he had it rebuilt immediately as a matter of top priority. I think I may actually have learned that from National Public Radio.

I said instead, “If I’d known I upset Kimberley as much as you say I did, I would certainly have apologized. I had no idea, sir. She gave no sign.”

What made me weak was the realization that I had been mistaken to think that I was with family there in the Board Room, that all Tarkingtonians and their parents and guardians had come to regard me as an uncle. My goodness—the family secrets I had learned over the years and kept to myself! My lips were sealed. What a faithful old retainer I was! But that was all I was to the Trustees, and probably to the students, too.

I wasn’t an uncle. I was a member of the Servant Class.

They were letting me go.

Soldiers are discharged. People in the workplace are fired. Servants are let go.

“Am I being fired?” I asked the Chairman of the Board incredulously.

“I’m sorry, Gene,” he said, “but we’re going to have to let you go.”

The President of the college, Tex Johnson, sitting two chairs away from me, hadn’t let out a peep. He looked sick. I surmised mistakenly that he had been scolded for having let me stay on the faculty long enough to get tenure. He was sick about something more personal, which still had a lot to do with Professor Eugene Debs Hartke.

He had been brought in as President from Rollins College down in Winter Park, Florida, where he had been Provost, after Sam Wakefield did the big trick of suicide. Henry “Tex” Johnson held a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration from Texas Tech in Lubbock, and claimed to be a descendant of a man who had died in the Alamo. Damon Stern, who was always turning up little-known facts of history, told me, incidentally, that the Battle of the Alamo was about slavery. The brave men who died there wanted to secede from Mexico because it was against the law to own slaves in Mexico. They were fighting for the right to own slaves.