On Americans and The Poor (page 164)
While
the British colonel set Lazzaro’s broken arm and mixed plaster for the cast,
the German major translated out loud passages from Howard W. Campbell, Jr.’s
monograph. Campbell had been a fairly well-known playwright at one time. His
opening line was this one:
America is the wealthiest
nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged
to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kim Hubbard, “It ain’t no
disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.” It is in fact a crime for an
American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other
nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and
virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such
tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their
betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is
himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel
question: “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” There will also be an
American flag no larger than a child’s hand—glued to a lollipop stick and
flying from the cash register.
On Christian Gospel (page 138)
Rosewater
was on the next bed, reading, and Billy drew him into the conversation, asked
him what he was reading this time.
So
Rosewater told him. It was The Gospel from Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It
was about a visitor from outer space, shaped very much like a Tralfamadorian,
by the way. The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity,
to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He
concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the
New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people,
among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.
But
the Gospels actually taught this:
Before you kill somebody,
make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected. So it goes.
A Fourth-Dimensional Tralfamadorian Explains to His Peers What
Time Looks Like to a Three-Dimensional Human Using a Two-Dimensional Analogy
(pp. 146-147)
The guide invited the crowd
to imagine that they were looking across a desert at a mountain range on a day
that was twinkling bright and clear. They could look at a peak or a bird or a
cloud, at a stone right in front of them, or even down into a canyon behind
them. But among them was this poor Earthling, and his head was encased in a
steel sphere which he could never take off. There was only one eyehole through
which he could look, and welded to that eyehole were six feet of pipe.
This was only the beginning
of Billy’s miseries in the metaphor. He was also strapped to a steel lattice
which was bolted to a flatcar on rails, and there was no way he could turn his
head or touch the pipe. The far end of the pipe rested on a bi-pod which was
also bolted to the flatcar. All Billy could see was the little dot at the end
of the pipe. He didn’t know he was on a flatcar, didn’t even know there was
anything peculiar about his situation.
The flatcar sometimes crept,
sometimes went extremely fast, often stopped—went uphill, downhill, around
curves, along straightaways. Whatever poor Billy saw through the pipe, he had
no choice but to say to himself, “That’s life.”
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