"Kurt Vonnegut - God Bless You Mr Rosewater" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

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