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

more than mildly inconvenience anyone.
Noah and a few like him perceived that the continent was in fact finite, and that venal
office-holders, legislators in particular, could be persuaded to toss up great hunks of it for
grabs, and to toss them in such a way as to have them land where Noah and his kind were standing.
Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in
America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless
American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as
bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved
henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against
which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to
the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went _bang_ in the noonday sun.
_E pluribus unum_ is surely an ironic motto to inscribe on the currency of this Utopia
gone bust, for every grotesquely rich American represents property, privileges, and pleasures that
have been denied the many. An even more instructive motto, in the light of history made by the
Noah Rosewaters, might be: _Grab much too much, or you'll get nothing at all_.
And Noah begat Samuel, who married Geraldine Ames Rockefeller. Samuel became even more
interested in politics than his father had been, served the Republican Party tirelessly as a king-
maker, caused that party to nominate men who would whirl like dervishes, bawl fluent Babylonian,
and order the militia to fire into crowds whenever a poor man seemed on the point of suggesting
that he and a Rosewater were equal in the eyes of the law.
And Samuel bought newspapers, and preachers, too. He gave them this simple lesson to
teach, and they taught it well: _Anybody who thought that the United States of America was
supposed to be a Utopia was a piggy, lazy, God-damned fool_. Samuel thundered that no American
factory hand was worth more than eighty cents a day. And yet he could be thankful for the
opportunity to pay a hundred thousand dollars or more for a painting by an Italian three centuries
dead. And he capped this insult by giving paintings to museums for the spiritual elevation of the
poor. The museums were closed on Sundays.
And Samuel begat Lister Ames Rosewater, who married Eunice Eliot Morgan. There was
something to be said for Lister and Eunice: unlike Noah and Cleota and Samuel and Geraldine, they
could laugh as though they meant it. As a curious footnote to history, Eunice became Woman's Chess
Champion of the United States in 1927, and again in 1933.
Eunice also wrote an historical novel about a female gladiator, _Ramba of Macedon_, which
was a best-seller in 1936. Eunice died in 1937, in a sailing accident in Cotuit, Massachusetts.
She was a wise and amusing person, with very sincere anxieties about the condition of the poor.
She was my mother.
Her husband, Lister, never was in business. From the moment of his birth to the time I am
writing this, he has left the manipulation of his assets to lawyers and banks. He has spent nearly
the whole of his adult life in the Congress of the United States, teaching morals, first as a
Representative from the district whose heart is Rosewater County, and then as Senator from
Indiana. That he is or ever was an Indiana person is a tenuous political fiction. And Lister begat
Eliot.
Lister has thought about the effects and implications of his inherited wealth about as
much as most men think about their left big toes. The fortune has never amused, worried, or
tempted him. Giving ninety-five per cent of it to the Foundation you now control didn't cause him
a twinge.
And Eliot married Sylvia DuVrais Zetterling, a Parisienne beauty who came to hate him. Her
mother was a patroness of painters. Her father was the greatest living cellist. Her maternal
grandparents were a Rothschild and a DuPont.
And Eliot became a drunkard, a Utopian dreamer, a tinhorn saint, an aimless fool.