"Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

The year is 2001 now.
If all had gone the way a lot of people thought it would, Jesus Christ would have been among us again,
and the American flag would have been planted on Venus and Mars.
No such luck!
At least the World will end, an event anticipated with great joy by many. It will end very soon, but not
in the year 2000, which has come and gone. From that I conclude that God Almighty is not heavily into
Numerology.

Grandfather Benjamin Wills died in 1948, when I was
a pIus 8 years of age, but not before he made sure that
I knew by heart the most famous words uttered by
Debs, which are:
тАЬWhile there is a lower class I am in it. While there is a criminal element I am of it. While there is a
soul in prison I am not free.тАЭ

I, DebsтАЩ namesake, however, became anything but a bleeding heart. From the time I was 21 until I was
35 1 was a professional soldier, a Commissioned Officer in the United States Army. During those 14
years I would have killed Jesus Christ Himself or Herself or Itself or Whatever, if ordered to do so by a
superior officer. At the abrupt and humiliating and dishonorable end of the Vietnam War, I was a
Lieutenant Colonel, with I ,000s and 1 ,000s of my own inferiors.

During that war, which was about nothing but the ammunition business, there was a microscopic
possibility, I suppose, that I called in a white-phosphorus barrage or a napalm air strike on a returning
Jesus Christ.

I never wanted to be a professional soldier, although I turned out to be a good one, if there can be such
a thing. The idea that I should go to West Point came up as unexpectedly as the finale of the Vietnam
War, near the end of my senior year in high school. I was all set to
go to the University of Michigan, and take courses in English and History and Political Science, and work
on the student daily paper there in preparation for a career as a journalist.
But all of a sudden my father, who was a chemical engineer involved in making plastics with a half-life
of 50,000 years, and as full of excrement as a Christmas turkey, said I should go to West Point instead.
He had never been in the military himself. During World War II, he was too valuable as a civilian deep-
thinker about chemicals to be put in a soldier suit and turned into a suicidal, homicidal imbecile in 13
weeks.
I had already been accepted by the University of Michigan, when this offer to me of an appointment to
the United States Military Academy came out of the blue. The offer arrived at a low point in my fatherтАЩs
life, when he needed something to boast about which would impress our simple-minded neighbors. They
would think an appointment to West Point was a great prize, like being picked for a professional baseball
team.
So he said to me, as I used to say to infantry replacements fresh off the boat or plane in Vietnam, тАЬThis
is a great opportunity.тАЭ

What I would really like to have been, given a perfect world, is a jazz pianist. I mean jazz. I donтАЩt mean
rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-way-twice music the American black people gave the world. I
played piano in my own all-white band in my all-white high school in Midland City, Ohio. We called
ourselves тАЬThe Soul Merchants.тАЭ
How good were we? We had to play white peopleтАЩs popular music, or nobody would have hired us. But
every so often we would cut loose with jazz anyway.
Nobody else seemed to notice the difference, but we sure did. We fell in love with ourselves. We were in