A Vonnegut tribute

[David Morris]

>From the Eschaton Blog, a Vonnegut tribute:

http://www.atrios.blogspot.com/

A passage from Slaughterhouse Five, or the Children's Crusade:

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.

The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was
that Christ, who didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the
Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when
they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater
read out loud again:

Oh boy - they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!

And that thought had a brother: "There are right people to lynch."
Who? People not well connected. So it goes.

The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In
it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of
people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all
the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels.

So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and
planting the cross in the ground. There couldn't possibly be any
repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think
that, too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a
nobody Jesus was.

And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and
there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down.
He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him
the full powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the
Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on,
He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no
connections!

Billy's fiancee had finished her Three Musketeers candy bar. Now she
was eating a Milky Way.

"Forget books," said Rosewater, throwing that particular book under
his bed. "The hell with 'em."

"That sounded like an interesting one," said Valencia.

"Jesus-if Kilgore Trout could only write!" Rosewater exclaimed. He had
a point: Kilgore Trout's unpopularity was deserved. His prose was
frightful. Only his ideas were good.