November 5, 2000

• Great (albeit sacrilegious) Vonnegutt quote
  

  I read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five last weekend. I had read Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions a couple of years ago, and while I didn’t like it that much, I thought I’d give Vonnegut another shot.
  

  After I had finished the first half, I thought Vonnegut had pretty blown his second chance, but then, I read the following quote, and came to appreciate Vonnegut as a genius:
  

  
  

  Rosewater was on the next bed, reading, and Billy drew him into the conversation [with his wife], 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 stores, 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 reprucussions, 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 throughtout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!

  
  

  Two thoughts:
  

  
  

  
  
  1. First, it’s pretty cheeky to criticize the Gospels as “slipshod storytelling”, particularly with analysis this acute. If you think about it, the idea that “the meek shall inherit the earth” only works if it’s backed up by the almighty power of God. Indeed, I always that the vengeful God depicted in the Old Testament, and parts of the New Testament (“Worship ME or suffer terrible consequences!!!”) reminded me a bit too much of a chain letter (“Send this to ten friends or you’ll get hit by a truck and die!”)

  2. Second, and this is a minor point, but Jesus wouldn’t have been able to say all those wonderful things, because a big chunk of the Gospels (as I recall) is Jesus coming to terms with the fact that he’s the Son of the Creator of the Universe, fated to die on the cross, etc. If Jesus doesn’t know he’s Somebody until he’s dead, that kinda screws up the Bible’s plot.

  • 2:19 pm
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