Fates Worse than Death by Kurt Vonnegut

Author:Kurt Vonnegut [Vonnegut, Kurt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7953-1868-9
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Published: 1991-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

WE PROBABLY COULD HAVE SAVED OURSELVES,

BUT WERE TOO DAMNED LAZY TO TRY VERY HARD.

“We might well add this:

AND TOO DAMN CHEAP.

“So it’s curtains not just for me as i grow old. it’s curtains for everyone. how’s that for full-strength royal astronomy?”

XII

“MIT has played an important part in the history of my branch of the Vonnegut family. My father and grandfather took degrees in architecture here. My Uncle Pete flunked out of here. My only brother Bernard, nine years my senior, took a doctor’s degree in chemistry here. Father and Grandfather became self-employed architects and partners. Uncle Pete became a building contractor, also self-employed. My brother knew early on that he would be a research scientist, and so could not be self-employed. If he was to have room enough and equipment enough to do what he did best, then he was going to have to work for somebody else. Who would that be?”

Such was what I considered a tantalizing beginning of a speech I gave at MIT back in 1985. (There have been times when I was nutty enough to believe that I might change the course of history a tiny bit, and this was one of them.) There in Kresge Auditorium I had a full house of young people who could do what the magician Merlin could only pretend to do in the Court of King Arthur, in Camelot. They could turn loose or rein in enormous forces (invisible as often as not) in the service or disservice of this or that enterprise (such as Star Wars).

“Most of you,” I went on, “will soon face my brother’s dilemma when he graduated from here. In order to survive and even prosper, most of you will have to make somebody else’s technological dreams come true—along with your own, of course. You will have to form that mixture of dreams we call a partnership—or more romantically, a marriage.

“My brother got his doctorate in 1938, I think. If he had gone to work in Germany after that, he would have been helping to make Hitler’s dreams come true. If he had gone to work in Italy, he would have been helping to make Mussolini’s dreams come true. If he had gone to work in Japan, he would have been helping to make Tojo’s dreams come true. If he had gone to work in the Soviet Union, he would have been helping to make Stalin’s dreams come true. He went to work for a bottle manufacturer in Butler, Pennsylvania, instead. It can make quite a difference not just to you but to humanity: the sort of boss you choose, whose dreams you help come true.

“Hitler dreamed of killing Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, mental defectives, believers in democracy, and so on, in industrial quantities. It would have remained only a dream if it hadn’t been for chemists as well educated as my brother, who supplied Hitler’s executioners with the cyanide gas known as Cyklon-B. It would have remained only a dream if architects

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