© 1992 Southam Inc., The Gazette (Montreal)
September 12, 1992

America: Right and Wrong
by Kurt Vonnegut

THE UNITED States is the only country I have, and the only country most German Americans have, since the homeland of our ancestors was so loathsome and finally our enemy in two world wars. Irish-Americans and Anglo-Americans and Chinese-Americans and Norwegian Americans and Italian Americans and Filipino Americans and so on have the option, should this country do something which really stinks to high heaven, of feeling that they, after all, are only visitors among crazy people, no matter how long their families may have lived here.

Afro Americans are also stuck with the United States of America and nothing else for countless tragic reasons, not the least of which is that native black Africans do not acknowledge them as even distant relatives. So an Afro American, like a German American, would be stating no more than a simple fact should he echo the American patriot Stephen Decatur's famous toast in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1816, when enslaving Afro Americans was still perfectly legal: "Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong." Decatur would eventually be killed in a formal pistol duel with a fellow Anglo American.

German Americans are by and large OK in 1992, maintaining a non- existent profile as such, and when in the news, as was our General Norman Schwarzkopf during the Gulf War, exemplifying Americana as unadulterated as a bottle of Pepsi-Cola with the cap still on. Ask the general who Goethe and Schiller and Heine were. He may know, but he would be well advised to answer, if he wants to go on addressing chambers of commerce and trade associations at $ 50,000 a pop, "Were they the outfield of the Saint Louis Cardinals in 1939?"

But the mass of Afro Americans is in one hell of a shape. Because they are as distinctively color-coded as the wires in a time bomb, and because they are one-tenth as numerous here as persons with much lighter skins, including orientals, I cannot daydream of good times of any duration for most of them. They are simply too tempting, too convenient as scapegoats, in these hard times, for Americans of all shades, for politicians seeking re-election not to suggest, as George Bush did in his first campaign for the White House, that the rest of us are right to be afraid of them.

I had better say for the benefit of the lady in Medicine Hat, Alberta, those who may not have heard of that campaign, that it featured a convicted black rapist named Willy Horton, who was paroled from a Massachusetts prison while Michael Dukakis, Bush's rival candidate, was governor of that state. And what did the black monster do as soon as he got out? He raped again. Yes, and the coded message in the enthusiasm of so many politicians, including the president and vice-president, for the availability of fully automatic weapons to one and all, surely, is that the time may come when, in order to protect our wives and daughters, we may have to mow down wave after wave of Willie Hortons.

It is all so nitwit primitive, as was the Nazi thing. And as a German American I may be, although not necessarily, more sensitive to similarities between some of the attitudes and enterprises of my own government and the Nazi thing than are some of the other hyphens.

Born in 1922, I have wondered how my family and I would have responded to Hitler had we lived in Frankfurt am Main, say, instead of Indianapolis, Indiana, am Fall Creek.

It is my educated guess that we could have had misgivings about much that was going on, but would not have been certain that our misgivings were justified, and so would have kept them private. My father's sister, an American citizen, married a German citizen and lived through the war in Hamburg, and they had a son about my age. My cousin wound up as a radio operator on the Russian front, where he was taken prisoner.

That is about what would have happened to me, too, I guess. If his parents said boo about anything the Nazis were doing or seemed to believe, I have not heard of it. Nor were they overtly complicitous in war crimes or crimes against humanity or whatever you want to call them. To their credit, I have to say, once the war was over, it did not occur to them to inflate small acts of compassion or reluctance on their part into hair-raising tales of anti-Nazi derring-do.

They were simply whipped. That was about the size of it.

I asked Heinrich Boll at the very end of his life how much ordinary German citizens had known about the Nazis' ''Final Solution'' to the problems that the Jews of Europe were thought to present. He said that they knew about the killing going on in the relatively modest genocidal institutions in their own neighborhoods, about which they spoke as little as possible, for fear that they themselves might be put inside one. But news of the high-tech, state-of-the-art corpse factories like Auschwitz, Poland, Auschwitz and its satellite nightmares, he said, came as a surprise to most of them.

I think that is true. Heinrich Himmler, the unspeakable ex-chicken farmer whose underlings kept the Polish crematoria running at capacity around the clock, said to some of those underlings in a speech that they were especially heroic, since they would never be able to tell what they had done for their country once the war was won.

Nichts sagen.

But we over here would need no bureaucracy of ultra-patriotic tormentors to shorten the lives of millions of Afro Americans, should we elect more and more politicians who teach us, as did George Bush with the Willie Horton parable, that Afro Americans, and especially the males, are a cancer in the body of an otherwise wholesome society.

We aready know that the consequences of hopelessness can do the job. They worked like a charm with the Indians. So be it. Whatever happens to the mass of Afro Americans next, and never mind their few multimillionaire superstars, it cannot be as bad as the slow-motion Auschwitz of slavery must have been back when Stephen Decatur said what he said in Norfolk, back when Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence (''When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another ...'') and James Madison, author of the first amendment to our constitution (''Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ...'') both owned slaves.

There may have been a few German Americans back then who also owned slaves. My own ancestors simply got here too late to buy some.

© 1992 Southam Inc., The Gazette (Montreal)

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