Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut Read Free Book Online Page A

“Gee—I’d give anything to be a college professor.”
    The shocking song, then, may really have been a way of honoring the powers of women, of dealing with the fearsthey inspired. It might properly be compared with a song making fun of lions, sung by lion hunters on a night before a hunt.
    The words were these:
    Sally in the garden
,
Sifting cinders
,
Lifted up her leg

And farted like a man
.
The bursting of her bloomers

Broke sixteen winders
.
The cheeks of her ass went—
    Here the singers, in order to complete the stanza, were required to clap three times.

       2
    M Y OFFICIAL TITLE in the Nixon White House, the job I was holding when I was arrested for embezzlement, perjury, and obstruction of justice, was this: the President’s special advisor on youth affairs. I was paid thirty-six thousand dollars a year. I had an office, but no secretary, in the subbasement of the Executive Office Building, directly underneath, as it happened, the office where burglaries and other crimes on behalf of President Nixon were planned. I could hear people walking overhead and raising their voices sometimes. On my own level in the subbasement my only companions were heating and air-conditioning equipment and a Coca-Cola machine that only I knew about, I think. I was the only person to patronize that machine.
    Yes, and I read college and high-school newspapers and magazines, and
Rolling Stone
and
Crawdaddy
, and anything else that claimed to speak for youth. I catalogued political statements in the words of popular songs. My chief qualification for the job, I thought, was that I myself had been a radical at Harvard, starting in my junior year. Nor had I been cochairman of the Harvard chapter of the Young Communist League. I had been cochairman of a radicalweekly paper,
The Bay State Progressive
. I was in fact, openly and proudly, a card-carrying communist until Hitler and Stalin signed a nonaggression pact in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-nine. Hell and heaven, as I saw it, were making common cause against weakly defended peoples everywhere. After that I became a cautious believer in capitalistic democracy again.
    It was once so acceptable in this country to be a communist that my being one did not prevent my winning a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford after Harvard, and then landing a job in Roosevelt’s Department of Agriculture after that. What could be so repulsive after all, during the Great Depression, especially, and with yet another war for natural wealth and markets coming, in a young man’s belief that each person could work as well as he or she was able, and should be rewarded, sick or well, young or old, brave or frightened, talented or imbecilic, according to his or her simple needs? How could anyone treat me as a person with a diseased mind if I thought that war need never come again—if only common people everywhere would take control of the planet’s wealth, disband their national armies, and forget their national boundaries; if only they would think of themselves ever after as brothers and sisters, yes, and as mothers and fathers, too, and children of all other common people—everywhere. The only person who would be excluded from such friendly and merciful society would be one who took more wealth than he or she needed at any time.
    And even now, at the rueful age of sixty-six, I find myknees still turn to water when I encounter anyone who still considers it a possibility that there will one day be one big happy peaceful family on Earth—the Family of Man. If I were this very day to meet myself as I was in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-three, I would swoon with pity and respectfulness.
    So my idealism did not die even in the Nixon White House, did not die even in prison, did not die even when I became, my most recent employment, a vice-president of the Down Home Records Division of The RAMJAC Corporation.
    I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.
    When I was