So now we count dollars the way you used to count bodies,¨ he said. What does that bring us closer to? What does it mean? We should do with those dollars what you did with the bodies. Bury and forget them! You were luckier with your bodies than we are with all our dollars.¨
How so?¨ I said.
All anybody can do with bodies is burn them or bury them,¨ he said. There isnt any nightmare afterwards, when you have to invest them and make them grow.¨
What a clever trap your Ruling Class set for us,¨ he went on. First the atomic bomb. Now this.¨
Trap?¨ I echoed wonderingly.
They looted your public and corporate treasuries, and turned your industries over to nincompoops,¨ he said. Then they had your Government borrow so heavily from us that we had no choice but to send over an Army of Occupation in business suits. Never before has the Ruling Class of a country found a way to stick other countries with all the responsibilities their wealth might imply, and still remain rich beyond the dreams of avarice! No wonder they thought the comatose Ronald Reagan was a great President!¨
His point was well taken, it seems to me.
When Jason Wilder and all the rest of the Trustees were hostages in the stable, and I paid them a call, I got the distinct impression that they regarded Americans as foreigners. What nationality that made them is hard to say.
They were all White, and they were all Male, since Lowell Chungs mother had died of tetanus. She died before the doctors could understand what was killing her. None of them had ever seen a case of tetanus before, because practically everybody in this country in the old days had been immunized.
Now that public health programs have pretty much fallen apart, and no foreigners are interested in running them, which is certainly understandable, quite a number of cases of tetanus, and especially among children, are turning up again.
So most doctors know what it looks like now. Mrs. Chung had the misfortune to be a pioneer.
The hostages told me about that. One of the first things I said to them was, Where is Madam Chung?¨
I thought I should reassure the Trustees after the execution of Lyle Hooper. His corpse had been shown to them as a warning, I suppose, against their making any plans for derring-do. That body was surely icing on the cake of terror, so to speak. The College President, after all, was dangling from spikes in the loft above.
One of the hostages said in a TV interview after he was liberated that he would never forget the sound of Tex Johnsons head bouncing on the steps as Tex was dragged up to the loft feet first. He tried to imitate the sound. He said, Bloomp, bloomp, bloomp,¨ the same sound a flat tire makes.
What a planet!
The hostages expressed pity for Tex, but none for Lyle Hooper, and none for all the other faculty members and Townies who were also dead. The locals were too insignificant for persons on their social level to think about. I dont fault them for this. I think they were being human.
The Vietnam War couldnt have gone on as long as it did, certainly, if it hadnt been human nature to regard persons 1 didnt know and didnt care to know, even if they were in agony, as insignificant. A few human beings have struggled against this most natural of tendencies, and have expressed pity for unhappy strangers. But, as History shows, as History yells: They have never been numerous!¨
Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.
And the worst flaw is that were just plain dumb. Admit it!
You think Auschwitz was intelligent?
When I tried to tell the hostages a little about their captors, about their childhoods and mental illnesses, and their not caring if they lived or died, and what prison was like, and so on, Jason Wilder actually closed his eyes and covered his ears. He was being theatrical rather than practical. He didnt cover his ears so well that he couldnt hear me.
Others shook their heads and indicated in other ways that such information was not only tiresome but offensive. It was as though we were in a thunderstorm, and I had begun lecturing on the circulation of electrical charges in clouds, and the formation of raindrops, and the paths chosen by lightning strokes, and what thunder was, and on and on. All they wanted to know was when the storm would stop, so they could go on about their business.
What Warden Matsumoto had said about people like them was accurate. They had managed to convert their wealth, which had originally been in the form of factories or stores or other demanding enterprises, into a form so liquid and abstract, negotiable representations of money on paper, that there were few reminders coming from anywhere that they might be responsible for anyone outside their own circle of friends and relatives.
They didnt rage against the convicts. They were mad at the Government for not making sure that escapes from prison were impossible. The more they ran on like that, the clearer it became that it was their Government,
not mine or the convicts or the Townies. Its first duty, moreover, was to protect them from the lower classes, not only in this country but everywhere.
Were people on Easy Street ever any different?
Think again about the crucifixions of Jesus and the 2 thieves, and the 6,000 slaves who followed the gladiator Spartacus.
Cough.
My body, as I understand it, is attempting to contain the TB germs inside me in little shells it builds around them. The shells are calcium, the most common element in the walls of many prisons, including Athena. This place is ringed by barbed wire. So was Auschwitz.
If I die of TB, it will be because my body could not build prisons fast enough and strong enough.
Is there a lesson there? Not a cheerful one.
If the Trustees were bad, the convicts were worse. I would be the last person to say otherwise. They were devastators of their own communities with gunfights and robberies and rapes, and the merchandising of brain-busting chemicals and on and on.
But at least they saw what they were doing, whereas people like the Trustees had a lot in common with B-52 bombardiers way up in the stratosphere. They seldom saw the devastation they caused as they moved the huge portion of this countrys wealth they controlled from here to there.
Unlike my Socialist grandfather Ben Wills, who was a nobody, I have no reforms to propose. I think any form of government, not just Capitalism, is whatever
the people who have all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decide to do today.
Warden Matsumoto was an odd duck. Many of his quirks were no doubt a consequence of his having had an atomic bomb dropped on him in childhood. The buildings and trees and bridges and so on which had seemed so substantial vanished like fantasies.
As Ive said, Hiroshima was suddenly a blank table-land with little dust devils spinning here and there.
After the flash, little Hiroshi Matsumoto was the only real thing on the table. He began a long, long walk in search of anything else that was also real. When he reached the edge of the city, he found himself among structures and creatures both real and fantastic, living people with their skins hanging on their exposed muscles and bones like draperies, and so on.
These images about the bombing are all his, by the way. But I wouldnt hear them from him until I had been teaching at the prison and living next door to him by the lake for 2 long years.
Whatever else being atom-bombed had done to him, it had not destroyed his conscience. He had hated turning away poor people from the emergency room at the hospital-for-profit he ran in Louisville. After he took over the prison-for-profit at Athena, he thought there ought to be some sort of educational program there, even though his corporations contract with New York State required him to keep the prisoners from escaping and nothing more.
He worked for Sony. He never worked for anybody but Sony.
New York State,¨ he said, does not believe that education can rehabilitate the sort of criminal who ends up at Athena or Attica or Sing Sing.¨ Attica and Sing Sing were for Hispanics and Whites respectively, who, like the inmates at Athena, had been convicted of at least 1 murder and 2 other violent crimes. The other 2 were likely to be murders, too.
I dont believe it, either,¨ he said. I do know this, though: 10 percent of the people inside these walls still have minds, but there is nothing for those minds to play with. So this place is twice as painful for them as it is for the rest. A good teacher just might be able to give their minds new toys, Math or Astronomy or History, or who knows what, which would make the passage of time just a little bit more bearable. What do you think?¨