One Hell of a Country

"One Hell of a Country" is a piece that was first printed in The Guardian on February 27, 1992 as the inaugural article in the "Writing home" series, in which authors from around the globe reflected on their nationality. It was published again in The Montreal Gazette on September 12, 1992 as part of the "My Country" series, in which it was titled "America: Right and Wrong".

Summary

Like most German-Americans, the United States is the only country Vonnegut has, since the homeland of his ancestors became so hated over the course of two world wars. Descendants of other nationalities retain the option of acting as if they are really just visitors among crazy people, should the United States do something really repulsive. African-Americans, for different, tragic reasons are also stuck with the United States since native Africans by and large see themselves as distinct. As the patriot Stephen Decatur once put it, when slavery was still legal: "our country, right or wrong". He would later be shot and killed in a formal duel with "a fellow Anglo-American".

Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf and President George Bush

German-Americans, however, have kept a low profile so as to be virtually non-existent. General Norman Schwarzkopf, made famous by the Gulf War, may well know who Goethe and Schiller were, but if he wants to keep looking American, he'd better act as if he doesn't. African-Americans, however, who are distinctly color-coded in a society in which they are only one-tenth of the population, are in much worse shape. They will always be too tempting for white Americans looking for power to turn into scapegoats, as George Bush did to become president. His commercial about the convicted murderer and rapist Willy [sic] Horton that was used to defeat his opponent, Michael Dukakis, were in essence a coded message that black criminals will soon be after our wives and daughters, so white male Americans had better have fully automatic weapons available to defend themselves.

This messaging is as "nitwit primitive" as Nazism, and perhaps as a German-American, Vonnegut is more sensitive to these similarities in attitude than some "other hyphens". He often wonders how his own family would have responded to the rise of Hitler had they been in Germany instead of the United States. His guess is that they would have been uncomfortable with what their society was doing, although not certain whether they were justified in being so, and probably would have kept their doubts to themselves. Vonnegut had an aunt, an American citizen, who married a German and lived in Hamburg during the war. They had a son of a similar age to Vonnegut who was captured on the Russian front. These relatives were neither Nazi supporters nor resisters, but simply tried to exist.

Vonnegut once asked the German author Heinrich Böll how much ordinary Germans knew about the "Final Solution". He replied that everyone was aware of local concentration camps to kill enemies of the state, but not the "corpse factories" like Auschwitz. Heinrich Himmler once told those who worked at such camps that they were especially heroic, since they could never publicly admit what they had done. Now white politicians in the United States portray African-Americans, especially males, as the "cancer in the body of an otherwise wholesome society". At least, however, things are not as bad as "the slow-motion Auschwitz of slavery", practiced by founding American heroes like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and would likely have been done by Vonnegut's own ancestors had they arrived in the United States a bit earlier.