Stars and Bit Players

"Stars and Bit Players" is the title given a speech given by Vonnegut on November 7, 1981 upon receiving the Eugene V. Debs Award in Terre Haute, Indiana. It was published in The Nation on November 28th of that year and reprinted in the collection Vonnegut By The Dozen in 2013.

Summary

Indianapolis is rarely taken seriously, although Vonnegut is fond of noting that it's the largest city in the world not on a navigable waterway as well as the first, and probably last, place in the United States where a white man was hanged for murdering a Native American. It takes more than a race track and Eli Lilly to make James Whitcomb Riley or the Rev. Jim Jones. At Shortridge High School in Indianapolis, Vonnegut learned two rules of public speaking: never read the speech or apologize. Therefore, he does both as a novelty, which is how to become famous in America. Debs became famous for attacking the railroad that once dominated the nation and opposing the First World War. Vonnegut's first apology is for accepting an award named after his hero when it should have gone "to a working stiff", but he will acknowledge that he will never cross a picket line. His family was not particularly liberal. As he noted in the introduction to Jailbird, his father in 1945 wasn't even aware there was doubt about the guilt of Sacco and Vanzetti. Vonnegut's first relative in the United States, his great-great-grandfather Jacob Schramm, wrote to a friend in 1842 that human weakness made the republican form of government impossible, but since Americans so love their freedom, it would take a violent revolution to install the necessary monarch. Vonnegut himself came to respect the Bill of Rights from his public school education during the Great Depression and during three years as a private in the Army. He speculates that what radicalizes Americans is America.

The divorce of Josephine and Napoleon

His second apology is for the damage his stories, which have been burned for being so offense, have done to the young. This apology is not for telling them "where babies really come from", that God shouldn't get to be in charge until humans "get to know Him a little better", that America's leaders are like the idiots Vonnegut went to high school with, or that adult soldiers sometimes swear. Instead, it is an apology about the nature of stories, which are structured such that there are a few central characters, with everyone else an unimportant bit player. From this, young people come to believe that life is the same way, which allows us all to watch Napoleon and Josephine while the corpses of nobodies cover battlefields. Chess sets, half made of pawns, teach this lesson as well, but that's not the fault of writers. Vonnegut, like all authors, has told stories with kings and pawns for the practical reason that readers can't keep track of so many significant characters. Unfortunately, people have begun seeing their own lives as characters in stories, with starring roles and unimportant bit players. This would be damaging anywhere, but especially in the United States "which is struggling toward democracy". Pawns can be easily sacrificed in foreign wars or forgotten about entirely.

Vonnegut first considered this apology ten years ago during the Attica State Prison uprising, the largest massacre of Americans by Americans since the Civil War. At that time, the convicts, hostages, and their families all pleaded with then-New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller to meet with the inmates, bringing "the magic and grace inherent in his office" to seek to avoid bloodshed. Like many public servants, such as police, firemen, and soldiers, he was asked to risk his dignity and perhaps his body. Instead, Rockefeller sent in armed troops who killed forty-five people, ten of them hostages. Clearly he saw himself as the leading character in the drama and everyone else as disposable bit players. Now the United States and Soviet Union occasionally threaten to get so angry at each other that they will obliterate the bit players of the other side, although we are always assured that some of the stars will survive so the story can go on. Here in Terre Haute, which means "high ground", we should acknowledge how destructive this view has been, to say nothing of the endings of stories with everything neatly wrapped up, unlike in life where events don't end.

David Stockman and Ronald Reagan

Now in the Reagan administration a "young monster named David Stockman" doesn't think bit players even need food, shelter, or clothing anymore, nor work or hope. The ostentatious displays of public officials show that the stars at least "are becoming happier all the time". Terre Haute and places like it must declare to Washington, D.C. that they "are not simpering, gaga fans!" This "moral herpes" of star culture has made absurd the most famous words of Eugene V. Debs: "While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free". In a decent nation, such thoughts would be natural, but instead Americans have a tendency to seek to be a little more of a star than others. Instead, we must teach children that life is not like the stories of art, explaining why art makes stars but making it clear that life "has no unimportant characters". They must learn how to spot people who imagine they are important characters, like Hitler and Caligula. Pawn-like sacrifices of life will still be necessary, but at least we can decide for ourselves to what extent we were born to be sacrificed. Many, in the face of real danger, will say what Rockefeller should have: "Very well—the time has come to put my life on the line. It is my duty". Vonnegut thanks the assembled for the award, saying that tonight they have made him a star.