The Last Tasmanian

"The Last Tasmanian" is an essay written in the fall of 1992 and first published posthumously in the collection Sucker's Portfolio in 2012 and reprinted in the fourth volume of the Library of America's Vonnegut set in 2016.

Summary

Reflecting that it's been a mere five hundred years since Europeans crossed the Atlantic to reach the Americas—a feat now performed "in rowboats and sailboats no bigger than a sofa"—Vonnegut recalls an article he wrote two decades earlier about how space exploration had revealed that other bodies in the solar system are inhospitable to human life and that we should stop treating the Earth as disposable. Several letters criticized him as the kind of person who would have told Christopher Columbus to stay home. These people failed to realize that history is not a series of "sudden and explosive events," but rather complex systems beyond human control and that the arrival of European explorers was as inevitable as "a sort of tropical storm... bound to hit the outlying islands of the Western Hemisphere". People prefer to "hope that life is like a lottery", in which inspired individuals take world-changing actions, instead of societies in which many are working at the same project.

Kirkpatrick Sale, 1988

The historian and conservationist Kirkpatrick Sale recently published the book The Conquest of Paradise in which he concludes that in addition to murdering the native population, the colonizers also destroyed the very environment they sought to conquer. Vonnegut himself and others like him continue to do this, imagining their garbage and ecological vandalism will simply disappear with the weekly trash pickup. His own German ancestors arrived in the United States too late to participate in the United States' continental genocide or the enslavement of the African-American population—instead innocently raising families and building local communities and cultures—but even new arrivals to the Americas are the beneficiaries of horrific crimes.

While author Heinrich Böll claimed that obedience was the basic flaw of the German character, the behavior of Columbus' sailors, Aztec priests performing human sacrifice, Chinese bureaucrats ordering the killing of unarmed protesters in Tiananmen Square, or American soldiers burying alive with bulldozers thousands of Iraqi soldiers hiding in tunnels would indicate that it is a basic human flaw. Vonnegut himself drove a large tractor during the Second World War, so high up that he had only the vaguest idea what was happening below or in front of him. Television has become the only personality in the United States, not as the educational tool it was promised to be, but as means to wipe out even the recent past with the promise of new entertainment. Vonnegut's adopted son, Steve Adams, wrote for television comedies but eventually quit because he couldn't make a reference to anything that had happened more than two weeks ago or viewers wouldn't understand. Like a bulldozer, television makes everything level and featureless, or like a black hole in which even the most horrible crimes can be made to disappear.

One time, when Vonnegut inquired about the careers of others in his graduate anthropology program at the University of Chicago, he found that many of them became "urban anthropologists" of American slums, since there were fewer "primitive people around". The heavily armed residents of those neighborhoods are clearly regarded by the federal government as a "well-regulated militia", at least as much as Columbus' crew was, who once hanged thirteen Taino with their feet barely touching the ground as punishment for burying Christian icons in an attempt to increase their fields' fertility. Hitler did similarly with those who conspired to assassinate him and had it filmed. However, it's too easy to vilify Columbus, who was a product of his times, as are all humans. History has repeatedly shown our potential, and sometimes unintentional, awfulness, like all animals. Vonnegut's cat Claude also "knows nothing of the Beatitudes" or other morality when killing mice, and humanity itself would be in even worse shape were it not for often ghastly experiments on lower animals like cats. He and Claude are currently living alone in Vonnegut's house in Sagaponack, a Native American name, in the winter, with the rich neighbors gone for warmer climates. He and his wife are having problems, which they both hope are only temporary.

Vonnegut's own history with Native Americans has been varied. Once he and his wife invited someone they thought to be Native American to the Russian Tea Room on Thanksgiving. Arriving in a mishmash of tribal apparel, he was given special dispensation to not wear a formal tie as was generally required of restaurant guests. Years later they learned that several Native American organizations had denounced this man as a fraud and the last time Vonnegut saw him, he was dressed "like a Wall Street broker". In his youth, Vonnegut spent two summers in the Southwest with friends, learning about the cultures of the Hopi, Navajo, and Zuni. These groups had his sympathy as early as his first grade education, when it was already clear that they "were innocent victims of crimes by white men that could never be forgiven". Many white people, almost always members of the "white-supremacist and social-Darwinist" Republican Party who live near Native Americans, continue speak about them with contempt. Vonnegut has been told of out-of-print writings by his literary hero, Mark Twain, in which he speaks of Native Americans as subhuman.

Leonard Peltier, 1972

Another Native American, Leonard Peltier, corresponds regularly with Vonnegut while in federal prison for the killing of FBI agents, despite evidence that he has been wrongly convicted. When new evidence was brought before a federal judge, the prosecutor commented that even if Peltier was not guilty of these specific murders, he was surely guilty of something else as bad. This was also said of the Italian-American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, who were executed in 1927 for murder, despite another person confessing to the crime. At that time, Italians were seen as non-white as Native Americans to the nation's ruling class, as were Greeks, Jews, Spaniards, and Portuguese. The famous mobster Al Capone, a fellow Italian immigrant, supported the execution since he thought Sacco and Vanzetti were "ungrateful to this wonderful country." He was later sent to prison for income tax evasion.

Robert Hughes, a historian of his native Australia and now a respected art critic in America for Time magazine, criticized Sale's book. While admitting that the standard Columbus narrative "was a myth pleasing to white supremacists", Sale likewise does a disservice to accurate history by making him little more than "Hitler in a caravel, landing like a virus among the innocent people of the New World." The smallest state in Australia, Tasmania, is notable as the only place where no genetic remnants of the pre-colonial population exist. The conquerors would not have sex with them and, according to a professor at the University of Chicago, the Tasmanians soon found life so terrible that they stopped procreating. This is unlike the party of Columbus, who are well-documented in their sexual appetites toward the native population of the Caribbean. This surely distinguishes Columbus from Hitler, who was portrayed to be as sexual pure as any Tasmanian.

During the Second World War, allied soldiers commonly believed Hitler had only one testicle, which was later proven incorrect. So was the idea that Nazis made soap and candles from the rendered fat of concentration-camp victims, a falsehood Vonnegut himself promulgated in his novel Mother Night. But Vonnegut has seen with his own eyes nuclear submarines that were designed and armed for no other purpose than to end life in the other hemisphere, as if there were dozens available instead of just two. Now that the Soviet Union has "vote[d] itself out of existence", the great eraser of television has taught Americans that they are beloved by everyone in the world without forcing us to wonder why all our national wealth has been spent on doomsday instead of schools, hospitals, and the decaying national infrastructure.

Hughes' primary complaint against Sale is part of a broader argument about those who portray the European colonists as pure evil thrust upon wholly innocent natives. This encourages "foolish people of all races" to think those of European descent are still pure evil, and that Africans and Indigenous Americans would have been left untroubled if not for them. Sale himself never makes this claim, but merely points out that power in this hemisphere is still largely held by white people and that they have been greedy and lazy stewards of this land. Henry Robinson Luce, the founder of Hughes' employer, Time magazine, declared the twentieth century to be "The American Century" and that periodical has always been sympathetic to the white power structure. Time itself is now in financial trouble, having recently laid off many employees. Like the 70,000 workers recently laid off from General Motors, these human beings, like the Caribbean natives and Tasmanians, find themselves the blameless and powerless victims of an avalanche beyond their control.

John Latham, an atmospheric scientist like Vonnegut's brother Bernard, but also a poet and humorist, once wrote comical advice for how to cope with being hit by an avalanche. Like works written by Twain toward the end of his life, they are reminders that humans are always subject to irresistible forces—physical, economic, biological, political, social, military, historical, technological—which at any moment without warning can destroy our hopes for ourselves and loved ones. Perhaps what Hughes and many others dislike most about narratives like Sale's is that they make the reader sympathize with long-dead nobodies instead of celebrating the greatness of the whole of history—which is to say, the recognition that despite all these human atrocities, millions of contemporary human beings are still doing perfectly fine. When Vonnegut's first wife was nominated for the Phi Beta Kappa honors society, she was unsuccessfully opposed by the history department at Swarthmore, which she had often denounced. Vonnegut respected her stubbornness but found her position wrong since at that time he believed, which he now does not, that "the human condition was improving despite such heavy casualties."

Ending his own idiosyncratic voyage on paper, Vonnegut muses that despite his many encounters while writing it, the only real discovery worth saving was his definition for the greatness of history as seen by Hughes and those like him: that despite the horrors of history, millions of people are still okay, and Vonnegut counts himself among them. Nonetheless, despite environmental destruction, economic inequality, and continued human misery, we as a species continue to reproduce without a second thought, even using technologies to overcome infertility. Vonnegut and his descendants are "clearly beneficiaries of 1492 and all the rest of history", but with the world more crowded than ever with hungry and demanding human beings, it seems unlikely such comfort can last, even with television condemning these people quickly to its black hole of disregard. While no doubt many human cultures will also die, to the starving, hunger is the only culture. Vonnegut, however, is forced to agree with the Catholic Church that all attempts to make the human population in proper ratio to the food supply—short of Tasmanian style abstinence—not only "range from indignity to infanticide", but are also impractical. When his adopted son served in the Peace Corps in Peru, he found the most in-demand item was condoms, which are expensive, single-use, and simply produce more garbage of modernity. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that "the jig is up", and the only consolation Vonnegut can offer is the Serenity Prayer: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference."