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class called Nuclear War. My final project was a newspaper report that detailed the destruction of my hometown by a hydrogen bomb.
     
     
     
    BOOM.
     
     
     
    THE VONNEGUT PASSAGE that haunted me throughout my college years is one of the few not quoted in my thesis. It comes from a curious little essay called “Biafra: A People Betrayed,” in his 1974 collection Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons. Vonnegut is reporting from the small African nation of Biafra, whose beleaguered citizens are bracing for a genocidal invasion by the Nigerian army.
    He writes,
     
What did we eat in Biafra? As guests of the government, we had meat and yams and soups and fruit. It was embarrassing. Whenever we told a cadaverous beggar, “No chop,” it wasn’t really true. We had plenty of chop, but it was all in our bellies.
     
    I had never read so ruthless and candid a summary of the relationship between the fed and starving of this world. Vonnegut was writing not only about injustice, but the peculiar American talent for self-deception (his own included), for espousing laudable beliefs just so long as you don’t have to live up to them.
     
     
     
    TO UNDERSTAND WHY this passage hit me so hard will require some family background. My mother was born and raised in the Bronx. Her mother, Annie Rosenthal, was an elementary school teacher in Harlem. Her father, Irving, was an actuary. Both were members of the Communist Party. My grandmother was eventually asked to testify about her activities before the New York Board of Education. She took an early retirement instead. Secrecy and fear pervaded their apartment.
    My own parents came of age during the 1960s. Both were early, vocal opponents of the war in Vietnam. My father helped undergraduates organize antiwar protests at Stanford, where he had taken a job on the faculty of the medical school. He was later arrested himself for taking part in a protest at a nearby air force base. His teaching contract was not renewed. What I am trying to convey here is that I am descended from people who suffered for their beliefs. I arrived at college eager to do the same thing.
     
     
     
    BUT WESLEYAN WASN’T exactly what I was expecting. It was, to be ruthless and candid, the world capital of Entitled Sanctimony, the kind of place where students staged protests to demand divestment from South Africa, then headed over to the dining hall to stuff themselves full of ice cream, where the lower-class toughs who played hockey and joined frats were considered dangerous misogynists, where kids in carefully torn polo sweaters gathered to chant grave, humanist slogans, then dispersed to drop acid on Foss Hill, where noblesse oblige had mutated into a kind of desperate narcissistic accessory.
    I did my best to fit in, to obey, for instance, the elaborate protocols surrounding gender and race nomenclature. 7 But it was impossible to ignore certain facts, such as that most black students wanted nothing to do with white students, and that the residents of Middletown regarded the lot of us as spoiled brats. I spent a few winter afternoons camped on the corners of Main Street, handing out pamphlets on nuclear disarmament, which the locals accepted politely, then deposited in the nearest trash can.
    It was also impossible to ignore the affluence of my classmates. They had new cars and elaborate stereo systems and Park Avenue apartments stuffed with high art. They spent vacations at beach houses and in tennis clubs, and their ease in these exotic precincts struck me hard; these were people born on the banks of what Vonnegut called the Money River.
    I don’t mean to make my classmates sound like dolts. They were trying to care about the world, however indulgently. My scorn for them was an expression of my own guilt. I couldn’t shake the benighted notion that the best way to honor the family legacy was to suffer for my beliefs.
     
     
     
    SO I WASHED DISHES in the cafeteria. I volunteered at a mental health facility. I