Norman Mushari

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Evil-doer
Full Name	Norman Mushari
Alias	The Weasel
Origin	God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Occupation	Lawyer
Powers / Skills	Manipulation Knowledge of law
Goals	Have Eliot Rosewater declared insane so that his cousin Fred Rosewater will inherit his wealth and Mushari can keep a chunk of it for himself.
Crimes	Slander Bribery Abuse of power Theft
Type of Villain	Greedy Corrupt Official

“	By all means, we must get this specimen before a judge.	„
	~ Mushari's first quote.

“	Sir. At this very moment, your Indiana relatives are swindling you and yours out of your birth-right, out of millions upon millions of dollars. I am here to tell you about a relatively cheap and simple court action that will make those millions yours.	„
	~ Norman Mushari to Fred Rosewater.

Norman Mushari is the main antagonist of Kurt Vonnegut's 1965 novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and its musical adaptation by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken.

He is an unscrupulous upstart lawyer who plans to have the main character, the loony but well-meaning president of the Rosewater Foundation Eliot Rosewater, adjudged insane so he'll have to surrender the Foundation and its fortune to his closest living relation, whom Mushari plans to represent in the court case as to extract a large cut of the fortune for himself in the transaction.

He was portrayed by Jonathan Hadary in the 1979 musical and by Skylar Astin in the 2016 Encores! revival.

Biography

Past

Eliot Rosewater became president of the Rosewater Foundation in 1947, when Mushari was only six. He caught wind of it on June 1st, 1964, when the sum was $87,472,033.61. Mushari topped his class in Cornell Law School, where his professor, Leonard Leech, taught him to always be on the lookout for "situations where large amounts of money were about to change hands". Having resolved to overthrow the Rosewater Foundation, he went to work for the Washington D.C. law firm that had created and was in control of it.

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

Mushari first appears breaking into a secured vault in the firm which contains a letter from Eliot Rosewater, supposed to be delivered to his successor only after his passing. In it, he discusses the Foundation's history, presenting its founders, particularly Noah Rosewater, in a rotten light. Mushari decides to use this as proof that he's unhinged.

He closely monitors Elitot's divorce with his wife, Sylvia, and even beguiles the latter into thinking it's mandatory to send their personal letters to Mushari, as she's a litigant in an ongoing divorce. He also finds out that Eliot crashed a sci-fi convention wherein he drunkenly extolled the brilliance of science fiction writers, touting them as the only ones crazy enough to predict the future and giving his favorite sci-fi writer, Kilgore Trout, an impassioned shout-out. Mushari stops into a smut-dealer's hole in the wall to obtain the works of Trout and is disappointed to find that it's not erotica at all.

When Sylvia suffers a mental breakdown and burns down the Rosewater Volunteer Fire Department, Mushari gets a hold of the confidential treatise Dr. Brown wrote on her diagnosis after she's placed in a private mental hospital in Indianapolis. He learns that she's suffering from a new disorder coined by Dr. Brown, samaritrophia, a "suppression of an overactive conscience by the rest of the mind" which culminated in her nervous breakdown.

Eventually, Mushari learns of Eliot's second cousin, Fred Rosewater, who lives in relative squalor in Pisquontuit, Rhode Island, and makes a living selling life insurance to deadbeats. Mushari hops on a plane to Providence Airport, passing the time by reading Senator Barry Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative. At the airport, he rents a red controvertible and drives to Pisquontuit, where he at first is unable to find Fred, owing to the latter being asleep on his sailboat all afternoon. As he waits for Fred to come home, he takes a tour in the famous Rumfoord mansion, where he's affronted by the still alive and well Lance Rumfoord.

When Mushari finally finds Fred, he informs him that his Indianapolis relatives are "swindling" him out of his millions and convinces him to file a lawsuit against them. This launches a massive, year-spanning legal war against the Indianapolis Rosewaters, during which Mushari in articles, clad in a new fancy vest and gold chain, decries Eliot as a lunatic protected by callous plutocrats. While the hearing is continuously delayed, Mushari secretly bribes over fifty poor women in Rosewater County to publicly claim that their children are Eliot's, making him seem even madder and more disreputable.

Eliot, who is being aided both by his father, the Foundation and Corporation and even Kilgore Trout in a bid to seem 'normal' for the grand hearing, gets an idea upon hearing of this scandal. He writes the Rhodes Island Rosewaters a check of a hundred thousand dollars and orders Mr. McAllister, the legal counsel of the Foundation, to go on record, publicly acknowledging all of his alleged children as his own, so that his inheritance will be split among all of them. This ensures that Mushari doesn't get a penny, no matter the results of the case.

Appearance

Norman Mushari is a five-feet-three-inches tall Lebanese man whose ass is enormous and luminous when bare.

Personality

Norman Mushari is a hugely sadistic, resourceful and driven person who will do anything to get his hands on even a modicum of the mammoth Rosewater fortune. He prefers to be masterminding his scheme in the background, rarely speaking any lines over the course of the novel and only visibly squirming about his evil designs to himself or fixing Sylvia a malignant smirk.

While representing the Rhode Island Rosewaters he puts up a front of being a justice fighter, seemingly devoted to winning back the millions a family of "brave, wholesome, average Americans" were stiffed out of. Despite all of his manipulation, he does genuinely believe Eliot to be insane, though he doesn't pity him at all for this and only sees an opportunity to earn dirty money through him.

Gallery

Mushari's Waltz (Magical Moment)

Norman Mushari's Villain Song in the musical.

Trivia

• Norman Mushari is often regarded as the only completely traditional main villain of a Kurt Vonnegut novel. While most other Vonnegut novels have plots that either do not revolve around the antagonists (or, indeed, feature no antagonists), Mushari patently drives the conflict in God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, and the story ends on a triumphant note as he is thwarted.
  • Ironically, Vonnegut would later point out in his famous 1969 novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, that his father commented he never wrote a book with a villain in it. Why neither Vonnegut or his father acknowledged Mushari as a villain is unknown.