Kurt Vonnegut on the state of America

[Galvatron]

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Many years ago, I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.

But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America's becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

When you get to my age, if you get to my age, which is 81, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged, what life is all about. I have seven kids, four of them adopted.

Many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.

I put my big question about life to my biological son Mark. Mark is a pediatrician, and author of a memoir, The Eden Express. It is about his crackup, straightjacket and padded cell stuff, from which he recovered sufficiently to graduate from Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: "Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is." So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it.

I have to say that's a pretty good sound bite, almost as good as, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, 500 years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.

The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one.

But back to people, like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark, who've said how we could behave more humanely, and maybe make the world a less painful place. One of my favorites is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana. Get a load of this:

Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was only 4, ran 5 times as the Socialist Party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning: As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I'm of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools or health insurance for all?

How about Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. ...

And so on.

Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney stuff.

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

"Blessed are the merciful" in a courtroom? "Blessed are the peacemakers" in the Pentagon? Give me a break!


There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

But, when you stop to think about it, only a nut case would want to be a human being, if he or she had a choice. Such treacherous, untrustworthy, lying and greedy animals we are!

I was born a human being in 1922 A.D. What does "A.D." signify? That commemorates an inmate of this lunatic asylum we call Earth who was nailed to a wooden cross by a bunch of other inmates. With him still conscious, they hammered spikes through his wrists and insteps, and into the wood. Then they set the cross upright, so he dangled up there where even the shortest person in the crowd could see him writhing this way and that.

Can you imagine people doing such a thing to a person?

No problem. That's entertainment. Ask the devout Roman Catholic Mel Gibson, who, as an act of piety, has just made a fortune with a movie about how Jesus was tortured. Never mind what Jesus said.

During the reign of King Henry the Eighth, founder of the Church of England, he had a counterfeiter boiled alive in public. Show biz again.

Mel Gibson's next movie should be The Counterfeiter. Box office records will again be broken.

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.


And what did the great British historian Edward Gibbon, 1737-1794 A.D., have to say about the human record so far? He said, "History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind."

The same can be said about this morning's edition of the New York Times.

The French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, who won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, wrote, "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide."

So there's another barrel of laughs from literature. Camus died in an automobile accident. His dates? 1913-1960 A.D.

Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible and The Charge of the Light Brigade.

But I have to say this in defense of humankind: No matter in what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got there. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these crazy games going on, which could make you act crazy, even if you weren't crazy to begin with. Some of the games that were already going on when you got here were love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf and girls' basketball.

Even crazier than golf, though, is modern American politics, where, thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

Actually, this same sort of thing happened to the people of England generations ago, and Sir William Gilbert, of the radical team of Gilbert and Sullivan, wrote these words for a song about it back then:

I often think it's comical

How nature always does contrive

That every boy and every gal

That's born into the world alive

Is either a little Liberal

Or else a little Conservative.

Which one are you in this country? It's practically a law of life that you have to be one or the other? If you aren't one or the other, you might as well be a doughnut.

If some of you still haven't decided, I'll make it easy for you.

If you want to take my guns away from me, and you're all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them kitchen appliances at their showers, and you're for the poor, you're a liberal.

If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you're a conservative.

What could be simpler?


My government's got a war on drugs. But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal.

One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W. Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed or tiddley-poo or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time from when he was 16 until he was 41. When he was 41, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.

Other drunks have seen pink elephants.

And do you know why I think he is so pissed off at Arabs? They invented algebra. Arabs also invented the numbers we use, including a symbol for nothing, which nobody else had ever had before. You think Arabs are dumb? Try doing long division with Roman numerals.

We're spreading democracy, are we? Same way European explorers brought Christianity to the Indians, what we now call "Native Americans."

How ungrateful they were! How ungrateful are the people of Baghdad today.

So let's give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That'll teach bin Laden a lesson he won't soon forget. Hail to the Chief.

That chief and his cohorts have as little to do with Democracy as the Europeans had to do with Christianity. We the people have absolutely no say in whatever they choose to do next. In case you haven't noticed, they've already cleaned out the treasury, passing it out to pals in the war and national security rackets, leaving your generation and the next one with a perfectly enormous debt that you'll be asked to repay.

Nobody let out a peep when they did that to you, because they have disconnected every burglar alarm in the Constitution: The House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the FBI, the free press (which, having been embedded, has forsaken the First Amendment) and We the People.

About my own history of foreign substance abuse. I've been a coward about heroin and cocaine and LSD and so on, afraid they might put me over the edge. I did smoke a joint of marijuana one time with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, just to be sociable. It didn't seem to do anything to me, one way or the other, so I never did it again. And by the grace of God, or whatever, I am not an alcoholic, largely a matter of genes. I take a couple of drinks now and then, and will do it again tonight. But two is my limit. No problem.

I am of course notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other.

But I'll tell you one thing: I once had a high that not even crack cocaine could match. That was when I got my first driver's license! Look out, world, here comes Kurt Vonnegut.

And my car back then, a Studebaker, as I recall, was powered, as are almost all means of transportation and other machinery today, and electric power plants and furnaces, by the most abused and addictive and destructive drugs of all: fossil fuels.

When you got here, even when I got here, the industrialized world was already hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there won't be any more of those. Cold turkey.

Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn't like TV news, is it?

Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.

And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we're hooked on.

[MKSheppard]

Guess he never really recovered mentally from Dresden or Hamburg
or whatever the fuck he was when we bombed the hell out of it.

PS, Mr. Vonnegut, I would like you to show me something that has
the power density and cheapness of gasoline/diesel, can be kept
without high pressures, is liquid at room temperature, etc

[Ma Deuce]

Guess he never really recovered mentally from Dresden or Hamburg
or whatever the fuck he was when we bombed the hell out of it.

I thought Dresden was bombed by the Brits?

[Joe]

Actually, Vonnegut was on the ground when we bombed Dresden (and yes, Ma Deuce, the US was involved in the bombing, though I'm pretty sure the RAF was in charge) as a POW. Well, to be even more precise, he was under the ground in a prison.

Interesting fact about him; the train that transported him to Dresden was attacked by the U.S. en route, and his car got shot at. With that and what he experienced at Dresden, Vonnegut says he's the only guy who got shot at by the U.S., the British, and the Germans all in the same war.

That being said, I've still always found him to be a really whiny guy. So much miserabilism.

[fgalkin]

Vonnegut is most eloquent, as usual, but somewhat misguided.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Master of Ossus]

Vonnegut is most eloquent, as usual, but somewhat misguided.

He wasn't very funny, though. He's usually such a good satirist, but it's clearly not flowing for him, right now.

[MKSheppard]

He wasn't very funny, though. He's usually such a good satirist, but it's clearly not flowing for him, right now.

I read Slaughterhouse 5 once. It was a pile of bullshit, except for that
one scene where the air war occurs in reverse.

[fgalkin]

He wasn't very funny, though. He's usually such a good satirist, but it's clearly not flowing for him, right now.

I read Slaughterhouse 5 once. It was a pile of bullshit, except for that
one scene where the air war occurs in reverse.

says you.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[fgalkin]

Vonnegut is most eloquent, as usual, but somewhat misguided.

He wasn't very funny, though. He's usually such a good satirist, but it's clearly not flowing for him, right now.

Well, he did raise a few good points, like The Passion of the Christ, why the fundies not giving a shit about the Sermon on the mount, and stuff.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Plekhanov]

I read Slaughterhouse 5 once. It was a pile of bullshit, except for that one scene where the air war occurs in reverse.

To much of how being in a war can fuck you up and not enough explosions for you i suppose.

[Frank Hipper]

He wasn't very funny, though. He's usually such a good satirist, but it's clearly not flowing for him, right now.

I read Slaughterhouse 5 once. It was a pile of bullshit, except for that
one scene where the air war occurs in reverse.

Try Cat's Cradle, Galapogos, or God Bless You Mr. Rosewater.
Especially Cat's Cradle, it's fucking high art.
His little essay is classic Vonegut, too. Over the top enough to want to make you dismiss it, but the points he makes refuse you to allow for it.
Hiliarious, and right on target.

[Elfdart]

He wasn't very funny, though. He's usually such a good satirist, but it's clearly not flowing for him, right now.

I read Slaughterhouse 5 once. It was a pile of bullshit, except for that
one scene where the air war occurs in reverse.

Yeah, Vonnegut should leave the writing of novels to literary giants like Tom Clancy.

[MKSheppard]

I've read other novels and I have to say Catch-22 was far more entertaining to read.

Slaughterhouse 5 was simply excruciating to read. Yossarian's exploits
were on the other hand, hiliarious, like Major Major Major

[MKSheppard]

Yeah, Vonnegut should leave the writing of novels to literary giants like Tom Clancy.

SH5 is put forth as one of his best literary works, and it's fobbed off
to countless high schoolers as english class projects, yet it's very
excruciating to read. There really is no plot and the book simply rambles
back and forth between the War Years and his Present day acid flashbacks.

[Plekhanov]

SH5 is put forth as one of his best literary works, and it's fobbed off to countless high schoolers as english class projects, yet it's very excruciating to read. There really is no plot and the book simply rambles back and forth between the War Years and his Present day acid flashbacks.

The less than easy read is the whole point you muppet, Billy wasn’t able to deal with what he was going through so he became “unstuck in time”. It’s hardly surprising it’s an awkward book because he’s dealing with Dresden and the experience of being a POW as the 3rd Reich was collapsing these are hardly easy subjects.

One of his points is that war is confusing, disorientating, unpleasant and generally messes you up, this is reflected in the character of Billy and the whole structure of the book. I suspect Mr Vonnegut would probably be very disappointed if he made Dresden “entertaining” because war isn’t entertaining it’s horrendous (though sometimes a necessary one) that’s the whole fucking point of the book.

[Master of Ossus]

SH5 is put forth as one of his best literary works, and it's fobbed off
to countless high schoolers as english class projects, yet it's very
excruciating to read.

That's part of the point. SH5 makes no effort to be accessible. The language that it's written is, however, extremely easy to understand. It's a study in mental illness, in the same way that Catcher in the Rye or Absalom, Absalom or even the early parts of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest are studies in mental illness.

There really is no plot and the book simply rambles
back and forth between the War Years and his Present day acid flashbacks.

Again, that's part of the point. SH5 is a virtually perfect book in execution, meaning that it's exactly the book the Vonnegut set out to write.

[RogueIce]

Yeah, Vonnegut should leave the writing of novels to literary giants like Tom Clancy.

SH5 is put forth as one of his best literary works, and it's fobbed off
to countless high schoolers as english class projects, yet it's very
excruciating to read. There really is no plot and the book simply rambles
back and forth between the War Years and his Present day acid flashbacks.

Hey, you gotta at least love the various "So it goes." parts.

[Bob the Gunslinger]

Actually, Vonnegut was on the ground when we bombed Dresden (and yes, Ma Deuce, the US was involved in the bombing, though I'm pretty sure the RAF was in charge) as a POW. Well, to be even more precise, he was under the ground in a prison.

I thought he was on an alien planet at the time. Trafalber or something.

...Maybe he was already brain-damaged and everyone to meet him after the war just assumed Dresden did it.

Interesting fact about him; the train that transported him to Dresden was attacked by the U.S. en route, and his car got shot at. With that and what he experienced at Dresden, Vonnegut says he's the only guy who got shot at by the U.S., the British, and the Germans all in the same war.

That being said, I've still always found him to be a really whiny guy. So much miserabilism.

Yeah, I've hated him since reading Slaughterhouse 5. Terrible writer and whiny, too.
Ooh, he's writing exactly like that guy who had a crowbar through his brain, but for him we call it genius!

[Bob the Gunslinger]

Hey, you gotta at least love the various "So it goes." parts.

Well, okay.

(Especially when it went for Harrison Bergeron! I could see he was making a point, and I agreed with it, but damn that story was annoying. Until they shot him with a shotgun.)

[fgalkin]

Hey, you gotta at least love the various "So it goes." parts.

Well, okay.

(Especially when it went for Harrison Bergeron! I could see he was making a point, and I agreed with it, but damn that story was annoying. Until they shot him with a shotgun.)

I loved that story. I guess Vonnegut is just not your cup of tea.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Tsyroc]

Anyone remember his cameo in Back to Schoool?

Rodney Dangerfield hired Vonnegut to write his paper on one of Vonnegut's books. The professor was able to tell that Dangefield didn't write it and she complained that whoever did write it didn't know a thing about Vonnegut.

[Bob the Gunslinger]

No, not my cup of tea at all.

I actually have the same problem with Bradbury. Lots of people I know talk about what a great author he is, but all the stories I've read of his were terrible. Especially that one about a midget who likes the house of mirrors, but he's a writer and.. then... no payoff. A real abuse of ambiguity there.

[Elfdart]

Anyone remember his cameo in Back to Schoool?

Rodney Dangerfield hired Vonnegut to write his paper on one of Vonnegut's books. The professor was able to tell that Dangefield didn't write it and she complained that whoever did write it didn't know a thing about Vonnegut.

The same thing happened in Annie Hall, except Woody Allen brought Marshall MacLuhan to meet an "expert" on MacLuhan's works.

[Andrew J.]

Anyone remember his cameo in Back to Schoool?

Rodney Dangerfield hired Vonnegut to write his paper on one of Vonnegut's books. The professor was able to tell that Dangefield didn't write it and she complained that whoever did write it didn't know a thing about Vonnegut.

Dangerfield: (on the phone with Kurt) "Fuck me? Hey Vonnegut, fuck you!"