A little radicalism from Kurt Vonnegut
I’ve enjoyed Vonnegut for a few years now. So I was a captive audience when this ran across my electronic world.
May 10, 2004
Cold Turkey
By Kurt Vonnegut
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.
Ecto blogging software