[lit-ideas] I always have loved Vonnegut....
- From: JulieReneB@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 17 May 2004 18:14:25 EDT
(any relation to you, Mike? I just realized who you sometimes remind me of.)
Click here: Cold Turkey -- In These Times
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/cold_turkey
Cold Turkey
By Kurt VonnegutMay 10, 2004
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 Americaâ??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: â??Father, we are here to help
each other get through this thing, whatever it is.â?? 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 thatâ??s a pretty good sound bite, almost as good as, â??Do unto
others as you would have them do unto you.â?? 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, whoâ??
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, Iâ??m of it.
As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
Doesnâ??t anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public
schools or health insurance for all?
How about Jesusâ?? 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. â?¦
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 thatâ??s Moses, not
Jesus. I haven
â??t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be
posted anywhere.
â??Blessed are the mercifulâ?? in a courtroom? â??Blessed are the
peacemakersâ?? in
the Pentagon? Give me a break!
-------------------------
There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I donâ??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 â??A.D.â?? 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. Thatâ??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 Gibsonâ??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, â??History is indeed little more
than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.â??
The same can be said about this morningâ??s edition of the New York Times.
The French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, who won a Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1957, wrote, â??There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and
that is suicide.â??
So thereâ??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 werenâ??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 girlsâ??
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 itâ??s comical
How nature always does contrive
That every boy and every gal
Thatâ??s born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative.
Which one are you in this country? Itâ??s practically a law of life that you
have to be one or the other? If you arenâ??t one or the other, you might as
well
be a doughnut.
If some of you still havenâ??t decided, Iâ??ll make it easy for you.
If you want to take my guns away from me, and youâ??re all for murdering
fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them
kitchen appliances at their showers, and youâ??re for the poor, youâ??re a
liberal.
If you are against those perversions and for the rich, youâ??re a conservative.
What could be simpler?
-------------------------
My governmentâ??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.
Weâ??re spreading democracy, are we? Same way European explorers brought
Christianity to the Indians, what we now call â??Native Americans.â??
How ungrateful they were! How ungrateful are the people of Baghdad today.
So letâ??s give another big tax cut to the super-rich. Thatâ??ll teach bin
Laden
a lesson he wonâ??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 havenâ??t noticed, theyâ??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 youâ??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. Iâ??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 didnâ??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 Iâ??ll tell you one thing: I once had a high that not even crack cocaine
could match. That was when I got my first driverâ??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 wonâ??t be any more
of those. Cold turkey.
Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isnâ??t like TV news, is it?
Hereâ??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 weâ??re hooked on.
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