[lit-ideas] Vonnegut, politics, and joy
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- Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2005 00:57:53 EDT
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Vonnegut, on politics, presidents and librarians
By Jacqueline Blais, USA TODAYThu Oct 6, 6:52 AM ET
Kurt Vonnegut opens an interview at La Mediterranée, a pretty Manhattan
restaurant, this way:
"What do you want to talk about? Politics? Our president is a complete twit.
I'll talk about the death of the novel. I'll talk about anything you want."
And so it goes.
For all those who have lived with Vonnegut in their imaginations - with the
listless soldier Billy Pilgrim in 1969's Slaughterhouse-Five, with the
religious Bokononists whispering "busy, busy, busy" in 1963's Cat's Cradle-
this is
what he is like in person.
Polite, courtly even. He has thick, light brownish hair. He was born
left-handed but taught, as they did back in the day, to write with his right.
He
says Law & Order on TV is "absolutely first-rate" - as long as the episode has
Sam Waterston or Jerry Orbach in it.
And at 82, this hero of the left is as unafraid as ever to speak out.
His new book is A Man Without a Country (Seven Stories Press, $23.95; edited
by Daniel Simon). It is part commentary (some material was written for the
left-leaning magazine In These Times), part memoir and all Vonnegut writing
about our world today.
And what kind of planet do we have?
Well, he says, we are making "thermodynamic whoopee with atomic energy and
fossil fuel." The part that makes him feel unfunny for the rest of his life:
People don't "give a damn whether the planet goes on or not." We are, he
writes, too cheap and lazy.
In short: "Human beings, past and present, have trashed the joint."
There is more where that came from.
The guessers (never filled with doubts) are in charge, wise people are
despised, and the USA is now operating on the snake-oil standard, he writes.
Yes, and more.
From his perspective as a former World War II prisoner of war, Vonnegut
writes that American soldiers in the Middle East are "being treated, as I never
was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas."
Then, beyond all the gloom and doom, there are things to cling to.
Music (especially the blues) cheers him, as do people who behave decently.
Librarians, too - "not famous for their physical strength" - who resist having
books removed from shelves and refuse to give names of people who have
checked out certain books in the era of the Patriot Act.
"The America I loved," he writes, "still exists in the front desks of public
libraries."
Within recent weeks, he has been on Real Time with Bill Maher and The Daily
Show with Jon Stewart. Said Stewart, introducing him: "As an adolescent,
(Vonnegut) made my life bearable."
No one can doubt Vonnegut's staying power. Seven Stories Press has gone back
to print four times for 190,000 copies of A Man Without a Country. He has
written 25 books, among them some of the best-loved in American literature.
During the past three months, he was in the top 50 most-popular authors in
North
America searched on abebooks.com, an umbrella website for used books.
Vonnegut grew up in the Midwest during the Great Depression. He came from a
family of three; his older brother, Bernard, was a highly respected physical
chemist who worked on cloud seeding.
Vonnegut learned how jokes work, he writes, from top comedians on the radio.
He went to Cornell for three years, studying chemistry, and did graduate work
in anthropology at the University of Chicago.
He helped raise seven children: three from his first marriage; three adopted
when his sister, Alice, and her husband died; and another adopted in his
second marriage.
He joined the Army in World War II, was captured by the Germans and
experienced the Allied bombing of Dresden, the inspiration for
Slaughterhouse-Five.
His thoughts about gasoline dependency came early in life. He was born Nov.
11, 1922, in Indianapolis - home to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway,
established in 1911. "When I got here in 1922, this country was already
roaring drunk
on petroleum," he says. "We are still roaring drunk on petroleum."
At La Mediterranée, Vonnegut brings with him a November 1972 Harper's article
he wrote about the Republican presidential nomination in Miami of Richard
Nixon when the country was fighting the Vietnam War.
"Read the piece written 33 years ago," he says. Nothing has changed: The
country is still "divided between winners and losers. The government is
Democratic and Republican, but look, in this last election, they had to choose
between two members of Skull and Bones (John Kerry and George Bush's fraternity
at
Yale) out of 300 million people or however many people we are."
"I was lucky enough to live under one truly humane president: FDR," he says.
"He gave the common people enough influence by strengthening the labor
unions.
"Automation has made labor worthless, so the losers are in awful trouble, and
have no power whatsoever. They used to be able to withhold labor."
But then again there is the humanistic Vonnegut, honorary president of the
Humanist Association: In A Man Without a Country, he repeats something his
Uncle Alex used to say when they were sitting under an apple tree, chatting
and
drinking lemonade.
"Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, 'If
this isn't nice, I don't know what is.' "
It is a saying he now carries around with him, and he urges everyone to
"please notice when you are happy."
Copyright © 2005 _USA TODAY_
(http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/$arg{referurl}) , a division of _Gannett Co.
Inc_ (http://www.gannett.com/) .
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