Folks,
For a little change of pace, something a little less dry, I thought you
might like these January comments from Kurt Vonnegut. He certainly hasn’t
lost his edge.
–C
—–Original Message—–
Kurt Vonnegut vs. the !&#*!@
By Joel Bleifuss | 1.27.03 print | email | comment
Kurt Vonnegut | vonnegut.com
In November, Kurt Vonnegut turned 80. He published his first novel, Player
Piano, in 1952 at the age of 29.
Since then he has written 13 others, including Slaughterhouse Five, which
stands as one of the pre-eminent
anti-war novels of the 20th century.
As war against Iraq looms, I asked Vonnegut, a reader and supporter of this
magazine, to weigh in. Vonnegut is
an American socialist in the tradition of Eugene Victor Debs, a fellow
Hoosier whom he likes to quote: "As long
as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal
element, I am of it. As long as there is
a soul in prison, I am not free."
-Joel Bleifuss
You have lived through World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Reagan wars, Desert
Storm, the Balkan wars and now
this coming war in Iraq. What has changed, and what has remained the same?
One thing which has not changed is that none of us, no matter what continent
or island or ice cap, asked to be
born in the first place, and that even somebody as old as I am, which is 80,
only just got here. There were
already all these games going on when I got here. . An apt motto for any
polity anywhere, to put on its state
seal or currency or whatever, might be this quotation from the late baseball
manager Casey Stengel, who was
addressing a team of losing professional athletes: "Can’t anybody here play
this game?"
My daughter Lily, for an example close to home, who has just turned 20,
finds herself-as does George W. Bush,
himself a kid-an heir to a shockingly recent history of human slavery, to an
AIDS epidemic and to nuclear
submarines slumbering on the floors of fjords in Iceland and elsewhere,
crews prepared at a moment’s notice to
turn industrial quantities of men, women and children into radioactive soot
and bone meal by means of rockets
and H-bomb warheads. And to the choice between liberalism or conservatism
and on and on.
What is radically new in 2003 is that my daughter, along with our president
and Saddam Hussein and on and on,
has inherited technologies whose byproducts, whether in war or peace, are
rapidly destroying the whole planet
as a breathable, drinkable system for supporting life of any kind. Human
beings, past and present, have trashed
the joint.
Based on what you’ve read and seen in the media, what is not being said in
the mainstream press about President
Bush’s policies and the impending war in Iraq?
That they are nonsense.
My feeling from talking to readers and friends is that many people are
beginning to despair. Do you think that
we’ve lost reason to hope?
I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just
war, might as well have been invaded
by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has
happened, though, is that it has been
taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup
d’etat imaginable. And those now in
charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no
history or geography, plus
not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka "Christians," and plus, most
frighteningly, psychopathic personalities,
or "PPs."
To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical
diagnosis, like saying he or she has
appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask
of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley.
Read it! PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their
actions may cause others, but they do not
care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!
And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom
and on and on, who have enriched
themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country, and who
still feel as pure as the driven
snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And so many of these
heartless PPs now hold big jobs in
our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick.
What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in
government, is that they are so
decisive. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the
simple reason that they cannot care
what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves!
Privatize the public schools! Attack
Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich!
Build a trillion-dollar missile
shield! *censored* habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss
my ass!
How have you gotten involved in the anti-war movement? And how would you
compare the movement against a war in
Iraq with the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era?
When it became obvious what a dumb and cruel and spiritually and financially
and militarily ruinous mistake our
war in Vietnam was, every artist worth a damn in this country, every serious
writer, painter, stand-up
comedian, musician, actor and actress, you name it, came out against the
thing. We formed what might be
described as a laser beam of protest, with everybody aimed in the same
direction, focused and intense. This
weapon proved to have the power of a banana-cream pie three feet in diameter
when dropped from a stepladder
five-feet high.
And so it is with anti-war protests in the present day. Then as now, TV did
not like anti-war protesters, nor
any other sort of protesters, unless they rioted. Now, as then, on account
of TV, the right of citizens to
peaceably assemble, and petition their government for a redress of
grievances, "ain’t worth a pitcher of warm
spit," as the saying goes.
As a writer and artist, have you noticed any difference between how the
cultural leaders of the past and the
cultural leaders of today view their responsibility to society?
Responsibility to which society? To Nazi Germany? To the Stalinist Soviet
Union? What about responsibility to
humanity in general? And leaders in what particular cultural activity? I
guess you mean the fine arts. I hope
you mean the fine arts. … Anybody practicing the fine art of composing
music, no matter how cynical or greedy
or scared, still can’t help serving all humanity. Music makes practically
everybody fonder of life than he or
she would be without it. Even military bands, although I am a pacifist,
always cheer me up.
But that is the power of ear candy. The creation of such a universal
confection for the eye, by means of
printed poetry or fiction or history or essays or memoirs and so on, isn’t
possible. Literature is by
definition opinionated. It is bound to provoke the arguments in many
quarters, not excluding the hometown or
even the family of the author. Any ink-on-paper author can only hope at best
to seem responsible to small
groups or like-minded people somewhere. He or she might as well have given
an interview to the editor of a
small-circulation publication.
Maybe we can talk about the responsibilities to their societies of
architects and sculptors and painters
another time. And I will say this: TV drama, although not yet classified as
fine art, has on occasion performed
marvelous services for Americans who want us to be less paranoid, to be
fairer and more merciful. M.A.S.H. and
Law and Order, to name only two shows, have been stunning masterpieces in
that regard.
That said, do you have any ideas for a really scary reality TV show?
"C students from Yale." It would stand your hair on end.
What targets would you consider fair game for a satirist today?
Assholes.
Joel Bleifuss is the editor of In These Times, where he has worked as a
investigative reporter, columnist and
editor since 1986. Bleifuss has had more stories on Project Censored’s
annual list of the "10 Most Censored
Stories" than any other journalist
<snow-list@lists.riseup.net>
Fyi. If there is typical Vonnegut, here is one (larry
ebersole).
***
> By Kurt Vonnegut
>
> In These Times
> March 6, 2003
>
> The recent Kurt Vonnegut interview (Kurt Vonnegut
> vs. !*@) has become the most popular story at
> inthesetimes.com, where the article originally
> appeared, with hundreds of readers expressing their
> opinions in the Comments section. The interview has
> also been translated and reprinted in Aftonbladet,
> Sweden’s largest daily newspaper, and La Jornada,
> Mexico’s most respected daily newspaper. In light of
> this response, Vonnegut has agreed, on an occasional
> basis, to entertain readers’ questions. If you would
> like to submit a question, write to
> vonnegut@inthesetimes.com, and the editors will pass
> along your question to him.
>
>
> Dear Mr. Vonnegut
>
> What genuinely motivates al-Qaeda to kill and
> self-destruct? The president says, "They hate our
> freedoms - our freedom of religion, our freedom of
> speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and
> disagree with each other," which surely is not what
> has been learned from the captives being held in
> Guantanamo, or what he is told in his briefings. Why
> do the communications industry and our elected
> politicians allow Bush to get away with such
> nonsense? And how can there ever be peace, and even
> trust in our leaders, if the American people aren’t
> told the truth?
> -Peter Hoyt, Little Deer Island, Maine
>
>
> Dear Mr. Hoyt,
>
>
> One wishes that those who have taken over our
> federal government, and hence the world, by means of
> a Mickey Mouse coup d’etat, and who have
> disconnected all the burglar alarms prescribed by
> the Constitution, which is to say the House and
> Senate and the Supreme Court and We the People, were
> truly Christian. But as William Shakespeare told us
> long ago, "The devil can cite Scripture for his
> purpose."
>
>
> And what remains the best-kept secret from the
> Second World War, because it is so embarrassing, is
> that Hitler was a Christian, and that his swastika
> was a Christian cross made of axes, an apt symbol of
> a political party for Christians of the working
> class. And there were simpler, unambiguous crosses
> on all Hitler’s tanks and planes.
>
>
> Again: One wishes, for the sake of the whole planet,
> that the people in and around the White House
> nowadays truly mean it when they say, "Forgive us
> our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass
> against us," and that they respect as children of
> God the losers, the nobodies so loved by Jesus in
> the Beatitudes, in His Sermon on the Mount: the poor
> in spirit, they that mourn, the meek, the merciful,
> the peace makers and so on.
>
>
> But such is obviously not the case. George W. Bush
> smirks and gloats unmercifully as he boasts of his
> readiness to loose more than a hundred cruise
> missiles, what I call "Timothy McVeighs," into the
> midst of the general population of Iraq, nearly half
> of whom are children, little boys and girls under
> the age of 15.
>
>
> His domestic policies, whose viciousness is peewee
> in comparison with what he is so eager to do to
> foreigners who don’t look like him and talk like
> him, who don’t have names like his, nonetheless
> inflict pain on those Americans of the sort
> enumerated in the Beatitudes, by depriving them of
> decent health care and educations, and of food,
> shelter and clothing when times are bad. It seems
> quite possible that his opinion of the American
> people has been formed while watching the Jerry
> Springer Show, which is Republican propaganda of the
> most pernicious kind.
>
>
> But America was certainly hated all around the world
> long before this coup d’etat. And we weren’t hated,
> as George W. Bush would have it, because of our
> liberty and justice for all. We are hated because
> our corporations have been the principal deliverers
> and imposers of new technologies and economic
> schemes that have wrecked the self-respect, the
> cultures of men, women and children in so many other
> societies.
>
>
> It’s that simple.
>
>
> What are we to do when confronted by such hatred?
> Respond to Code Red and run around like chickens
> with their heads cut off.
>
>
> Keep in touch,
> Kurt Vonnegut
>
>
> Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in
> Space
> PO Box 90083
> Gainesville, FL. 32607
> (352) 337-9274
> (352) 871-7554 (Cell Phone)
> http://space4peace.org
> globalnet@mindspringcom
=====
"Intelligent and conscientious people have doubts — express yours
through conscientious objections to militarism and war. For info.
on this topic (not direct-services!), please do visit,
www.objector.org>."