Momentary2
All American
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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.  9/25/2005 2:32:56 AM
|
Momentary2
All American
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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. 9/25/2005 2:33:22 AM |
