- Vonnegut's Blues For America
By Kurt Vonnegut
2-6-6
-
- No matter how
corrupt, greedy, and heartless
our government, our corporations,
our media, and our religious and
charitable institutions may
become, the music will still be
wonderful.
-
- If I should ever
die, God forbid, let this be my
epitaph:
-
- THE ONLY PROOF HE
NEEDED
- FOR THE EXISTENCE
OF GOD
- WAS MUSIC
-
- Now, during our
catastrophically idiotic war in
Vietnam, the music kept getting
better and better and better. We
lost that war, by the way. Order
couldn't be restored in Indochina
until the people kicked us out.
-
- That war only made
billionaires out of millionaires.
Today's war is making
trillionaires out of
billionaires. Now I call that
progress.
-
- And how come the
people in countries we invade
can't fight like ladies and
gentlemen, in uniform and with
tanks and helicopter gunships?
-
- Back to music. It
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. And
I really like Strauss and Mozart
and all that, but the priceless
gift that African Americans gave
the whole world when they were
still in slavery was a gift so
great that it is now almost the
only reason many foreigners still
like us at least a little bit.
That specific remedy for the
worldwide epidemic of depression
is a gift called the blues. All
pop music today jazz, swing,
be-bop, Elvis Presley, the
Beatles, the Stones,
rock-and-roll, hip-hop, and on
and on is derived from the
blues.
-
- A gift to the
world? One of the best
rhythm-and-blues combos I ever
heard was three guys and a girl
from Finland playing in a club in
Krakow, Poland.
-
- The wonderful
writer Albert Murray, who is a
jazz historian and a friend of
mine among other things, told me
that during the era of slavery in
this country an atrocity from
which we can never fully recover
the suicide rate per capita
among slave owners was much
higher than the suicide rate
among slaves.
-
- Murray says he
thinks this was because slaves
had a way of dealing with
depression, which their white
owners did not: They could shoo
away Old Man Suicide by playing
and singing the Blues. He says
something else which also sounds
right to me. He says the blues
can't drive depression clear out
of a house, but can drive it into
the corners of any room where
it's being played. So please
remember that.
-
- Foreigners love us
for our jazz. And they don't hate
us for our purported liberty and
justice for all. They hate us now
for our arrogance.
-
- When I went to
grade school in Indian apolis,
the James Whitcomb Riley School
#43, we used to draw pictures of
houses of tomorrow, boats of
tomorrow, airplanes of tomorrow,
and there were all these dreams
for the future. Of course at that
time everything had come to a
stop. The factories had stopped,
the Great Depression was on, and
the magic word was Prosperity.
Sometime Prosperity will come. We
were preparing for it. We were
dreaming of the sorts of houses
human beings should inhabit
ideal dwellings, ideal forms of
transportation.
-
- What is radically
new today is that my daughter,
Lily, who has just turned 21,
finds herself, as do your
children, as does George W Bush,
himself a kid, and Saddam Hussein
and on and on, 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. Our children have
inherited technologies whose
by-products, whether in war or
peace, are rapidly destroying the
whole planet as a breathable,
drinkable system for supporting
life of any kind.
-
- Anyone who has
studied science and talks to
scientists notices that we are in
terrible danger now. Human
beings, past and present, have
trashed the joint.
-
- The biggest truth
to face now what is probably
making me unfunny now for the
remainder of my life is that I
don't think people give a damn
whether the planet goes on or
not. It seems to me as if
everyone is living as members of
Alcoholics Anonymous do, day by
day. And a few more days will be
enough. I know of very few people
who are dreaming of a world for
their grandchildren.
-
- 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 becoming humane
and reasonable. Because power
corrupts us, and absolute power
corrupts us 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 lifeless bodies, is
already shot to pieces. They are
being treated, as I never was,
like toys a rich kid got for
Christmas.
-
- Human beings have
had to guess about almost
everything for the past million
years or so. The leading
characters in our history books
have been our most enthralling,
and sometimes our most
terrifying, guessers.
-
- May I name two of
them? Aristotle and Hitler.
-
- One good guesser
and one bad one.
-
- And the masses of
humanity through the ages,
feeling inadequately educated
just like we do now, and rightly
so, have had little choice but to
believe this guesser or that one.
-
- Russians who
didn't think much of the guesses
of Ivan the Terrible, for
example, were likely to have
their hats nailed to their heads.
-
- We must
acknowledge that persuasive
guessers, even Ivan the Terrible,
now a hero in the Soviet Union,
have sometimes given us the
courage to endure extraordinary
ordeals which we had no way of
understanding. Crop failures,
plagues, eruptions of volcanoes,
babies being born dead the
guessers often gave us the
illusion that bad luck and good
luck were understandable and
could somehow be dealt with
intelligently and effectively.
Without that illusion, we all
might have surrendered long ago.
-
- But the guessers,
in fact, knew no more than the
common people and sometimes less,
even when, or especially when,
they gave us the illusion that we
were in control of our destinies.
-
- Persuasive
guessing has been at the core of
leadership far so long, for all
of human experience so far, that
it is wholly unsurprising that
most of the leaders of this
planet, in spite of all the
information that is suddenly
ours, want the guessing to go on.
It is now their turn to guess and
guess and be listened to. Some of
the loudest, most proudly
ignorant guessing in the world is
going on in Washington today. Our
leaders are sick of all the solid
information that has been dumped
on humanity by research and
scholarship and investigative
reporting. They think that the
whole country is sick of it, and
they could be right. It isn't the
gold standard that they want to
put us back on. They want
something even more basic. They
want to put us back on the
snake-oil standard.
-
- Loaded pistols are
good for everyone except inmates
in prisons or lunatic asylums.
-
- That's correct.
-
- Millions spent on
public health are inflationary.
-
- That's correct.
-
- Billions spent on
weapons will bring inflation
down.
-
- That's correct.
-
- Dictatorships to
the right are much closer to
American ideals than
dictatorships to the left.
-
- That's correct.
-
- The more hydrogen
bomb warheads we have, all set to
go off at a moment's notice, the
safer humanity is and the better
off the world will be that our
grandchildren will inherit.
-
- That's correct.
-
- Industrial wastes,
and especially those that are
radioactive, hardly ever hurt
anybody, so everybody should shut
up about them.
-
- That's correct.
-
- Industries should
be allowed to do whatever they
want to do: bribe, wreck the
environment just a little, fix
prices, screw dumb customers, put
a stop to competition, and raid
the Treasury when they go broke.
-
- That's correct.
-
- That's free
enterprise.
-
- And that's
correct.
-
- The poor have done
something very wrong or they
wouldn't be poor, so their
children should pay the
consequences.
-
- That's correct.
-
- The United States
of America cannot be expected to
look after its own people.
-
- That's correct.
-
- The free market
will do that.
-
- That's correct.
-
- The free market is
an automatic system of justice.
-
- That's correct.
-
- I'm kidding.
-
- And if you
actually are an educated,
thinking person, you will not be
welcome in Washington, DC. I know
a couple of bright seventh
graders who would not be welcome
in Washington, DC. Do you
remember those doctors a few
months back who got together and
announced that it was a simple,
clear medical fact that we could
not survive even a moderate
attack by hydrogen bombs? They
were not welcome in Washington,
DC.
-
- Even if we fired
the first salvo of hydrogen
weapons and the enemy never fired
back, the poisons released would
probably kill the whole planet by
and by.
-
- What is the
response in Washington? They
guess otherwise. What good is an
education? The boisterous
guessers are still in charge
the haters of information. And
the guessers are almost all
highly educated people. Think of
that. They have had to throw away
their educations, even Harvard or
Yale educations.
-
- If they didn't do
that, there is no way their
uninhibited guessing could go on
and on and on. Please, don't you
do that. But if you make use of
the vast fund of knowledge now
available to educated persons,
you are going to be lonesome as
hell. The guessers outnumber you
and now I have to guess
about 10 to one.
-
- I'm going to tell
you some news.
-
- No, I am not
running for President, although I
do know that a sentence, if it is
to be complete, must have both a
subject and a verb.
-
- Nor will I confess
that I sleep with children. I
will say this, though: My wife is
by far the oldest person I ever
slept with.
-
- Here's the news: I
am going to sue the Brown &
Williamson Tobacco Company,
manufacturers of Pall Mall
cigarettes, for a billion bucks!
Starting when I was only 12 years
old, I have never chain-smoked
anything but unfiltered Pall
Malls. And for many years now,
right on the package, Brown and
Williamson have promised to kill
me.
-
- But I am now 82.
Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The
last thing I ever wanted was to
be alive when the three most
powerful people on the whole
planet would be named Bush, Dick
and Colon.
-
- Our government's
got a war on drugs. That's
certainly a lot better than no
drugs at all. That's what was
said about prohibition. Do you
realise that from 1919 to 1933 it
was absolutely against the law to
manufacture, transport, or sell
alcoholic beverages, and the
Indiana newspaper humourist Ken
Hubbard said: "Prohibition
is better than no liquor at
all."
-
- 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
40. 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.
-
- About my own
history of foreign substance
abuse, I've been a coward about
heroin and cocaine, 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 licence 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, addictive, and
destructive drugs of all: fossil
fuels.
-
- When you got here,
even when I got here, the
industrialised world was already
hopelessly hooked on fossil
fuels, and very soon now there
won't be any left. Cold turkey.
-
- Can I tell you the
truth? I mean this isn't the TV
news is it? Here's what I think
the truth is: We are all addicts
of fossil fuels in a state of
denial. 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.
-
- I turned 82 on
November 11, 2004. What's it like
to be this old? I can't parallel
park worth a damn any more, so
please don't watch while I try to
do it. And gravity has become a
lot less friendly and manageable
than it used to be.
-
- When you get to my
age, if you get to my age, and if
you have reproduced, you will
find yourself asking your own
children, who are themselves
middle-aged: "What is life
all about?'" I have seven
kids, three of them orphaned
nephews.
-
- I put my big
question about life to my son the
pediatrician. Dr Vonnegut said
this to his doddering old dad:
"Father, we are here to help
each other get through this
thing, whatever it is."
-
- Extracted from A
Man Without A Country: A Memoir
Of Life In George W Bush's
America, (Bloomsbury).
-
- http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/
- 158322713X/ref=nosim/002-5326326-
- 0975257?n=283155
-
- Published on
Sunday, February 5, 2006 by the
Sunday Herald (Scotland)
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