God Bless You Mr. Vonnegut
The minx has been in love with Kurt Vonnegut for years–since she was about 10 years old. I don’t know if its obvious or not, but the minx was always a pretty serious person and her reading material as a child reflected that. It seems like I jumped straight from the Dick & Jane book I insisted on learning to read before beginning kindergarten to Irving Stone, James Michener, and Leon Uris. And yes, I recognise the fact that normal children probably don’t beg their mother for permission to read The Passions of The Mind, a fictional biography of Sigmund Freud, but it explains a lot doesn’t it?
But then dear Kurt Vonnegut entered my young life and taught me how to “laugh at the ghastly absurdity of the modern condition” rather than wallow in it as Douglas Brinkley so eloquently puts it in his piece on Vonnegut in Rolling Stone. For those of you who haven’t experienced Vonnegut’s particular brand of genius, I thought I would quote a few lines from the article:
On this day, though, as Vonnegut sips coffee and his tiny white dog, Flour, yaps in the background, there is no wry amusement or social satire in his repertoire. There is only burning dissent about the way modern technology and global capitalism are usurping the last gasps of goodness from honest laborers’ lives. And deep sadness that everyday humans are butchering their most civilized impulses. But then Vonnegut starts coughing, clearing his throat of phlegm, grasping for a half-smoked pack of Pall Malls lying on a coffee table. He quickly lights up. His wheezing ceases. I ask him whether he worries that cigarettes are killing him. “Oh, yes,” he answers, in what is clearly a set-piece gag. “I’ve been smoking Pall Mall unfiltered cigarettes since I was twelve or fourteen. So I’m going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, who manufactured them. And do you know why?” “Lung cancer?” I offer.
“No. No. Because I’m eighty-three years old. The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson promised to kill me. Instead, their cigarettes didn’t work. Now I’m forced to suffer leaders with names like Bush and Dick and, up until recently, ‘Colon.’”….
And this:
As a self-proclaimed agnostic, Vonnegut is afflicted not with a fear of a vengeful diety but with the “gasoline blues” and “Busfluenza.” He longs for the days of impassioned voices for the downtrodden like FDR or Robert F. Kenndey and Martin Luther King Jr. “Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by honest research and excellent scholarship and investigative reporting,” he believes. “They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard.”
And this:
He asks me if I know why President Bush is so pissed off at Arabs, I shrug no. “They brought us algebra,” he says laughing. “Also the numbers we use, including the symbol for nothing. Zero.”
And finally this:
“You must realize that the priceless gift that African-Americans gave us musically is now almost the only reason many foreigners still tolerate us. That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is the blues.” …As for his tombstone epitaph, he wants it to read THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC.
And a poem:
I feel as though we have been invaded
by body-snatchers or Martians.
Sometimes I wish we had been.
Isn’t it time somebody investigated
Yale University?
God Bless You Mr Vonnegut. I know you don’t want to live much longer, but I hope you do.
Photo by Peter Yang
Similar Posts:
- And So He Goes: Rest In Peace Sweet Kurt Vonnegut
- In Honor Of Kurt Vonnegut Week
- Roger Stone Does It Again and Again
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Ah, beautiful! Thanks for posting this!