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Vonnegut's Blues For
America
By Kurt
Vonnegut
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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