- 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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