-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: April 15, 2007 1:11:09 AM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Our North American Banana Republic, Governed by Nouveau-
Rich White Trash
Editor's Note: The fact that Mr. Vonnegut was concerned about
the legitimacy of the war in Iraq before it began belies the Bush
Administration's assertion that the evidence pointed toward
invasion. In fact, many of America's most thoughtful minds,
including Mr. Vonnegut, were skeptical from the start. Truthout
has decided to distribute this interview because the editors
believed the interview was very telling, and simply because we
enjoy Mr. Vonnegut's take on the issues. Ting-a-ling! --amd
http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/7/4001
Kurt Vonnegut vs. the !&#*!@
By Joel Bleifuss
In These Times
Monday 27 January 2003
In November, Kurt Vonnegut turned 80. He published his first novel,
Player Piano, in 1952 at the age of 29. Since then he has written
13 others, including Slaughterhouse Five, which stands as one of
the pre-eminent anti-war novels of the 20th century.
As war against Iraq looms, I asked Vonnegut, a reader and supporter
of this magazine, to weigh in. Vonnegut is an American socialist in
the tradition of Eugene Victor Debs, a fellow Hoosier whom he likes
to quote: "As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long
as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a
soul in prison, I am not free."
--Joel Bleifuss
You have lived through World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the
Reagan wars, Desert Storm, the Balkan wars and now this coming war
in Iraq. What has changed, and what has remained the same?
One thing which has not changed is that none of us, no matter
what continent or island or ice cap, asked to be born in the first
place, and that even somebody as old as I am, which is 80, only
just got here. "There were already all these games going on when I
got here." An apt motto for any polity anywhere, to put on its
state seal or currency or whatever, might be this quotation from
the late baseball manager Casey Stengel, who was addressing a team
of losing professional athletes: "Can't anybody here play this game"?
My daughter Lily, for an example close to home, who has just
turned 20, finds herself --as does George W. Bush, himself a kid--
an 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. And to the choice between liberalism or conservatism and
on and on.
What is radically new in 2003 is that my daughter, along with
our president and Saddam Hussein and on and on, has inherited
technologies whose byproducts, whether in war or peace, are rapidly
destroying the whole planet as a breathable, drinkable system for
supporting life of any kind. Human beings, past and present, have
trashed the joint.
Based on what you've read and seen in the media, what is not
being said in the mainstream press about President Bush's policies
and the impending war in Iraq?
That they are nonsense.
My feeling from talking to readers and friends is that many
people are beginning to despair. Do you think that we've lost
reason to hope?
I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought
in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body
snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though,
is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-
comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'etat imaginable. And those now
in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who
know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white
supremacists, AKA "Christians," and plus, most frighteningly,
psychopathic personalities or "PPs."
To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable
medical diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or
athlete's foot. The classic medical text on PPs is "The Mask of
Sanity" by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. Read it! PPs are presentable,
they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others,
but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They
have a screw loose!
And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron
and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while
ruining their employees and investors and country, and who still
feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to
or about them? And so many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs
in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of
sick.
What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations,
and now in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal
people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason
that they cannot care what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do
that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack
Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the
rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus
and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!
How have you gotten involved in the anti-war movement? And how
would you compare the movement against a war in Iraq with the anti-
war movement of the Vietnam era?
When it became obvious what a dumb and cruel and spiritually
and financially and militarily ruinous mistake our war in Vietnam
was, every artist worth a damn in this country, every serious
writer, painter, stand-up comedian, musician, actor and actress,
you name it, came out against the thing. We formed what might be
described as a laser beam of protest, with everybody aimed in the
same direction, focused and intense. This weapon proved to have the
power of a banana-cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped
from a stepladder five-feet high.
And so it is with anti-war protests in the present day. Then as
now, TV did not like anti-war protesters, nor any other sort of
protesters, unless they rioted. Now, as then, on account of TV,
the right of citizens to peaceably assemble, and petition their
government for a redress of grievances "ain't worth a pitcher of
warm spit," as the saying goes.
As a writer and artist, have you noticed any difference between
how the cultural leaders of the past and the cultural leaders of
today view their responsibility to society?
Responsibility to which society? To Nazi Germany? To the
Stalinist Soviet Union? What about responsibility to humanity in
general? And leaders in what particular cultural activity? I guess
you mean the fine arts. I hope you mean the fine arts. ... Anybody
practicing the fine art of composing music, no matter how cynical
or greedy or scared, still can't help serving all humanity. Music
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.
But that is the power of ear candy. The creation of such a
universal confection for the eye, by means of printed poetry or
fiction or history or essays or memoirs and so on, isn't possible.
Literature is by definition opinionated. It is bound to provoke the
arguments in many quarters, not excluding the hometown or even the
family of the author. Any ink-on-paper author can only hope at best
to seem responsible to small groups or like-minded people
somewhere. He or she might as well have given an interview to the
editor of a small-circulation publication.
Maybe we can talk about the responsibilities to their societies
of architects and sculptors and painters another time. And I will
say this: TV drama, although not yet classified as fine art, has on
occasion performed marvelous services for Americans who want us to
be less paranoid, to be fairer and more merciful. M.A.S.H. and Law
and Order, to name only two shows, have been stunning masterpieces
in that regard.
That said, do you have any ideas for a really scary reality TV
show?
"C students from Yale." It would make your hair stand on end.
What targets would you consider fair game for a satirist today?
Assholes.
Joel Bleifuss is the editor of In These Times, where he has worked
as an investigative reporter, columnist and editor since 1986.
Bleifuss has had more stories on Project Censored's annual list of
the ?10 Most Censored Stories? than any other journalist.
See what's free at AOL.com.
www.ctrl.org
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