Religions > Atheism > News, OT: "Vonnegut, on politics, presidents and librarians"
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Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"" |
| Date: |
07 Oct 2005 05:37:17 AM |
| Object: |
News, OT: "Vonnegut, on politics, presidents and librarians" |
Quoth the great man:
"What do you want to talk about? Politics? Our president is
a complete twit."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20051006/en_usatoday/vonnegutonpoliticspre=
sidentsandlibrarians
Bob Dog
Atheist #153 =3D 1^3 + 5^3 + 3^3
EAC's chief cook and brainwasher
-----
"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work
within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards."
- Claire Wolfe
"I disagree with the second part."
- Detective Somerset of "Se7en", paraphrased
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Vonnegut, on politics, presidents and librarians
By Jacqueline Blais, USA TODAY
Thu Oct 6, 6:52 AM ET
Kurt Vonnegut opens an interview at La Mediterran=E9e, a pretty
Manhattan restaurant, this way:
"What do you want to talk about? Politics? Our president is a
complete twit. I'll talk about the death of the novel. I'll talk
about anything you want."
And so it goes.
For all those who have lived with Vonnegut in their imaginations -
with the listless soldier Billy Pilgrim in 1969's Slaughterhouse-
Five, with the religious Bokononists whispering "busy, busy, busy"
in 1963's Cat's Cradle- this is what he is like in person.
Polite, courtly even. He has thick, light brownish hair. He was
born left-handed but taught, as they did back in the day, to write
with his right. He says Law & Order on TV is "absolutely first-rate"
- as long as the episode has Sam Waterston or Jerry Orbach in it.
And at 82, this hero of the left is as unafraid as ever to speak out.
His new book is A Man Without a Country (Seven Stories Press, $23.95;
edited by Daniel Simon). It is part commentary (some material was
written for the left-leaning magazine In These Times), part memoir
and all Vonnegut writing about our world today.
And what kind of planet do we have?
Well, he says, we are making "thermodynamic whoopee with atomic
energy and fossil fuel." The part that makes him feel unfunny for
the rest of his life: People don't "give a damn whether the planet
goes on or not." We are, he writes, too cheap and lazy.
In short: "Human beings, past and present, have trashed the joint."
There is more where that came from.
The guessers (never filled with doubts) are in charge, wise people
are despised, and the USA is now operating on the snake-oil standard,
he writes.
Yes, and more.
From his perspective as a former World War II prisoner of war,
Vonnegut writes that American soldiers in the Middle East are "being
treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas."
Then, beyond all the gloom and doom, there are things to cling to.
Music (especially the blues) cheers him, as do people who behave
decently. Librarians, too - "not famous for their physical strength"
- who resist having books removed from shelves and refuse to give
names of people who have checked out certain books in the era of the
Patriot Act.
"The America I loved," he writes, "still exists in the front desks of
public libraries."
Within recent weeks, he has been on Real Time with Bill Maher and The
Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Said Stewart, introducing him: "As an
adolescent, (Vonnegut) made my life bearable."
No one can doubt Vonnegut's staying power. Seven Stories Press has
gone back to print four times for 190,000 copies of A Man Without a
Country. He has written 25 books, among them some of the best-loved
in American literature. During the past three months, he was in the
top 50 most-popular authors in North America searched on abebooks.com,
an umbrella website for used books.
Vonnegut grew up in the Midwest during the Great Depression. He came
from a family of three; his older brother, Bernard, was a highly
respected physical chemist who worked on cloud seeding.
Vonnegut learned how jokes work, he writes, from top comedians on the
radio. He went to Cornell for three years, studying chemistry, and
did graduate work in anthropology at the University of Chicago.
He helped raise seven children: three from his first marriage; three
adopted when his sister, Alice, and her husband died; and another
adopted in his second marriage.
He joined the Army in World War II, was captured by the Germans and
experienced the Allied bombing of Dresden, the inspiration for
Slaughterhouse-Five.
His thoughts about gasoline dependency came early in life. He was
born Nov. 11, 1922, in Indianapolis - home to the Indianapolis Motor
Speedway, established in 1911. "When I got here in 1922, this country
was already roaring drunk on petroleum," he says. "We are still
roaring drunk on petroleum."
At La Mediterran=E9e, Vonnegut brings with him a November 1972 Harper's
article he wrote about the Republican presidential nomination in
Miami of Richard Nixon when the country was fighting the Vietnam
War.
"Read the piece written 33 years ago," he says. Nothing has changed:
The country is still "divided between winners and losers. The
government is Democratic and Republican, but look, in this last
election, they had to choose between two members of Skull and Bones
(John Kerry and George Bush's fraternity at Yale) out of 300 million
people or however many people we are."
"I was lucky enough to live under one truly humane president: FDR,"
he says. "He gave the common people enough influence by strengthening
the labor unions.
"Automation has made labor worthless, so the losers are in awful
trouble, and have no power whatsoever. They used to be able to
withhold labor."
But then again there is the humanistic Vonnegut, honorary president
of the Humanist Association: In A Man Without a Country, he repeats
something his Uncle Alex used to say when they were sitting under an
apple tree, chatting and drinking lemonade.
"Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to
exclaim, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.' "
It is a saying he now carries around with him, and he urges everyone
to "please notice when you are happy."
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