Another quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s latest:
‘The blues was a gift so great that it is now almost the only reason
many foreigners still like the USA. Foreigners love us for our jazz.
They don’t hate us for our
purported liberty and justice for all. They hate us for our arrogance.’’
I stuck another excerpt behind the link. Enjoy!
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.”
Leave a Reply