Vonnegut Made Life More Bearable

[babylonsister]

http://progressive.org/mag_wx041207

Vonnegut Made Life More Bearable
By Matthew Rothschild

April 12, 2007

snip//”

He understood the cruelty of the capitalist economy, and so he kept alive the name of Eugene Victor Debs, the great leader of the Socialist Party and candidate for President early in the Twentieth Century. In Timequake, he denounced the “faithless custodians of capital making themselves multimillionaires and multibillionaires, while playing beanbag with money better spent on creating meaningful jobs and training people to fill them, and raising our young and retiring our old in surroundings of respect and safety. For Christ’s sake, let’s help more of our frightened people get through this thing, whatever it is. Why throw money at problems? That is what money is for?”

And as for cockamamie governments, he had no tolerance whatsoever for the Bush Administration.

In his last great book, A Man Without a Country, which is a collection of essays, drawings, and throwaway lines he wrote for the feisty magazine In These Times, Vonnegut took on the Bush-Cheney crowd:

“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. . . . They are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin’ day, and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they don’t give a fuck 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!”

Since reality TV is all the rage, Vonnegut was asked if he had any ideas for a pilot. He responded: “I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: ‘C-Students From Yale.’ ”

I met Vonnegut only once, and in person he was just like he was in his writing, witty like a good first date.

“Being alive is a crock,” he wrote in Timequake. But, he added, “a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit.”

Kurt Vonnegut accomplished that mission.

[Hardrada]

1. He had a really good perspective at all times

and knew our real peril from our enemies and how deriding them was both amusing and necessary. I liked his little-known dark play "Happy Birthday, Wanda June."

[CrazyOrangeCat]

2. K&R