A Weekend Train Ride with Kurt Vonnegut

by emptypockets

Sunday afternoon. You've taken the weekend out of the city. You're returning by train. You struggle down the aisle. You find an empty seat. You shove your bag onto the overhead rack. You sit down, rummage for your ticket, stick it in the seat strap for the conductor. You look at the man next to you. He is frizzled, wrinkled, frazzled, twinkled. He is Kurt Vonnegut. You begin to talk.

Wouldn't that be nice? Taking the train back to New York with Kurt Vonnegut? Wouldn't that be fun?

Well, perhaps "nice" isn't the right word, exactly. "Fun," may be not quite it either. I mean, even in his youth, Kurt Vonnegut was not exactly a ray of sunshine. Reading him was not like staring into a rainbow. And, like most humans, Vonnegut has not found fewer things to complain about as he's gotten older. Like most humans, he does not see the world of today as a bouncing bundle of joy and hope compared with the world of his youth. The writer whose work has been described as a sugar pill with a bitter coating seems, in his older years, not to have bothered with the part about the sugar pill.

So his most recent book, "Man Without a Country," is not one to read when you are depressed. It is not one to read when you are ready to give up hope in America, or when you are already thinking about how humans have ruined the planet, how we are all doomed. It is, however, an excellent book to read when you are on a train, returning home, relaxed, sun-baked, afraid for the future but content in the present, and wishing for a little company from an old friend -- a very old friend -- a very old, cranky friend, who will crab all the way back until the train pulls into Penn Station.

I'm excerpting a few passages here to give you a taste. These were not my favorite parts (though they're good) but they are directly political and seemed best suited for discussion here. I've excerpted long chunks not out of disrespect for copyright but because it was not fair to the prose to slice and dice and ellipse it up until all the flavor was lost. Readers, lawyers, Kurt, forgive me.

Excerpt Number One.

Our government's got a war on drugs. That's certainly a lot better then no drugs at all. That's what was said about prohibition. Do you realize that from 1919 to 1933 it was absolutely against the law to manufacture, transport, or sell alcoholic beverages, and the Indiana newspaper humorist Ken Hubbard said, "Prohibition is better than no liquor at all."

But get this: The two most widely abused and addicitive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal.

One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W. Bush, no less, 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 sixteen until he was forty. When he was forty-one, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.

Other drunks have seen pink elephants.

[...]

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 license -- 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 industrialized 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.

Excerpt Number Two.

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 that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts 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.

Excerpt Number Three.

Get a load of this. Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was not yet four, ran five times as the Socialist Party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, almost 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning:

As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.

As long as there is a criminal element, I'm of it.

As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?

When you get out of bed each morning, with the roosters crowing, wouldn't you like to say, "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."

How about Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.

And so on.

Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld stuff.

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

"Blessed are the merciful" in a courtroom? "Blessed are the peacemakers" in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

ok. I just wanted to share that with you because I enjoyed it. When Bush starts sounding like Vonnegut, you know the end times are nigh. ("We have a serious problem. America is addicted to oil.")

Comments

[emptypockets]

...and for what it's worth, I don't really buy the line that we invaded Iraq to feed our country's oil addiction. We invaded because this administration is heavily invested, personally, in the energy industry. If they were invested in the cheap plastic shit industry I think we'd have invaded China. If they were invested in the fermented herring industry I think we'd have invaded the Swedes. They happened to be invested in oil.

[willyr]

and if they had been invested in the broccoli and sprouts industry they would have invaded Brussels.

I *love* Vonnegut. Crusty is the new black.

[sunyasi]

I can think of no other time in my fifty-odd years that was more full of wampeters, foma and grand faloons!!!

[cs]

I adore Kurt Vonnegut. Along with Debs and Dreiser, he redeems at least some of my Hoosier birth-state's sordid history.

When an interviewer asked him before the war if he had any good ideas for a scary reality show, he answered, "C students from Yale. It would stand your hair on end."

[jonnybutter]

Thanks for the post, EP. I liked your introduction more than the excerpts themselves.

[Melanie]

'pockets,

You just sold another book for Kurt Vonnegut.

[self]

Much better a train ride with Vonnegut than a gravytrain of purl jam, jackson browne and the dinosaur/deadmen all-stars.

Nice work.