Vonnegut's Blues for America

[genie_weenie]

America's greatest living writer.


From the article:

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.

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.



http://www.sundayherald.com/53889

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. And a review of the book, by John Iving, in The Times

God bless you, Mr Vonnegut
As the master of satirical sci-fi publishes an autobiography packed with wisdom and wit, John Irving pays tribute to a teacher and friend

...
“We are here on Earth to fart around,” Vonnegut writes. “Don’t let anybody tell you any different.” Boy, do we human beings know how to fart around! According to Vonnegut, a team of Martian anthropologists has been studying American culture for the past ten years; they recently went back to Mars “because they knew how terrible global warming was about to become”. But even after ten years, there were things about American culture that no Martian could understand. “What is it,” asks one, “what can it possibly be about blowjobs and golf?” What, indeed; more farting around!

As the youngest member of his family, Vonnegut tells us, he was always a jokemaker — “the only way I could get into a conversation was to say something funny”. He’s still at it. He says that his long-ago failure as the manager of a Saab dealership on Cape Cod is why the Swedes haven’t given him a Nobel Prize for Literature. “I came to speak ill of Swedish engineering, and so diddled myself out of a Nobel Prize.” It’s as good a reason as any, but here’s another: Vonnegut is too funny to win a Nobel Prize for Literature. Have any of you been laughing your ass off while reading a recent winner?

Vonnegut loves socialists — among them, George Bernard Shaw, whom he quotes as follows: “I don’t know if there are men on the moon, but if there are, they must be using the Earth as their lunatic asylum.” On this point, Vonnegut isn’t kidding. The planet Earth’s rulers, George W. Bush foremost among them, are “psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences”. Vonnegut doesn ’t think much of the American media, either. “Our daily news sources, newspapers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on be- half of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books do we learn what’s really going on.”

Then there are the Christians. “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.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,923-2021940,00.html

He's got to be a DU member, hasn't he?

[RaleighNCDUer]

2. Maybe DU members

are all little Vonneguts...

[LiberalEsto]

3. He's a UU

Unitarian Universalist