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Kurt Vonnegut vs. the !&#*!@

By Joel Bleifuss 
  
In November, Kurt Vonnegut turned 80. He published his first novel, 
Player Piano, in 1952 at the age of 29. Since then he has written 13 
others, including Slaughterhouse Five, which stands as one of the pre-
eminent anti-war novels of the 20th century.
As war against Iraq looms, I asked Vonnegut, a reader and supporter of 
this magazine, to weigh in. Vonnegut is an American socialist in the 
tradition of Eugene Victor Debs, a fellow Hoosier whom he likes to 
quote: “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.”

—Joel Bleifuss

Q: You have lived through World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Reagan wars,
Desert Storm, the Balkan wars and now this coming war in Iraq. What has 
changed, and what has remained the same?

A: One thing which has not changed is that none of us, no matter what 
continent or island or ice cap, asked to be born in the first place, 
and that even somebody as old as I am, which is 80, only just got here. 
There were already all these games going on when I got here. … An apt 
motto for any polity anywhere, to put on its state seal or currency or 
whatever, might be this quotation from the late baseball manager Casey 
Stengel, who was addressing a team of losing professional 
athletes: “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

My daughter Lily, for an example close to home, who has just turned 20, 
finds herself—as does George W. Bush, himself a kid—an 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. And to the choice between 
liberalism or conservatism and on and on.

What is radically new in 2003 is that my daughter, along with our 
president and Saddam Hussein and on and on, has inherited technologies 
whose byproducts, whether in war or peace, are rapidly destroying the 
whole planet as a breathable, drinkable system for supporting life of 
any kind. Human beings, past and present, have trashed the joint.

Q: Based on what you’ve read and seen in the media, what is not being
said in the mainstream press about President Bush’s policies and the 
impending war in Iraq?

A: That they are nonsense.

Q: My feeling from talking to readers and friends is that many people
are beginning to despair. Do you think that we’ve lost reason to hope?

A: 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, or “PPs.”

To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical 
diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. 
The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey 
Cleckley. Read it! PPs are presentable, they know full well the 
suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They 
cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and 
WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining 
their employees and investors and country, and who still feel as pure 
as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? 
And so many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal 
government, as though they were leaders instead of sick.

What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now 
in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they 
are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot 
care 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!

Q: How have you gotten involved in the anti-war movement? And how would 
you compare the movement against a war in Iraq with the anti-war 
movement of the Vietnam era?

A: When it became obvious what a dumb and cruel and spiritually and 
financially and militarily ruinous mistake our war in Vietnam was, 
every artist worth a damn in this country, every serious writer, 
painter, stand-up comedian, musician, actor and actress, you name it, 
came out against the thing. We formed what might be described as a 
laser beam of protest, with everybody aimed in the same direction, 
focused and intense. This weapon proved to have the power of a banana-
cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-
feet high.

And so it is with anti-war protests in the present day. Then as now, TV 
did not like anti-war protesters, nor any other sort of protesters, 
unless they rioted. Now, as then, on account of TV, the right of 
citizens to peaceably assemble, and petition their government for a 
redress of grievances, “ain’t worth a pitcher of warm spit,” as the 
saying goes.

Q: As a writer and artist, have you noticed any difference between how
the cultural leaders of the past and the cultural leaders of today view 
their responsibility to society?

A: Responsibility to which society? To Nazi Germany? To the Stalinist 
Soviet Union? What about responsibility to humanity in general? And 
leaders in what particular cultural activity? I guess you mean the fine 
arts. I hope you mean the fine arts. ... Anybody practicing the fine 
art of composing music, no matter how cynical or greedy or scared, 
still can’t help serving all humanity. Music 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.

But that is the power of ear candy. The creation of such a universal 
confection for the eye, by means of printed poetry or fiction or 
history or essays or memoirs and so on, isn’t possible. Literature is 
by definition opinionated. It is bound to provoke the arguments in many 
quarters, not excluding the hometown or even the family of the author. 
Any ink-on-paper author can only hope at best to seem responsible to 
small groups or like-minded people somewhere. He or she might as well 
have given an interview to the editor of a small-circulation 
publication.

Maybe we can talk about the responsibilities to their societies of 
architects and sculptors and painters another time. And I will say 
this: TV drama, although not yet classified as fine art, has on 
occasion performed marvelous services for Americans who want us to be 
less paranoid, to be fairer and more merciful. M.A.S.H. and Law and 
Order, to name only two shows, have been stunning masterpieces in that 
regard.

Q: That said, do you have any ideas for a really scary reality TV show?

A: "C students from Yale." It would stand your hair on end.

Q: What targets would you consider fair game for a satirist today?

A: Assholes.  


Joel Bleifuss is the editor of In These Times, where he has worked as a 
investigative reporter, columnist and editor since 1986. Bleifuss has 
had more stories on Project Censored's annual list of the “10 Most 
Censored Stories” than any other journalist.

http://vonnegut.com