Published on Wednesday, May 12, 2004 by In These Times
<http://www.inthesetimes.com/>
Cold Turkey
by
Kurt Vonnegut
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’s becoming
humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power
corrupts 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 bodies, is already shot to pieces.
They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for
Christmas.
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When you get to my age, if you get to my age, which is 81, and if you have
reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are
themselves middle-aged, what life is all about. I have seven kids, four of
them adopted.
Many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren.
They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer
corporations and government.
I put my big question about life to my biological son Mark. Mark is a
pediatrician, and author of a memoir,
The Eden Express. It is about his crackup, straightjacket and
padded cell stuff, from which he recovered sufficiently to graduate from
Harvard Medical School. Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad:
“Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it
is.” So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer,
so you can forget it.
I have to say that’s a pretty good sound bite, almost as good as, “Do unto
others as you would have them do unto you.” A lot of people think Jesus said
that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was
actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, 500 years before there
was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.
The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for
gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks.
And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even
knew that there was another one.
But back to people, like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark,
who’ve said how we could behave more humanely, and maybe make the world a
less painful place. One of my favorites is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in
my native state of Indiana. Get a load of this: Eugene Debs, who died back
in 1926, when I was only 4, ran 5 times as the Socialist Party candidate for
president, winning 900,000 votes, 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? 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 Donald
Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney 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!
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There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what
can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president. But,
when you stop to think about it, only a nut case would want to be a human
being, if he or she had a choice. Such treacherous, untrustworthy, lying and
greedy animals we are!
I was born a human being in 1922 A.D. What does “A.D.” signify? That
commemorates an inmate of this lunatic asylum we call Earth who was nailed
to a wooden cross by a bunch of other inmates. With him still conscious,
they hammered spikes through his wrists and insteps, and into the wood. Then
they set the cross upright, so he dangled up there where even the shortest
person in the crowd could see him writhing this way and that.
Can you imagine people doing such a thing to a person?
No problem. That’s entertainment. Ask the devout Roman Catholic Mel Gibson,
who, as an act of piety, has just made a fortune with a movie about how
Jesus was tortured. Never mind what Jesus said. During the reign of King
Henry the Eighth, founder of the Church of England, he had a counterfeiter
boiled alive in public. Show biz again. Mel Gibson’s next movie should be
The Counterfeiter. Box office
records will again be broken. One of the few good things about modern times:
If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will
have entertained us.
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And what did the great British historian Edward Gibbon, 1737-1794 A.D., have
to say about the human record so far? He said, “History is indeed little
more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.”
The same can be said about this morning’s edition of the
New York Times.
The French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, who won a Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1957, wrote, “There is but one truly serious philosophical
problem, and that is suicide.” So there’s another barrel of laughs from
literature. Camus died in an automobile accident. His dates? 1913-1960 A.D.
Listen.
All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being:
Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge
of Courage, the Iliad
and the Odyssey, Crime and Punishment,
the Bible and The Charge of the Light
Brigade.
But I have to say this in defense of humankind: No matter in what era in
history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got there. And, except
for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these crazy games going on,
which could make you act crazy, even if you weren’t crazy to begin with.
Some of the games that were already going on when you got here were love and
hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf and
girls’ basketball. Even crazier than golf, though, is modern American
politics, where, thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be
one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.
Actually, this same sort of thing happened to the people of England
generations ago, and Sir William Gilbert, of the radical team of Gilbert and
Sullivan, wrote these words for a song about it back then:
I often think it’s comical
How nature always does contrive
That every boy and every gal
That’s born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative.
Which one are you in this country? It’s practically a law of life that you
have to be one or the other? If you aren’t one or the other, you might as
well be a doughnut. If some of you still haven’t decided, I’ll make it easy
for you.
If you want to take my guns away from me, and you’re all for murdering
fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give
them kitchen appliances at their showers, and you’re for the poor, you’re a
liberal.
If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you’re a
conservative. What could be simpler?
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My government’s got a war on drugs. 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 41. 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.
And do you know why I think he is so pissed off at Arabs?
They invented algebra. Arabs also invented the numbers we use, including a
symbol for nothing, which nobody else had ever had before. You think Arabs
are dumb? Try doing long division with Roman numerals.
We’re spreading democracy, are we?
Same way European explorers brought Christianity to the Indians, what we now
call “Native Americans.” How ungrateful they were! How ungrateful are the
people of Baghdad today.
So let’s give another big tax cut to the super-rich.
That’ll teach bin Laden a lesson he won’t soon forget.
Hail to the Chief.
That chief and his cohorts have as little to do with Democracy as the
Europeans had to do with Christianity. We the people have absolutely no say
in whatever they choose to do next. In case you haven’t noticed, they’ve
already cleaned out the treasury, passing it out to pals in the war and
national security rackets, leaving your generation and the next one with a
perfectly enormous debt that you’ll be asked to repay.
Nobody let out a peep when they did that to you, because they have
disconnected every burglar alarm in the Constitution: The House, the Senate,
the Supreme Court, the FBI, the free press (which, having been embedded, has
forsaken the First Amendment) and We the People.
About my own history of foreign substance abuse. I’ve been a coward about
heroin and cocaine and 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 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 and
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 more of those. Cold
turkey.
Can I tell you the truth?
I mean this isn’t like TV news, is it?
Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a
state of denial, about to face cold turkey. 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.
