Just got this email from an actress/producer friend of mine.. she's in Hollywood, working with her Canadian hubby.. she sent his excerpt from Vonnegut's new book 'cuz it sums it all up for her... me too. Pardon my lifting this excerp... minor poets borrow, great poets steal and Vonnegut brings it straight from the heart and gut, so I'll pass it on. If this has been posted before, again my apologies.
(more below the fold)
Hi, If you have 5 minutes read on, it might look long
but it is a fast read and totally worth it, wisely
stated by Kurt Vonnegut, it is really sad that
everything written here is a reflection of what we as
citizens of the world have let happen. Read on and
tell me what you think...
Shaula~
Kurt Vonnegut - A Man Without a Country
Custodians of chaos
In this exclusive extract from his forthcoming
memoirs, Kurt Vonnegut is horrified by the hypocrisy
in contemporary US politics
"Do unto others what 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,
five hundred 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.
We've sure come a long way since then. Sometimes I
wish we hadn't. I hate H-bombs and the Jerry Springer
Show
But back to people like Confucius and Jesus and my son
the doctor, Mark, each of whom have said in their own
way how we could behave more humanely and maybe make
the world a less painful place. One of my favourite
humans 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 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 am 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!
It so happens that idealism enough for anyone is not
made of perfumed pink clouds. It is the law! It is the
US Constitution.
But 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
instead is that it was taken over by means of the
sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'état
imaginable.
I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary
reality TV show. I have one reality show that would
really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from
Yale".
George W Bush has gathered around him 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, the medical term for smart,
personable people who have no consciences.
To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly
respectable 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, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the
Medical College of Georgia, published in 1941. Read
it!
Some people are born deaf, some are born blind or
whatever, and this book is about congenitally
defective human beings of a sort that is making this
whole country and many other parts of the planet go
completely haywire nowadays. These were people born
without consciences, and suddenly they are taking
charge of everything.
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 they are waging a war that is making billionaires
out of millionaires, and trillionaires out of
billionaires, and they own television, and they
bankroll George Bush, and not because he's against gay
marriage.
So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in
our federal government, as though they were leaders
instead of sick. They have taken charge. They have
taken charge of communications and the schools, so we
might as well be Poland under occupation.
They might have felt that taking our country into an
endless war was simply something decisive to do. What
has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in
corporations, and now in government, is that 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! Mobilise the
reserves! Privatise 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!
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. This was true
even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran
for class president.
The title of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is a
parody of the title of Ray Bradbury's great
science-fiction novel Fahrenheit 451. Four hundred and
fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit is the combustion point,
incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed.
The hero of Bradbury's novel is a municipal worker
whose job is burning books.
While on the subject of burning books, I want to
congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical
strength, who, all over this country, have staunchly
resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to
remove certain books from their shelves, and destroyed
records rather than have to reveal to thought police
the names of persons who have checked out those
titles.
So the America I loved still exists, if not in the
White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House
of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved
still exists at the front desks of our public
libraries.
And still on the subject of books: our daily news
sources, newspapers and TV, are now so craven, so
unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so
uninformative, that only in books do we learn what's
really going on.
I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud
by Craig Unger, published in early 2004, that
humiliating, shameful, blood-soaked year.
In case you haven't noticed, as the result of a
shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which
thousands of African-Americans were arbitrarily
disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest
of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless
war-lovers with appallingly powerful weaponry - who
stand unopposed.
In case you haven't noticed, we are now as feared and
hated all over the world as Nazis once were.
And with good reason.
In case you haven't noticed, our unelected leaders
have dehumanised millions and millions of human beings
simply because of their religion and race. We wound
'em and kill 'em and torture 'em and imprison 'em all
we want.
Piece of cake.
In case you haven't noticed, we also dehumanised our
own soldiers, not because of their religion or race,
but because of their low social class.
Send 'em anywhere. Make 'em do anything.
Piece of cake.
The O'Reilly Factor.
So I am a man without a country, except for the
librarians and a Chicago paper called In These Times.
Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times
guaranteed there were weapons of mass destruction
there.
Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human
race at the end of their lives, even though Twain
hadn't even seen the first world war. War is now a
form of TV entertainment, and what made the first
world war so particularly entertaining were two
American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun.
Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same
name. Don't you wish you could have something named
after you?
Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now
give up on people, too. I am a veteran of the second
world war and I have to say this is not the first time
I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.
My last words? "Life is no way to treat an animal, not
even a mouse."
Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas
Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.
What can be said to our young people, now that
psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons
without consciences, without senses of pity or shame,
have taken all the money in the treasuries of our
government and corporations, and made it all their
own?
© 2005 Kurt Vonnegut Extracted from A Man Without a
Country: A Memoir of Life in George W Bush's America.