I heard the news this morning: Kurt Vonnegut is dead. What a loss to all of us who are for peace, to all of us who worry about the fate of the world, and to all of us who wrestle with our existential plight. “We are here on Earth,” said Vonnegut once, “to fart around.” It was that wryness and dryness that kept drawing me back to Vonnegut.
He was always reader friendly, advising writers to act as though they’re on a first date, and try, at least once in a while, to entertain.
Ever idiosyncratic, he had semicolonitis and tried to blot out that punctuation mark from the language. He also tended to end his observations and ruminations with the coda: “So it goes.”
His existentialism, his quirkiness, his pessimism, and his atheism didn’t lead him to nihilism but to a democratic socialism and a profound humanism. He was an atheist who truly believed in the Sermon on the Mount.
He first expressed this in his unforgettable Slaughterhouse-Five, his eyewitness account of the allied firebombings in Dresden, where he was a prisoner of war. But he carried his twinkling humanism all the way through his science fiction, in such works as God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Welcome to the Monkey House, and Cat’s Cradle, right up to his undervalued Time Quake in 1997.
“All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental,” he wrote, on the dedication page of that last book. And he defended himself against critics who charged that he wasn’t all that much interested in coming up with different fictional characters. “If I’d wasted my time creating characters,” said Kilgore Trout (Vonnegut’s thinly masked man), “I would never have gotten around to calling attention to things that really matter: irresistible forces in nature, and cruel inventions, and cockamamie ideals and governments and economies that make heroes and heroines alike feel like something the cat drug in.”
One of those cruel inventions was the atomic bomb, and what Vonnegut found totally indefensible was the decision by Truman to drop the bomb on Nagasaki. Hiroshima you could argue about, he said. But Nagasaki?
“I knew a single word that proved our democratic government was capable of committing obscene, gleefully rabid and racist, yahooistic murders of unarmed men, women, and children, murders wholly devoid of military common sense,” he wrote. “I said the word. It was a foreign word. The word was Nagasaki.”
He understood the cruelty of the capitalist economy, and so he kept alive the name of Eugene Victor Debs, the great leader of the Socialist Party and candidate for President early in the Twentieth Century.
In Timequake, he denounced the “faithless custodians of capital making themselves multimillionaires and multibillionaires, while playing beanbag with money better spent on creating meaningful jobs and training people to fill them, and raising our young and retiring our old in surroundings of respect and safety. For Christ’s sake, let’s help more of our frightened people get through this thing, whatever it is. Why throw money at problems? That is what money is for?”
And as for cockamamie governments, he had no tolerance whatsoever for the Bush Administration.
In his last great book, A Man Without a Country, which is a collection of essays, drawings, and throwaway lines he wrote for the feisty magazine In These Times, Vonnegut took on the Bush-Cheney crowd: “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. . . . 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! 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!”
Since reality TV is all the rage, Vonnegut was asked if he had any ideas for a pilot. He responded: “I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: ‘C-Students From Yale.’ ”
I met Vonnegut only once, and in person he was just like he was in his writing, witty like a good first date. “Being alive is a crock,” he wrote in Timequake. But, he added, “a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit.”
Kurt Vonnegut accomplished that mission.