Truth, Injustice and the American Way

[Truth]

Those that know, know no note of knowing is necessary.

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.