Vonnegut, now 81, is one of the great writers of our time and, thank goodness, he's still got it. As with Picasso, Lennon and the other great artists, he can throw off brilliance easily, casually, almost without thinking. It's awesome.
Every day we get from him is something I treasure. So is every word. As with everything he has ever written, his message for our time is frightening, apocalyptic, and compelling:
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.
Someday the body of Kurt Vonnegut will fade and die. But the body of his literature will go on forever. If I could ever have 1/1,000,000th of that immortality I'd die a happy man. Failing that, as I will, I'll settle for my two children, and you.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
Whenever anyone suggests that the quality of writing doesn't matter so much as the truth of what you're saying, I point them to Kurt Vonnegut. (The image is from an iText primer at 
1. modesty verve on May 17, 2004 10:52 AM writes...
OK, I read the whole thing. Then I stood back, and I guess I'm sort of in awe: What chauvinism! What hubris! What narcissism! What a crock! Somebody give this geezer a glass of warm milk and put him to bed already.
The dude made it to 81 years of age with the intact belief that America could become humane and reasonable?! I don't believe him. He's not an ignorant man. No culture, no empire, no country, no state, no square city block in the history of civilization has been "humane and reasonable" for more than maybe a week or two...until the mood (or incentive) passed.
So what's so extraordinary about Vonnegut's America that might've qualified it for the first-ever transcendence of inevitability? Nothing. He knows this. He tells us: "We the people have absolutely no say in whatever they choose to do next."
Then he rambles and mumbles about chimpanzees, Baby Boomers, my son the doctor, Jesus, Mel Gibson, guns, fetuses, homosexuals, Bush, drunks, drugs, algebra, Native Americans, and a Studebaker, until he finally manages to spit out a punch line. Yes, of course we're addicted to (among other things) fossil fuels. And yes, our leaders are now committing violent crimes very possibly to get, among other things, what little may be left of what we're hooked on.
OK. But why did our leaders commit violent crimes last week, last month, last year, last decade, last war, last war before that...? Why have leaders and their followers everywhere committed violent crimes throughout history? What's new? Nothing. He knows this. He tells us: "...Power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power."
Oh, and about the Sermon on the Mount: A lot of people probably think Jesus said "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" simply because he actually did say it, according to Luke and Matthew, during -- guess when? -- the Sermon on the Mount.
Night-night, Grandpa Kurt.
Permalink to Comment2. ap on July 10, 2004 11:12 AM writes...
True, for more than half a century now, Vonnegut has been saying things like humaneness and humanity do not particularly apply to America. And that America is hooked on fossil fuels, and that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and so on... Agreed too, that the history of civilization has not particularly been much use other than taking lessons in how to screw others -- slingshots, gunpowder, carpet-bombing, nulcear arsenals, and of course corrupt political- military nexus and all that. But then, Papa Vonegut isn't asking us to change overnight -- knowing well that the life of corporations depend on the thick-as-pigshit-SUV-driving-self-serving individuals. These are also the same people who eat up nearly about 80% of the world's resources themselves being 6% of the global population, often without needing to know that! But unflagging as he is in criticising America, his criticism has a purpose - to agitate the complacent. The complacent, in the words of yet another now forgotten writer, D H Lawrence, is '...one / who builds around himself a wall / paints it blue / and thinks he is heaven'. Gradpa Vonnegut has only told us that all his life through his loric fiction.
Permalink to Comment3. abhijeet paul on July 10, 2004 11:18 AM writes...
True, for more than half a century now, Vonnegut has been saying things like humaneness and humanity do not particularly apply to America. And that America is hooked on fossil fuels, and that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and so on... Agreed too, that the history of civilization has not particularly been much use other than taking lessons in how to screw others -- slingshots, gunpowder, carpet-bombing, nulcear arsenals, and of course corrupt political- military nexus and all that. But then, Papa Vonegut isn't asking us to change overnight -- knowing well that the life of corporations depend on the thick-as-pigshit-SUV-driving-self-serving individuals. These are also the same people who eat up nearly about 80% of the world's resources themselves being 6% of the global population, often without needing to know that! But unflagging as he is in criticising America, his criticism has a purpose - to agitate the complacent. The complacent, in the words of yet another now forgotten writer, D H Lawrence, is '...one / who builds around himself a wall / paints it blue / and thinks he is heaven'. Grandpa Vonnegut has only told us that all his life through his loric fiction.
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