A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY
Kurt Vonnegut
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Vonnegut has been around a long time.
In fact, I was surprised to see another book by him. He's 84 and curmudgeon
with an active sense of humor. It's the kind of book you can read during TV
commercials and easily finish in an evening without going to sleep.
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The book is unabashedly political in
the broad sense. If the current administration is at the core of his illustrations
it is only because he writes, as a good humorist should, about things going
on right now.
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Vonnegut’s quarrel with our society is
not new born. He's been consistent all his years.
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The face pages for each new chapter are
truisms of sort, typically Vonnegut. For instance,
“EVOLUTION IS SO CREATIVE, THAT'S HOW WE GOT GIRAFFES”
Or,
“THE HIGHEST TREASON IN THE USA TODAY IS TO SAY AMERICANS ARE NOT LOVED,
NO MATTER WHERE THEY ARE, NO MATTER WHAT THEY ARE DOING THERE”
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Here is part of pages 7 and 8:
Do you realize that all great literature
─ Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, A Farewell to Arms, Scarlet Letter, The Red badge of Courage, the
Iliad and The Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible, and The Charge of
the Light Brigade ─ are all about what a bummer it is to be a human being?
Isn't it such a relief to have someone say that?
Evolution
can go to hell as far as I am concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally
wounded this
sweet
life-supporting planet ─ the only one in the Milky Way ─ with a century of
transportation whoopee. Our government is conducting a war against drugs,
is it? Let them go after petroleum. Talk about a destructive high!
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The reader will get smatterings of history
with recognition of many of the big names along the way.
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He comes back to things that bug him,
like when he goes back to oil which he calls
The most abused, addictive, and destructive
drugs of all: fossil fuels… Here’s what I think the truth is: we are all addicts
of fossil fuels in a state of denial. 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. (p.42)
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Mr. V is still working the stand up comedian
routines, planting the truth so straight that people laugh.
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Comedians exaggerate, of course, but
it's all the more true because of it
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…. 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. (p.100)
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In case he hasn't been clear about what
he really thinks, maybe this will do it:
Unlike normal people they (PPs) are
never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they don't give a F…
what happens next. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize public
schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes
on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! F…. habeas corpus and
the Sierra Club and In these Times, and kiss my Ass! Only nut cases want to
be president. (p.101)
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To the end of the book he despairs of
human management of the planet his words in “Requiem”:
When the last living thing has died
on account of us, how poetical it would if earth could say, in a voice floating
up perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon, “It is done.” People didn't
like it here. (p.137)
— Art Morgan, December 2005
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