Vonnegut’s last essays sing (and sting) for today

A couple weekends ago I faced a low-key dilemma: What’s my next book to read? The one I finished was selected by my 12-year old daughter. 

See, I’ve resolved to read at least one book per year from the “genre” of her age group. Last year, it was a ghost story, “The Ghost of Drowned Meadow,” which was set in an east-coast town with a dark Nazi past—that part was true, which grounded the mystery in teachable fact around the haunting of a young girl’s new home while she navigated the rigors of being the new kid in town. To my shock, I still think about that book and that disturbing bit of real-life history. 

The book I just finished was a prequel to the “Wings of Fire” books series. “Wings of Fire,” you ask? Let me tell you a bit. Apparently, there’s a planet out there that’s home to dragons who are smart and can cook when they don’t feel like snacking on a live beast. They have divided themselves into tribes and have themselves alliances and wars and all that stuff (sound familiar?). I could read this prequel, my kid said, without feeling obligated to read the 15 or so books in the series. The story was about Darkstalker, born about 2,000 years before the start of the first book in the series. He’s a young dragon born with immense genetic gifts that could wreak havoc on dragon society, or help out. Not a bad fella early on, he gets thinking he knows best because of all these gifts. Well, you can guess how that goes. 

“Did you get to the disembowelment yet?” my dear sweet daughter asked as she noticed I was a certain depth into the book. “Don’t ruin it for me, kid,” I said with a sigh (she’s a great spoiler of stories). As I closed the book after the last page, I was left wondering what might have happened had Darkstalker’s parents named him Sunshine.

My tour on the dragon planet complete, I was allowed to decide for myself what book to read. Given the state of the country—and the world—I’d been thinking lately about Kurt Vonnegut. I figured I needed a dose of his acerbic, dark humor that’s conveyed in laconic prose that reads as nimble as a lemur casually navigating a tree canopy. 

The many bookshelves in our house are organized to no principle whatsoever. Weak efforts were made over the years (most photo books can be found over there, but, there are some over there, too). But the fiction and nonfiction? Please. They’re everywhere. Alphabetized? That’s insane. We saved that energy for the CD collection, contained to that single wall in the guest bedroom. 

Fortunately, from where I sat on the couch, I could see a Vonnegut book, laying on top of a random pile stacked askew in front of the row of books appropriately lined up like good soldiers on one of the lower shelves of the bookcase. It was his last collection of essays from 2005 (he died two years later), “A Man Without A Country.” “I believe I read that,” I thought to myself, as I reached long to grab the book. I flipped through, my eyes stopping at pages along the way to jog my memory. Bits and pieces flashed, but, I thought, it’s been 20 years—nothing clearly recalled. Anyway. The title fit my mood. I dug in right then and there. And, oh my, dark were Mr. Vonnegut’s thoughts at that time. Take this bit: 

“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 becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us 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 lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.”

Oof. Vonnegut, a WWII veteran who had seen much death, railed against the Bush administration and the Iraq war, and made note of how that administration often did its best to twist that criticism of the war into an accusation of criticism against the troops fighting it. Which, of course, it wasn’t.

Sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it? Except these days, any criticisms of the current administration’s policies—heck, even questioning—is aggressively twisted by those in the administration (top to bottom) into the accusation of anti-Americanism. Many essays in Vonnegut’s book one could simply swap a reference or two and one would think he had risen from the grave to update the collection. It’s to his credit as a writer that, much like Mark Twain, his essays still sing in the current times. On I read.

Vonnegut is an economical scribe; the book’s a breeze at about 140 pages. As I started typing up this here past-due review, a few things happened. Namely, another politically-motivated murder in the span of three months. Unlike with the first murder (Melissa Hortman, the former DFL House Speaker in Minnesota), the second (Charlie Kirk, right-wing provocateur) generated blame and demonization of an entire political party, and anyone who dared look critically (read, honestly) at the rhetoric Kirk espoused—and the demonization spouted volcanically from the tippy-top of the current administration. That’s in contrast to what used to happen: leaders trying to calm and unify by highlighting our better impulses. 

I’m not diving into all that in this piece. I do have thoughts, of course, but, as of this posting date, events continue to evolve and accumulate at a rapid pace. I will say, however, what should be obvious: No one should be murdered for speech, however misinformed or hateful it might be. Nor should anyone be murdered for being a leader within a political party, diligently serving their constituents. And no swathe of a population should be painted with blame for an individual’s actions. 

As these events occurred and piled on each other, along with recent senate hearings with administration leadership regarding the chaos they have sowed, the relevance of Vonnegut’s prose from two decades past kept burbling in my frontal lobes: 

“Persuasive guessing has been at the core of leadership for so long, for all of human experience so far, that it is wholly unsurprising that most of the leaders of this planet, in spite of all the information that is suddenly ours, want the guessing to go on. It is now their turn to guess and be listened to. Some of the loudest, most proudly ignorant guessing in the world is going on in Washington today. Our leaders are sick of all the information that has been dumped on humanity by research and scholarship and investigative reporting. They think the whole country is sick of it, and they could be right. It isn’t the gold standard they want to put us back on. They want something even more basic. They want us back on the snake-oil standard.”

And this: 

“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!”

And, glaringly, this:

“What has allowed so many PPs (psychopathic personalities) 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 they don’t give a fuck what happens next. Simply can’t.”

Sigh. Here we are. Again. It must have been terribly disappointing to Vonnegut (and to others who fought in and survived WWII) to feel like the clock was turning backward to inequality and a kind of authoritarianism—not just here, but abroad. 

Fortunately the book is not a relentless downer—it can’t be, because Vonnegut can’t help but be funny. His sentimentality is also on full display, and, as much as he tries to hide it, conveys his optimism. 

While poking fun at his chosen path in the less-than-financially-secure arts, he is generous in praise for the choice to make art:

“The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

He fought his demons, too. Responding to one fan letter, a young woman who had just given birth to her child, was searching for optimism. Vonnegut wasn’t feeling any such thing; his impulse was to ask why anyone would want to bring a child into this world, but, wisely, refrained. Instead, he found an honest way he could give comfort: “… I replied that what made being alive almost worthwhile for me, besides music, was all the saints I met, who could be anywhere. By saints I meant people who behaved decently in a strikingly indecent society.”

The Vonnegut lesson I am holding onto in these times is a simple one, that can be had anywhere. Vonnegut recalled his late Uncle Alex, who was “an honest life-insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’

“So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’”

I have already made a point of making this observation at least once since finishing the book. And it feels good. Perhaps if we all could manage more of that, and less staring at our screens, we might stumble into a little bit of calm sanity.