Kurt Vonnegut - A Requiem for the USA

[phorbesie]

ublished on Sunday, February 5, 2006 by The Sunday Herald (Scotland)

Kurt Vonnegut: A Requiem for the USA

'All the other species are dying and so will we. I’m whistling as I walk past the graveyard... whistling as beautifully as I can'

Kurt Vonnegut is dwelling on the apocalypse. It’s not that his omelette isn’t good. It’s not that his mood is downcast, but for the third time over lunch in Manhattan, America’s funniest and most pessimistic novelist is explaining why he will welcome the end of the world. “I don’t like life very much for what it does to other people,†he says. This is by no means the most depressing statement he makes between starter and main course, but somehow, by the time we leave the restaurant I feel inspired and full of hope.

Taken at face value, Vonnegut’s worldview is appallingly bleak. He tells me that “all the other species are dying and so will weâ€. He argues that almost everybody is “humiliated, frustrated, terribly disappointedâ€, and compares life to an enforced spell in the army lasting 80 years instead of three. An hour in the company of such an acutely-aware Eeyore could be dispiriting, were it not for his belief in the redemptive power of creativity and his endless capacity for jokes. “I’m whistling as I walk past the graveyard,†he admits, “and I’m whistling as beautifully as I can.â€

A Man Without A Country has been presented as Vonnegut’s final testament, eight years after he announced that he would never publish again. It contains many familiar themes, some old gags, and several passages lifted verbatim from previous essays and speeches, most of which first appeared in the left-wing magazine In These Times. He credits his publisher, Daniel Simon, with “doing for me what Jesus did for Lazarusâ€.

“I was so dead I stank,†he continues, “I’m as surprised as anyone to be back at the age of 83 and I’m embarrassed to have lived so long. I was in a house-fire some years ago and it would have been much more tasteful to have died back then.â€

For all the references to his advanced years, and his continued loyalty to unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes, Vonnegut is in remarkably good health. His wheezing laugh, the tar-pit depths of his baritone and the occasional coughing fit testify to 70 years of smoking, but he doesn’t light up. In New York, even literary icons must keep their habit at home. A glass of wine is declined because “it hits me too hard these daysâ€.

It has often been remarked that as he grows older, Vonnegut increasingly resembles Mark Twain, one of his heroes. The curls are tighter and darker, the moustache less pronounced, and despite his frailty he looks younger than Twain in his declining years, even though Huckleberry Finn’s creator never saw 75. The picture on the front cover of the new book, taken by his second wife, the renowned photographer, Jill Krementz, is a good one. “It’s a good face, fer chrissakes,†cackles Vonnegut.

Manners are important to him, and he regrets their passing. He is unfailingly courteous, and once wrote that if he dined with Richard Nixon’s defence secretary, he would discuss global annihilation with a smile. If promoting a new book is a chore, it never shows. He tells the waitress: “This place is great … I eat less than this on Thanksgiving.â€

And so on.

Born in Indianapolis in 1922, Kurt Vonnegut Jr was encouraged to believe that once the Great Depression was over, technological advances would ensure prosperity for all. His father, an architect, insisted that he should become a scientist like his brother. “What actually happened,†he recalls in his collected speeches, “was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima. We killed everybody there.â€

As he had recently experienced his mother’s suicide, fought in the second world war and witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden as a captive of the German army, he decided, not unreasonably, that there was no longer much cause for optimism. “I predicted that everything would become worse,†he says, “and everything has become worse.â€

In 1958, Vonnegut’s sister Alice died of cancer the day after her husband John was killed in a train crash. Vonnegut and his first wife adopted their three children. They already had three of their own.

“I try to be truthful,†he continues, “My God, after the Holocaust isn’t it time we gave up as a species? After the first world war wasn’t it time we gave up? We’re perfectly awful animals and we’re intelligent enough to know about it.â€

This dim view of humanity permeates Vonnegut’s fiction, without ever becoming corrosive, thanks to an endless parade of wild ideas, elegantly constructed comic set-pieces and cheap one-liners. Slaughterhouse Five, widely regarded as his definitive statement, views the horrors of Dresden through the eyes of a man who has become unstuck in time. Billy Pilgrim leaps from 1950s America to the planet Tralfamadore and back to Dresden again, a device Vonnegut describes as “the equivalent of [shakespeare] bringing on the clowns every so often to lighten things upâ€.

Writing it was a painful experience lasting more than 20 years, and by the end all he felt able to conclude was: “I’ve finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun. This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt.â€

The novel has been a staple of US high school reading lists for three decades now, but Vonnegut’s work remains under- appreciated next to his avant-garde peers Thomas Pynchon, John Barth and William Gaddis. For too long, critics and academics stacked all science-fiction with the trash, assuming that books thousands of teenagers were enjoying on their own time did not merit serious consideration.

That stigma has faded, but there is still a sense that Vonnegut is both too whimsical and too accessible for America’s literary custodians, an issue he has himself addressed, writing that “clarity looks a lot like laziness and ignorance and childishness and cheapness to them. Any idea which can be grasped immediately is for them, by definition, something they knew all the timeâ€.

In A Man Without A Country, Vonnegut plays with this notion that he has been cheated of due recognition, claiming that he hasn’t been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature because he once ran a Saab dealership that went bust and consequently bad-mouthed the Swedes. “I think it was great that Pinter won,†he says “and it was a fine speech. Perhaps as a result of this book they’ll give me one too. I just need to make it to October and I get a million dollars.†He’s kidding, although his publisher points out that his work is always translated into Swedish, just to make sure it doesn’t slip past the Nobel committee.

If there is a lingering hunger for acceptance, Vonnegut hides it well. “I’m just the asshole who broke the bank at Monte Carlo,†he says, and if it’s a well-worn line, he seems ready enough to believe it. “Listen, I have no idea how it happens,†he continues. “There are plenty of artists that have no idea how they did it. I don’t think any of us know what we are. I seem to have had a destiny, so I did it.

“Beethoven died shaking his fist at God because all this music was still pouring out of him. I don’t know how the hell I did it. What people say is they’re possessed, and I suspect that we’re more possessible than we realise. Something just takes over.â€

Vonnegut has threatened to quit several times. Long before he formally declared that Timequake would be his last book, in 1997, he was fond of reminding people that of all the great writers only Tolstoy produced his best work after 45. Is there not some slim chance that he will be possessed again?

“I don’t care,†he answers, “I don’t think it would be particularly good news. I feel like I’ve fulfilled my destiny. I’m completely in print. I’ve been allowed to say everything I’ve wanted to say. I’ve said that this country needs another novel the way the world needs another Sistine Chapel or another Beethoven’s Ninth.â€

As to what the country does need, Vonnegut is less sure. His last book, if it is his last, is an excoriating attack on modern American society in all its greed and stupidity, but there is no pay-off or conclusion. It ends not with a revolution but with a requiem.

Vonnegut’s contempt for George Bush and his government is expressed with great force and clarity in A Man Without A Country, but his feelings of alienation from his homeland are nothing new. In 1972 he covered the Republican Convention for Harper’s Magazine, describing Nixon as “the first president to hate American people and all they stand forâ€. It was there he concluded that the USA’s two party system is one of winners and losers, rather than Democrats and Republicans, and the winners win no matter who gets into office. This being so, surely there is some consolation in the fact that the current president is such a ripe satirical target?

“I suppose so,†he acknowledges, “but the country is terribly at risk, because his stupidities have terrible consequences, leading to deaths of many people, rotten schools, rotten healthcare. He should be protecting us not only from insurgents or terrorists but from disease and ignorance, and he’s not about to do either.

“Still, there’s not much difference. [Democratic candidate, John] Kerry said out of the side of his mouth at one point that he’s not for re-distributing wealth. He and George Bush belong to the same social class, went to the same university, belong to the same gentleman’s club. Can you believe that, in a country of 300 million people, we have to choose between two members of Skull & Bones [a secret society] at Yale?â€

Vonnegut votes Democrat, but describes himself as socialist, in the tradition of Carl Sandburg, Eugene Victor Debs and Powers Hapgood. Does he find it troubling that there is no socialist party of note in the US, that historians of the right can claim that the left has demonstrably failed?

“They have socialised medicine in Sweden and Canada, I wish to God we had it,†he answers, “there are socialist experiments going on everywhere. In the Communist Manifesto, what they demanded was free education and free healthcare. One of the most beneficial social experiments in this country was the GI Bill Of Rights – when we came home we could all go to college for free.â€

Last week, George Bush used his annual State Of The Union address to declare that his government is meeting its responsibility to provide healthcare for the poor and the elderly and spearheading a global quest for peace. Vonnegut’s stump speech states the opposite. In the land of his internal exile, corporate profiteers rule unchecked, extended families have been split into desperately vulnerable nuclear groups, “lethal injection and warfare are forms of entertainment†and Americans are “as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis once wereâ€.

When challenged about this last statement, Vonnegut repeats that US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and vice- president Dick Cheney are “jut-jawed, like Nazis†and argues that the main difference is that the Germans were justly feared for their military prowess.

“We have no army,†he says, “What makes us the most powerful nation on Earth is our willingness to kill people in their thousands with remote-controlled missiles, the fact that we’re prepared to set off nuclear explosions in the middle of unarmed people – men, women and children.

“Only one country has been crazy enough to set off a nuke in the middle of a civilian population. Did it twice, and that’s when members of my generation, soldiers, could see that ‘we’re not the good guys any more’. We were very careful not to hurt civilians.â€

In his rage and despair he invokes the true guardians of America’s soul, quoting from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address and Christ’s Sermon On The Mount. For a confirmed humanist, he mentions the Beatitudes surprisingly often, arguing that the President’s fundamentalist friends have forgotten the meek, the merciful, and the peacemakers.

Vonnegut once observed that he was at his funniest two days after Martin Luther King Jr was shot, because he was speaking to an audience “full of pain that they couldn’t do anything about … there was an enormous need to either laugh or cryâ€.

The punchline count is high in A Man Without A Country, as it has been in every one of his novels. On the first page he explains that, as the youngest child in a family of five, making jokes was the only way to get noticed in adult conversation. Reporting on the fall of Biafra in 1970, he noticed he still cracked wise as the Nigerian army approached, writing that “joking was my response to misery I couldn’t do anything aboutâ€.

Crucially, it has not been his only reflex. What elevates his work above gallows humour and exposes him as an idealist in pessimist’s clothing is his palpable compassion and the way in which he appeals to his readers’ better natures. “Practising any art is a way to make your soul grow,†he writes, and it is clear that this has been his own salvation. As we speak, he raises a glass : “To the arts.â€

Later, when the food arrives, Vonnegut talks about the teacher who inspired him, James C Bean, reminding me that “the Great Depression was going on, and there were no good jobs, so it was a wonderful break to get to be a teacher or a mailman. Some of the best and smartest people in Indianapolis were teaching in school.

“All it takes is one great teacher,†he continues, and though he would never be so conceited as to admit it, he has evidently been that teacher, for his seven children, for students at various American universities, and for three generations of science-fiction fans.

What he has consistently taught is that art alone can rescue his homeland, through a series of personal revolutions. This belief in the transformative power of creativity is expressed beautifully in the preface to Wampeters, Foma, & Granfalloons (Opinions). “I now believe,†he writes, “that the only way in which Americans can rise above their ordinariness, can mature sufficiently to rescue themselves and to help rescue the planet, is through enthusiastic intimacy with works of their own imaginations.

“I am not especially satisfied with my own imaginative works, my fiction. I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth.â€

At 83, Vonnegut has been convinced by a publisher from his children’s generation that his last task is to tell the truth. He has decided that the proximity of environmental catastrophe will probably make him unfunny for the rest of his life. He is unrepentant in his pessimism, and he wishes he wasn’t a writer. He wishes, as he has always wished, that he was a musician.

“Music gives pleasure as we never can,†he reasons. “I’ve said that the purpose of the arts is to make people like life more than they had done before, and people ask me if I’ve seen this done and I say, ‘Yes, the Beatles did it’ – it was an amazing event.â€

In Breakfast Of Champions, Vonnegut’s satirical take on the madness of consumer society, science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout longs to be seen as “a representative of all the thousands of artists who devoted their entire lives to a search for truth and beauty – and didn’t find doodley-squatâ€. It is his master’s voice. Vonnegut’s lifetime of searching has left him weary, and he is reluctant to claim much credit for the wonders he has unlocked for millions of readers.

After lunch, as he climbs into the back of a waiting car, he offers this parting shot: “Remember, I don’t know how I did it.â€

05 February 2006

© 2006 newsquest (sunday herald) limited

[timouse]

what a great read...thanks for posting this! thanks to mr vonnegut and phorbesie i have a new signature

what a very humble man he is...and witrh everything he knows and thinks about, still optomistic (in his own way).

[fluffhead77]

great article...thanks

[Hal Johnson]

Kurt Vonnegut convinced me to never quit smoking. Its true.

[bokonon]

yep, you gotta love Vonnegut. I find that people either really enjoy his work or say they just don't get it. I don't understand how anyone could not comprehend him, he writes plainly and clearly.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Thanks for that, Phorbesie! Gives me an excuse for never not pursuing writing more aggressively .

“Music gives pleasure as we never can,†he reasons. “I’ve said that the purpose of the arts is to make people like life more than they had done before, and people ask me if I’ve seen this done and I say, ‘Yes, the Beatles did it’ – it was an amazing event.â€

[SmoothedShredder]

What he has consistently taught is that art alone can rescue his homeland, through a series of personal revolutions. This belief in the transformative power of creativity is expressed beautifully in the preface to Wampeters, Foma, & Granfalloons (Opinions). “I now believe,†he writes, “that the only way in which Americans can rise above their ordinariness, can mature sufficiently to rescue themselves and to help rescue the planet, is through enthusiastic intimacy with works of their own imaginations.

I agree whole heartedly on this point. Though it's not absolute, atleast there are huge pockets of Artisans in the States, and hope is not lost.

[phorbesie]

And here's an excerpt from his new book!

Published on Sunday, February 5, 2006 by the Sunday Herald (Scotland)

Vonnegut's Blues for America

by Kurt Vonnegut

No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED

FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

WAS MUSIC

Now, during our catastrophically idiotic war in Vietnam, the music kept getting better and better and better. We lost that war, by the way. Order couldn’t be restored in Indochina until the people kicked us out.

That war only made billionaires out of millionaires. Today’s war is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress.

And how come the people in countries we invade can’t fight like ladies and gentlemen, in uniform and with tanks and helicopter gunships?

Back to music. It makes practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without it. Even military bands, although I am a pacifist, always cheer me up. And I really like Strauss and Mozart and all that, but the priceless gift that African Americans gave the whole world when they were still in slavery was a gift so great that it is now almost the only reason many foreigners still like us at least a little bit. That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues. All pop music today – jazz, swing, be-bop, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Stones, rock-and-roll, hip-hop, and on and on – is derived from the blues.

A gift to the world? One of the best rhythm-and-blues combos I ever heard was three guys and a girl from Finland playing in a club in Krakow, Poland.

The wonderful writer Albert Murray, who is a jazz historian and a friend of mine among other things, told me that during the era of slavery in this country – an atrocity from which we can never fully recover – the suicide rate per capita among slave owners was much higher than the suicide rate among slaves.

Murray says he thinks this was because slaves had a way of dealing with depression, which their white owners did not: They could shoo away Old Man Suicide by playing and singing the Blues. He says something else which also sounds right to me. He says the blues can’t drive depression clear out of a house, but can drive it into the corners of any room where it’s being played. So please remember that.

Foreigners love us for our jazz. And they don’t hate us for our purported liberty and justice for all. They hate us now for our arrogance.

When I went to grade school in Indian apolis, the James Whitcomb Riley School #43, we used to draw pictures of houses of tomorrow, boats of tomorrow, airplanes of tomorrow, and there were all these dreams for the future. Of course at that time everything had come to a stop. The factories had stopped, the Great Depression was on, and the magic word was Prosperity. Sometime Prosperity will come. We were preparing for it. We were dreaming of the sorts of houses human beings should inhabit – ideal dwellings, ideal forms of transportation.

What is radically new today is that my daughter, Lily, who has just turned 21, finds herself, as do your children, as does George W Bush, himself a kid, and Saddam Hussein and on and on, heir to a shockingly recent history of human slavery, to an Aids epidemic, and to nuclear submarines slumbering on the floors of fjords in Iceland and elsewhere, crews prepared at a moment’s notice to turn industrial quantities of men, women, and children into radioactive soot and bone meal by means of rockets and H-bomb warheads. Our children have inherited technologies whose by-products, whether in war or peace, are rapidly destroying the whole planet as a breathable, drinkable system for supporting life of any kind.

Anyone who has studied science and talks to scientists notices that we are in terrible danger now. Human beings, past and present, have trashed the joint.

The biggest truth to face now – what is probably making me unfunny now for the remainder of my life – is that I don’t think people give a damn whether the planet goes on or not. It seems to me as if everyone is living as members of Alcoholics Anonymous do, day by day. And a few more days will be enough. I know of very few people who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren.

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.

Human beings have had to guess about almost everything for the past million years or so. The leading characters in our history books have been our most enthralling, and sometimes our most terrifying, guessers.

May I name two of them? Aristotle and Hitler.

One good guesser and one bad one.

And the masses of humanity through the ages, feeling inadequately educated just like we do now, and rightly so, have had little choice but to believe this guesser or that one.

Russians who didn’t think much of the guesses of Ivan the Terrible, for example, were likely to have their hats nailed to their heads.

We must acknowledge that persuasive guessers, even Ivan the Terrible, now a hero in the Soviet Union, have sometimes given us the courage to endure extraordinary ordeals which we had no way of understanding. Crop failures, plagues, eruptions of volcanoes, babies being born dead – the guessers often gave us the illusion that bad luck and good luck were understandable and could somehow be dealt with intelligently and effectively. Without that illusion, we all might have surrendered long ago.

But the guessers, in fact, knew no more than the common people and sometimes less, even when, or especially when, they gave us the illusion that we were in control of our destinies.

Persuasive guessing has been at the core of leadership far 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 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 solid information that has been dumped on humanity by research and scholarship and investigative reporting. They think that the whole country is sick of it, and they could be right. It isn’t the gold standard that they want to put us back on. They want something even more basic. They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard.

Loaded pistols are good for everyone except inmates in prisons or lunatic asylums.

That’s correct.

Millions spent on public health are inflationary.

That’s correct.

Billions spent on weapons will bring inflation down.

That’s correct.

Dictatorships to the right are much closer to American ideals than dictatorships to the left.

That’s correct.

The more hydrogen bomb warheads we have, all set to go off at a moment’s notice, the safer humanity is and the better off the world will be that our grandchildren will inherit.

That’s correct.

Industrial wastes, and especially those that are radioactive, hardly ever hurt anybody, so everybody should shut up about them.

That’s correct.

Industries should be allowed to do whatever they want to do: bribe, wreck the environment just a little, fix prices, screw dumb customers, put a stop to competition, and raid the Treasury when they go broke.

That’s correct.

That’s free enterprise.

And that’s correct.

The poor have done something very wrong or they wouldn’t be poor, so their children should pay the consequences.

That’s correct.

The United States of America cannot be expected to look after its own people.

That’s correct.

The free market will do that.

That’s correct.

The free market is an automatic system of justice.

That’s correct.

I’m kidding.

And if you actually are an educated, thinking person, you will not be welcome in Washington, DC. I know a couple of bright seventh graders who would not be welcome in Washington, DC. Do you remember those doctors a few months back who got together and announced that it was a simple, clear medical fact that we could not survive even a moderate attack by hydrogen bombs? They were not welcome in Washington, DC.

Even if we fired the first salvo of hydrogen weapons and the enemy never fired back, the poisons released would probably kill the whole planet by and by.

What is the response in Washington? They guess otherwise. What good is an education? The boisterous guessers are still in charge – the haters of information. And the guessers are almost all highly educated people. Think of that. They have had to throw away their educations, even Harvard or Yale educations.

If they didn’t do that, there is no way their uninhibited guessing could go on and on and on. Please, don’t you do that. But if you make use of the vast fund of knowledge now available to educated persons, you are going to be lonesome as hell. The guessers outnumber you – and now I have to guess – about 10 to one.

I’m going to tell you some news.

No, I am not running for President, although I do know that a sentence, if it is to be complete, must have both a subject and a verb.

Nor will I confess that I sleep with children. I will say this, though: My wife is by far the oldest person I ever slept with.

Here’s the news: I am going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, manufacturers of Pall Mall cigarettes, for a billion bucks! Starting when I was only 12 years old, I have never chain-smoked anything but unfiltered Pall Malls. And for many years now, right on the package, Brown and Williamson have promised to kill me.

But I am now 82. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.

Our government’s got a war on drugs. That’s certainly a lot better than no drugs at all. That’s what was said about prohibition. Do you realise that from 1919 to 1933 it was absolutely against the law to manufacture, transport, or sell alcoholic beverages, and the Indiana newspaper humourist Ken Hubbard said: “Prohibition is better than no liquor at all.â€

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 40. 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.

About my own history of foreign substance abuse, I’ve been a coward about heroin and cocaine, 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 licence – 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, addictive, and destructive drugs of all: fossil fuels.

When you got here, even when I got here, the industrialised world was already hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there won’t be any left. Cold turkey.

Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn’t the TV news is it? 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.

I turned 82 on November 11, 2004. What’s it like to be this old? I can’t parallel park worth a damn any more, so please don’t watch while I try to do it. And gravity has become a lot less friendly and manageable than it used to be.

When you get to my age, if you get to my age, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged: “What is life all about?’†I have seven kids, three of them orphaned nephews.

I put my big question about life to my son the pediatrician. Dr Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.â€

Extracted from A Man Without A Country: A Memoir Of Life In George W Bush’s America, (Bloomsbury).

© 2006 The Sunday Herald

[Davey Boy 2.0]

Vonnegut's a hero and I'm constantly amazed at how concisely he voices my views on so many subjects

The world running out of oil (some say within 100 years) seems to me to be the planet's one Big Hope. The freedom with which have been travelling all over the globe for the last half century or so might turn out to be one of the most unique characteristics of our time.