I read A Man Without a Country back when it came out, 2005.  Vonnegut died soon after, April, 2017,  so he never had the pleasure of seeing the country right itself briefly to elect Obama, or the sheer terrifying hull-down dive under Trump.  For any Vonnegut fans, or even those who just vaguely know his name, this is not his humor, but his cry.

Title: A Man Without A County
Author: Kurt Vonnegut
Translator:
Publisher:  Seven Stories Press
Date of Original Copyright: 2005
Date of Current Copyright:
Date of Translation Copyright:

 

A series of short not even essays by the aging Vonnegut, more wrenched than ever by what he is seeing.  The opening epitaph sets the tone:

“There is no reason good can’t triumph over evil, if only angels will get organized along the lines of the mafia.”

1)  On humor. Humor from being the youngest. Life was great during his growing up years. Humor is physiological reaction to fear. He tries not to offend. Bob Hope was superficial; Laurel and Hardy were great: too sweet to survive and always in terrible danger…  Even in the bombing of Dresden there was humor. (As the bombs were falling, one of KV’s friends said, “I wonder how the poor people are doing tonight.” (5)

2) On “twerpiness”

Lists the great books:  (All about what a bummer it is to be a human being..)

• Occurrence at Owl Creek” by Ambrose Bierce
• Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville
• Moby Dick
• Huckleberry Finn
• A Farewell to Arms
• The Scarlet Letter
• The Red Badge of Courage
• The Iliad
• The Odyssey
• Crime And Punishment
• The Bible
• “The Charge of the Light Brigade”

“Great Lakes people.” Brief paean to socialism and uneducated working men, including Carl Sandburg and Abraham Lincoln.  Freshwater people – Great Lakes.  “Socialism is no more an evil word than Christianity…proposition that all men, women and children are equal and shall not starve. (11)  Admires Debs.  “Religion is the opium of the people” was not a dictum but an observation, in a day when opium was one of the few narcotics available; Marx himself had taken it.

Why it took him 23 years to write Slaughterhouse Five:  (Dresden  Feb 13, 1945  to 1968) Because war is unspeakable; because not saying is a way of saying.  Vietnam war freed him to write it. (19-20)

Bernie O’Hare and his wife – “You were such babies…” (Also in his intro to Slaughterhouse 5”)

3) On Writing.  Don’t use semicolons.  I’ll tell you when I’m kidding  (Join the army.  I’m kidding.)  If you really want to hurt your parents…be an artist.  (24)  Draws Cartesian diagram for storytelling.  Vertical is Good – Evil.  Horizontal is Beginning End.  Start high, dip low, end high.(25)  And other variations. (Tongue in cheek, but semi serious.)

Applies his graph technique to Kafka and to Hamlet. (33-34) Interesting precis of the two.

“We know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.” (37)

4) News. He’s never slept with children; he’s not running for president; he’s not an alcoholic. He is addicted to cigarettes and he’s suing the tobacco companies because it hasn’t killed him yet and he doesn’t want to be around for what is coming.  True addiction is to fossil fuel.  “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.”  (42)

…here’s the truth: We have squandered our planet’s resources, including air and water, as though there were no tomorrow, so now there isn’t going to be one.” (44)

5) On families, and extension and connectedness.  “What do women want?  They want to talk…”  His friend in the Ibo.  The Bushes.  Brief note on German Americans and Anglo Americans  and the fault line – appeared during the Civil War with new German immigration…  Getting fainter, but still there…

6) Luddites.  I welcome being called one.  The typewriter was my loom. (56)   Long description of how he used to get his manuscripts out. (Interesting but only in a personal way.) I guess the point of telling the story is in the closing sentence: “How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something.  We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.” (62)

7) On aging. He tuned 82 on November 11, 2004.  Gravity is getting harder to manage.  What is life about?  

“We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”

No matter how greedy the corporations…etc. there will always be music.  During the idiotic war in Vietnam the music kept getting better and better…  Vietnam made billionaires out of millionaires…  Music: especially the blues.   Can’t drive it out of the house, but can put it in the corners of the room….  They don’t hate us for our liberty and freedom…they hate us for our arrogance…(69)

When I went to school we drew pictures of homes of the future, progress.   Now we think about aids, nuclear submarines… “Anybody 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.” (70) (He is pretty depressed here – not funny, as he says.)

I used to be so naïve, even fighting in WW II I believed in peace.  “But I  know now that there is not a chance in hell of American become humane and reasonable.  Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely.  Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power.” (71)  Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address the most intelligent and decent prayer ever uttered…. (72)

The theory in play by those who believe in killing industrial quantities of defenseless human beings is that the leaders of those people will be overcome with weepiness and give up.  Don’t think it works… (74)

KV Recalls Mark Twain on the massacre of 600 Moros during the “liberation of the Philippines .Recalls Lincoln’s opposition to Polk’s war against Mexico. (75)

8) Do you know what a humanist is?  KV is a humanist  — trying to be decent and kind and good without any hope of an afterlife.  Is president of American Humanist Association, following Isaac Asimov.  Joked after his dead: Issac is in heaven now.  Rolled ‘em in the aisles.  (80)

Throughout human history we have had to guess at causes of what happens to us.  Now, with a lot better knowledge our leadership wants to keep on guessing.  KV lists all sorts of claims:  Millions spent on healthcare are inflationary…  Billions spent on defense are deflationary… (82)  The free market is an automatic system of justice.  

Because of fraudulent election we now present ourselves as the jut-jawed unopposed war lovers.  We kill and we torture.  We send out lower class soldiers out to war.  I am a man without a country….  Even the good old NY Times guaranteed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Einstein and Twain gave up on the human race at the ends of their lives and Twain hadn’t even seen WW I.

What can be said to our young people now that psychopathic personalities which is to say persons without conscience, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations, and made it all their own? (89)

Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor is KV’s hero – an obstetrician who observed that women in childbirth were dying and linked possibly to doctors coming straight from the dissecting rooms. He suggested they wash their hands, and was mocked for doing so.  Eventually they played along and the dying stopped…  Semmelweis nevertheless was mocked out of the hospital, and eventually took his own life. (This seems not to be true.  He was incarcerated in an insane asylum – perhaps due to dementia, and died of injuries from beatings by hospital personnel  according to Wikipedia…  Also, recall Semmelweis Reflex– rejection of new information on no grounds whatsoever. Made popular by Timothy Leary but apparently coined by Robert Anton Wilson.)

9) Do unto others as you would have them do unto you –not Jesus but Confucius;  (excursion into China gunpowder…and  “back then people didn’t know about the other hemisphere… “  KV sometimes wishes we were still “that dumb”  He doesn’t like the H bomb or the Jerry Springer show…)  Back to Jesus and Confucius and KV’s son Mark – treat each other better and life would be less painful.  Cites Eugene Debs  who ran for president 4 times,  Cites his “As long as there is a soul in prison I am not free.”  Neither this nor the Beatitudes is part of the Republican party plank.

Why is it that vocal Christians demand that the 10 commandments be posted in public and never demand that the Beatitudes be posted? (98)

I feel like the US – for which I fought in a just war – has been take over by psychopathic personalities  PPs  — people who present well but have no conscience.  My idea for a scary reality TV show – C – Students from Yale…Read The Mask of Sanity, about PPs

PPs run Enron and WorldCom.  And many in the government.  Why? Because they are decisive and they don’t care if their actions hurt others.. (101)

Recommends Craig Unger’s House of Bush, House of Saud.  Only in books – not in the news – do we see what is going on…  Praises librarians for standing up to the Administration.

10) Woman asks KV if she should bring a child into the world.  No!  but, yes  what makes life great, besides the music, is all the saints he meets.  To another: the only rule is you’ve got to be kind.(106)  Reminisces about the practical jokes of having to have our shoes x-rayed but the best being Abbie Hoffman announcing that banana peels taken rectally were a world-class high.  Quotes some letter writers about the stupidity of Americans and then recommends Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger, 1898 that Satan not God created earth, “and the damned human race”.(112)

11) Good News.  Good news is that the Martians have landed.  Bad news is they only eat the homeless and pee gasoline…  Gasoline is great: put some in an airplane and you can drop all kinds of crap on Arabs.  Put some in school buses and you can get the kids to school… But seriously … KV has been working on a novel, “If God were alive today,” about a stand up comedian as the world is coming to an end.  Denouncing fossil fuels, pushers in White House, and sex… (118)  Strikes a Billy Pilgrim note, asking how we can be so sure that time, as we measure and label it is that – that each second stays immutable forever.  Perhaps  WW II caused WW I’ perhaps Mozart was just plagiarizing from the future.

Writes his agent that he (KV) is going on Orange Alert – Bush’s State of the Union is on.

Cites George Bernard Shaw: “I don’t know if there are men on the moon, but if there are they must be using the earth as their lunatic asylum.” (Couldn’t find the source in GBS but it appears attributed to him often on the internet.)]

We are killing this planet and its life support system … it is trying to get rid of us, with Aids, new strains of flu etc

12)  Funny little squib about KV once being a Saab seller and coming to speak ill of Swedish engineering, thus denying him the Nobel Prize. (125)

Humor is hard to do — like building a mouse trap: it’s got to snap.  Tragedy works as long as all the elements are there.  Michael Frayn, who wrote the Tin Men, got serious and lost his humor… “Humor is a way of holding off how awful life can be, to protect yourself.”  (129)  I may have lost it myself.. perhaps humor is no longer a satisfactory defense mechanism..  Some writers feel they are steering themselves, I don’t.  I am simply becoming…  All I wanted to do was give people the gift of laughter… like aspirin…(130)

I apologize to readers who are my children’s and grandchildren’s age: we are leaving a terrible mess.  (On the other hand) it has always been a mess.  It is not true that you are not an adult until you’ve been through some terrible calamity. Bad uncle, good uncle. Good uncle said people seldom notice when they’re happy. (132)

The imagination circuit (in the brain) has to be developed by parents, teachers…  But now we have professionally produced shows, the information highway… no need for those circuits. (134)

Saul Steinberg – KV’s wisest man…

A Requiem by KV