Features » May 10, 2004

Cold Turkey

By Kurt Vonnegut

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

————————————-

When you get to my age, if you get to my age, which is 81, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged, what life is all about. I have seven kids, four of them adopted.

Many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.

I put my big question about life to my biological son Mark. Mark is a pediatrician, and author of a memoir, The Eden Express. It is about his crackup, straightjacket and padded cell stuff, from which he recovered sufficiently to graduate from Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it.

I have to say that’s a pretty good sound bite, almost as good as, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, 500 years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.

The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one.

But back to people, like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark, who’ve said how we could behave more humanely, and maybe make the world a less painful place. One of my favorites is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana. Get a load of this:

Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was only 4, ran 5 times as the Socialist Party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning:

As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.
As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it.
As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Doesn’t anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools or health insurance for all?

How about Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. …

And so on.

Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney stuff.

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!

————————————-

There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

But, when you stop to think about it, only a nut case would want to be a human being, if he or she had a choice. Such treacherous, untrustworthy, lying and greedy animals we are!

I was born a human being in 1922 A.D. What does “A.D.” signify? That commemorates an inmate of this lunatic asylum we call Earth who was nailed to a wooden cross by a bunch of other inmates. With him still conscious, they hammered spikes through his wrists and insteps, and into the wood. Then they set the cross upright, so he dangled up there where even the shortest person in the crowd could see him writhing this way and that.

Can you imagine people doing such a thing to a person?

No problem. That’s entertainment. Ask the devout Roman Catholic Mel Gibson, who, as an act of piety, has just made a fortune with a movie about how Jesus was tortured. Never mind what Jesus said.

During the reign of King Henry the Eighth, founder of the Church of England, he had a counterfeiter boiled alive in public. Show biz again.

Mel Gibson’s next movie should be The Counterfeiter. Box office records will again be broken.

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

————————————-

And what did the great British historian Edward Gibbon, 1737-1794 A.D., have to say about the human record so far? He said, “History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.”

The same can be said about this morning’s edition of the New York Times.

The French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, who won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, wrote, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”

So there’s another barrel of laughs from literature. Camus died in an automobile accident. His dates? 1913-1960 A.D.

Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible and The Charge of the Light Brigade.

But I have to say this in defense of humankind: No matter in what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got there. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these crazy games going on, which could make you act crazy, even if you weren’t crazy to begin with. Some of the games that were already going on when you got here were love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf and girls’ basketball.

Even crazier than golf, though, is modern American politics, where, thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

Actually, this same sort of thing happened to the people of England generations ago, and Sir William Gilbert, of the radical team of Gilbert and Sullivan, wrote these words for a song about it back then:

I often think it’s comical
How nature always does contrive
That every boy and every gal
That’s born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative.

Which one are you in this country? It’s practically a law of life that you have to be one or the other? If you aren’t one or the other, you might as well be a doughnut.

If some of you still haven’t decided, I’ll make it easy for you.

If you want to take my guns away from me, and you’re all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them kitchen appliances at their showers, and you’re for the poor, you’re a liberal.

If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you’re a conservative.

What could be simpler?

————————————-

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.

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• Reader Comments

  Power corrupts us . Absolute power .

  Isn’t this concept more appropriate in a totalitarian context,of communist nature to be precise ?
  For America,and therefore the rest of the world,shouldn’t we be speaking of absolute (free) capitalism ?
  And,all things considered,isn’t Kurt Vonnegut quite happy to be living in that system?
  For with the excesses capitalism may produce also comes the diversity and freedom that characterizes American society .

  The Arabs did -not- invent the numbers we use.The Indo Europeans did.As well as the zero. It appeared in 458 AD in an indian cosmology treaty.Defined in 628 by Brahmagupta as the result of a whole number substracted from itself.
  It was not before the eight century that the zero,as well as the rest of the Indo Europeans numerals,was introduced at the court of Bagdad….by an indian astronomer.
  The Arabs ,in this story,are therefore transmitters,not discoverers.
  Kurt Vonnegut,in this story as well as in others….. a bullshitter.

  The parallel between Native Americans and today’s baghdadis : Bullshit.

  The disconnection of the free press? It does smell a bit country-ish to me .

  The Jerry Garcia cameo: OK,it is certainly true,but—- who the hell cares !! And what relevance besides trying to play the post-hippy string in American liberals ?

  Cold turkey on fossil fuels ?
  Now,what would cold turkey be ?( apart from a sudden ice age befalling and freezing the activity of a very cumbersome european neighbour,alas,let us not dream)

  The 40-50 years of estimated world oil resources can probably be extended another 30 with the exploitation of “heavy oils”,with a spectacular ecological result,but it still comes close to 80 years.
  80 years may be cold turkey on the scale of history,but it doesn’t seem to be the
  time table he’s talking about.

  It seems the numerous offsprings of Kurt Vonnegut will be able to drive their car to work to pay,pay,pay for that Iraki bill…

  Posted by george babushes on May 22, 2004 at 5:56 PM

  The esteemed Mr. Vonnegut is, to my taste, the talent most akin to Emile Zola that American letters have been able to produce

  That said, the careful observer Mr. V. repeats himself. There’s little except topical color in what he has written in “Cold Turkey” that differs from what he said in _Timequake_.

  Still, “Cold Turkey” is worth publishing, because it excerpts this profoundly humane yet pessimistic author’s thought for those who haven’t been reading him for 40 years as many of us have!

  Posted by JacquesDelaguerre on May 24, 2004 at 3:09 AM

  My apologies for straying from the discussion of the essay. I just wanted to ask the author a question:

  Mr. Vonnegut,

  I’ve wanted to ask you a simple question for about 15 years now regarding your story, “Harrison Bergeron”. Is the main character’s name inspired by Henri Bergson?

  Thanks,
  Dan Florio

  Posted by DanFlorio on May 24, 2004 at 5:35 PM

  Hello Mr Vonnegut,

  I hope you read these comments, but I think that you probably don’t since I hear you dislike computers.  Personally, I think you need to give the internet more of a chance—it’s like colonial days all over again when people published pamphlets and articles anonymously and the printing press gave sudden forum to so many nimble minds.

  Anyway, I love your books—I’ve read them all—and now can’t stop putting double dashes in nearly evey paragraph I write thanks to you!  But what I wanted to comment on is your perspectives on providing child care and health care for eveyone and what Jesus would have thought about all of that.  Of course he would have thought it a great idea—it was his after all, but the last thing he wanted was for government to do that job.  What we need is not more government living under some sort of collective.  Government only focuses on the “collect” part of collective.  What we need is all of us with new ideas, forming cooperatives under our own design to provide for us in these ways.  Jesus was the first libertarian.  He wanted us to recognize a kingdom of God and a kingdom of man.  The Romans, the Pharisees; they were the kingdom of man.  WE are the kingdom of God. 

  We enter this world with free will and it is the basis of sin and redemption.  Free will is the most basic and central Christian value.  Governments on the other hand, deal in coercion.  Governments don’t like free will and Jesus don’t like governments.  We need to pull together as human beings in cooperatives and not care what the rich folks do.  It’s the power of the government to take our money, skim their share, and then give back a pittance that even makes it possible to fight two wars on two fronts 4000 miles away. 

  And your son is right.

  Posted by highlonesome on May 24, 2004 at 8:01 PM

  Hello Mr. Kurt Vonnegut

  I thought some comments may give you a glimmer of hope for a humane and reasonable America before you do the big check out.

  Our leaders are power-drunk but leaders can only lead where they have followers. The underlying problem is the support of the followers are consumption-drunk. The followers will do anything to protect their consumption.

  While the corporations and government are not telling the truth they aren’t lying either. The people in these organizations really believe what they think. The people outside the organizations believe what the think. These and many other two opposing world views neutralize each other. This symmetry occurs over and over in human belief systems forming stable systems.

  Today the global culture is addicted to fossil fuels but this has only been going on for a century and there are alternatives. What is deeply inbreded in our belief systems is the dependent on population growth which has been going on unabated for the last 10,000 years.

  This is where the symmetry driving humanity can be broken. We know that the fertility rate of females is a function of education. By insuring that every human has access to the cultural innovations of reading, mathematics and music the fertility rate will drop for a time below the rate needed for replacement . 

  Our current system of socailization is totally inadaqunet for this task. The proposed solution for reducing the global population is preparing a small group of children for an information subsistence mode by enhancing early childhood development. The core system is the Urban Camp a series of 72 sites one for each month in a child’s life from 0 to 6. While all dimensions of childhood development will be addressed the greatest link between the industrial age and information age is in the area of intellectual development. The urban camp will enable children to decode reading, writing, language, math and music as part and simultaneously with their native language. The generic name of this system will be the Corporate Family Village.

  Posted by pulsar on May 25, 2004 at 5:16 PM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 154 posts.

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