Though it is no surprise, yet no less sad, the only person I regard as a personal hero
has died. So it goes.
And, for that, the world has become just a little bit dumber.
It would take me hours to explain why Vonnegut was my hero. Humanism, intelligence, wit, valiant rationalism and crotchety old age are among the very few reasons I've spent the last 17 years or so reading and re-reading his work. It can all boil down to a basic simple tenet:
Kurt Vonnegut could take a difficult human condition, the worst of man kind and find its heart, show it to you, make you laugh and then you'd walk away understanding that the most basic solution exists. Or, as
Bokonon says, "Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything."
Since there is no way I could do Vonnegut any justice, I'll give some examples of why I admired him so. Examples of his craft, his wit and his human soul.
First, I would offer the whole of the following books to anyone who wants to read Vonnegut and to laugh, cry and feel a little smarter in the end:
Slaughter-house Five
Breakfast of Champions
God Bless You, Mr. RosewaterI won't tell you where to find the quotes below because finding them in Vonnegut's body of work is half the fun and half the journey.
On LonelinessBut I am surely a great admirer of Alcoholics Anonymous, and Gamblers Anonymous, and Cocaine Freaks Anonymous, and on and on. And such groups gratify me as a person who studied anthropology, since they give to Americans something as essential to health as vitamin C, something so many of us do not have in this particular civilization: an extended family. Human beings have almost always been supported and comforted and disciplined and amused by stable lattices of many relatives and friends until the Great American Experiment, which is an experiment not only with liberty but with rootlessness, mobility and impossibly tough-minded loneliness.
On the importance of intoxication:Good examples of harmless toots are some of the things children do. They get smashed for hours on some strictly limited aspect of the Great Big Everything, the Universe, such as water or snow or mud or colors or rocks (throwing little ones, looking under big ones), or echoes or funny sounds from the voicebox or banging on a drum and so on. Only two people are involved: the child and the Universe. The child does a little something to the Universe, and the Great Big Everything does something funny or beautiful or sometimes disappointing or scary or even painful in return. The child teaches the Universe how to be a good playmate, to be nice instead of mean."
On our planet (before Al Gore):The sort of leaders we need now are not those who promise ultimate victory over Nature through perseverance in living as we do right now, but those with the courage and intelligence to present to the world what appear to be Nature's stern but reasonable surrender terms:
1. Reduce and stabilize your population.
2. Stop poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil.
3. Stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems.
4. Teach your kids, and yourselves too, while you're at it, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.
5. Stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.
6. Stop thinking your grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is really mean and stupid.
7. And so on. Or else.
On history:Write it all down. Without accurate records of the past, how can men and women be expected to avoid making serious mistakes in the future?
And, finally, my two favorite things Vonnegut ever wrote. One is a simple plea for babies and the other is simply a beautiful thought.
From
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater:
Hello, babies. Welcome to earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you have about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of–
God damn it, babies, you’ve got to be kind.
From
Slaughter-house Five. My favorite bit of Vonnegut:
It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:
American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
To Mr. Vonnegut, I offer this joke in his memory:
"Kurt is up in heaven now."
Don't worry if you don't get it. Vonnegut is laughing his ass off, wherever he is.
