Kurt Vonnegut 1922-2007

This is a post I wrote on BlueMassGroup last year (April 2007): American author Kurt Vonnegut passed away this week at age 84. He lived in New York City, but was once a resident of our own Cape Cod, Massachusetts. While there have been official obituaries (more and more) in the press this week, it didn't seem they quite did justice to the man, at least as I'd been thinking about him this year. Cat's Cradle and Galapagos are two of my favorite books. Yet his last book was a memoir of sort: A Man Without a Country, and I'd like to present some of his quotes from that here, which given Vonnegut's recurring focus on the future of humanity (both in fiction and now non-fiction) are timely on the eve of the National Day for Climate Action (there are all kinds of public events tommorow around the country). What was particularly striking to me is that Vonnegut announced in that book that he gave up on humanity at the end of his life, in his own cynical yet funny way. When I read that last year I wanted to go straight to New York and tell him that it's not too late for us, there still is hope. And hope there is: this is the week that Massachusetts and other states successfully sued the Bush Environmental Protection Agency to start regulating carbon dioxide and global warming, an issue clearly important to Vonnegut in his memoir. And there's another suit still pending for mercury pollution. Throughout Vonnegut's last book, it seems he is keenly aware of his coming mortality, and he has some things he would like us to hear about life, and maybe even some things to laugh at as well.

On the environment: Anyone who has studied science and talks to scientist 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. On reality TV: I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from Yale." On humanity: Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn't even seen the First World War. War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the First World War so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun. Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you? Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now give up on people, too. I am a veteran of the Second World War and I have to say this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine. My last words? "Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse." On smoking: Here's the news: I am going to sue the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company, manufacturers of Pall Mall cigarettes for a billion bucks! Starting when I was only twelve 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 now I am eighty-two. 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. On the arts: We are about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. Wave flags if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. I'm kidding. If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. 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. On his own epitaph: Do you know what a humanist is? ... We humanists try to behave as decently, as fairly, and as honorably as we can without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. ... I am, incidently, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, "Isaac is up in heaven now." It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, "Kurt is up in heaven now". That's my favorite joke. ... If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC