The world needs more Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007). Or more accurately perhaps, Kurt Vonnegut’s perspective.
I’ve been an avid fan for decades. I was hooked by his novel Slaughterhouse-Five where he pulls no punches whatsoever in his depiction of the brutality and inanity of war.
Vonnegut is the consummate truth teller. The scales were dropped from his eyes at his birth, I believe. I have read much of his literary output with a deep sense of irony and gratitude. Vonnegut has a gift for belaboring the obvious – in the best possible way.
I recently came across this snippet of an interview with him. I want to share it as it speaks to a current preoccupation of mine: how the glue of social cohesion is rapidly ebbing away, if not indeed, already fully ebbed. We are on a runaway roller coaster with an uncertain endpoint.
Younger people especially (by whom I mean anyone under 50) are consumed daily with a wildly out of balance need to simply keep body and soul together. It is no longer a matter of a “decent day’s pay for a decent day’s work.” It is the two to three jobs and income producing projects they juggle just to keep the wolf from the door.
It is a dehumanizing and soul destroying way to live. My current preoccupation is how to bring society back into balance.
I’m not thinking even for a moment that I have answers to solve this present dilemma of whacked out values, intolerance, billionaires’ greed, and wildly disaffected and unmoored teenagers.
But I will contribute to the conversation whenever and wherever I have the opportunity. Like now.
Vonnegut generally makes an important contribution. He is making an important point here specifically. I am reminded of the powers that be at a bank who were intensely lobbied to keep a modestly profitable branch open just because the daily interactions of local seniors with the tellers were so vital and life affirming.
Technology overload is starting to take over at the top of my shit list. Read a book, people. Dammit.
See if you don’t see the wisdom in what Vonnegut sees. I do.
DAVID BRANCACCIO: There’s a little sweet moment, I’ve got to say, in a very intense book– your latest– in which you’re heading out the door and your wife says what are you doing? I think you say– I’m getting– I’m going to buy an envelope.
KURT VONNEGUT: Yeah.
DAVID BRANCACCIO: What happens then?
KURT VONNEGUT: Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.
I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around.
And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore. ~Kurt Vonnegut
(Source: NOW on PBS, David Brancaccio interviews Kurt Vonnegut discussing his then newly published Book: A Man Without a Country https://amzn.to/3PUGWTT)
Expressive Compulsive 