Custodians of chaos

[Guest guest]

Custodians of chaos

 

In this exclusive extract from his forthcoming memoirs, Kurt Vonnegut is

horrified by the hypocrisy in contemporary US politics

 

Saturday January 21, 2006

The Guardian

 

" Do unto others what 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, five hundred 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.

 

 

We've sure come a long way since then. Sometimes I wish we hadn't. I

hate H-bombs and the Jerry Springer Show

 

But back to people like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark,

each of whom have said in their own way how we could behave more

humanely and maybe make the world a less painful place. One of my

favourite humans 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 not

yet four, ran five times as the Socialist party candidate for president,

winning 900,000 votes, almost 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 am 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?

 

When you get out of bed each morning, with the roosters crowing,

wouldn't you like to say. " As long as there is a lower class, I am in

it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there

is a soul in prison, I am not free. "

 

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 George W Bush,

Dick Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld 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!

 

It so happens that idealism enough for anyone is not made of perfumed

pink clouds. It is the law! It is the US Constitution.

 

But I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a

just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body

snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened instead is

that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone

Cops-style coup d'état imaginable.

 

I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show.

I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end:

" C-Students from Yale " .

 

George W Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no

history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka

Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or

PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.

 

To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis,

like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot. The classic

medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr Hervey Cleckley, a

clinical professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of Georgia,

published in 1941. Read it!

 

Some people are born deaf, some are born blind or whatever, and this

book is about congenitally defective human beings of a sort that is

making this whole country and many other parts of the planet go

completely haywire nowadays. These were people born without consciences,

and suddenly they are taking charge of everything.

 

PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may

cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are

nuts. They have a screw loose!

 

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and

WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their

employees and investors and country and who still feel as pure as the

driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And they

are waging a war that is making billionaires out of millionaires, and

trillionaires out of billionaires, and they own television, and they

bankroll George Bush, and not because he's against gay marriage.

 

So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal

government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken

charge. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we

might as well be Poland under occupation.

 

They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was

simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so

high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so

decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin' day and they are

not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for

the simple reason that they don't give a fuck what happens next. Simply

can't. Do this! Do that! Mobilise the reserves! Privatise the public

schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut

taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas

corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!

 

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. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed

people ran for class president.

 

The title of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is a parody of the title of

Ray Bradbury's great science-fiction novel Fahrenheit 451. Four hundred

and fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit is the combustion point, incidentally,

of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury's novel is a

municipal worker whose job is burning books.

 

While on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate

librarians, not famous for their physical strength, who, all over this

country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried

to remove certain books from their shelves, and destroyed records rather

than have to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have

checked out those titles.

 

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the

Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media.

The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

 

And still on the subject of books: our daily news sources, newspapers

and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American

people, so uninformative, that only in books do we learn what's really

going on.

 

I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger,

published in early 2004, that humiliating, shameful, blood-soaked year.

 

In case you haven't noticed, as the result of a shamelessly rigged

election in Florida, in which thousands of African-Americans were

arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the

world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war-lovers with

appallingly powerful weaponry - who stand unopposed.

 

In case you haven't noticed, we are now as feared and hated all over the

world as Nazis once were.

 

And with good reason.

 

In case you haven't noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanised

millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion

and race. We wound 'em and kill 'em and torture 'em and imprison 'em all

we want.

 

Piece of cake.

 

In case you haven't noticed, we also dehumanised our own soldiers, not

because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.

 

Send 'em anywhere. Make 'em do anything.

 

Piece of cake.

 

The O'Reilly Factor.

 

So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and a Chicago

paper called In These Times.

 

Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed there

were weapons of mass destruction there.

 

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. "

 

Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas

 

Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler. What can be said to

our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say

persons without consciences, 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?

 

© 2005 Kurt Vonnegut Extracted from A Man Without a Country: A Memoir of

Life in George W Bush's America, to be published by Bloomsbury on

February 6, price £14.99