February 22, 2006

BOOK REVIEW
Slaughter House Jive

A Man Without a Country
By Kurt Vonnegut
Seven Stories Press, 2005
H ardcover, 146 pages, $23.95

By TIM HARRIS
Staff Writer

The great activist and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once described how the “children of darkness are always wiser in their day than the children of light.” The former, he said, are those who side with evil by advancing only their narrow self-interest. The latter are those who work toward a harmonization of interests for the good of all.

The cynics among us who understand power, wrote Niebuhr, have a more realistic understanding of human nature than those sentimentalists who believe that people, once educated to the facts, tend toward the good. His theology struck a young Martin Luther King, Jr. like a thunderbolt and became part of the theoretical underpinnings of the civil rights movement.

Some of our most clear-eyed social critics, therefore, have taken a rather dim view of humanity. There is literary precedent here as well. Mark Twain, for example, was by the end of his life so embittered he was barely able to write. One also thinks of the brilliant songwriter Tom Lehrer, who stopped performing and famously declared satire obsolete when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize.

The best work of Kurt Vonnegut, now 83, is 30 years behind him. His more recent fiction, such as Blue Beard and Galápagos, give way to a bitterness that his classics, however dark, mostly avoided. In a Man Without a Country, his latest collection of personal essays, Vonnegut himself notes that “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.”

He writes our epitaph: “The Good Earth. We could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.”

Vonnegut has always been attracted to the sort of jokes that express the sadder range of human experience. He finds Bob Hope, for example, bland and insipid, but sees the tragic in Laurel and Hardy (“They could so easily be killed”).

“ Humor, ” he says, “is a way of holding off how awful life is.”

Slaughterhouse Five, which drew upon his experience as a young soldier in World War II, was a gut-wrenching masterpiece of moral vision. As a prisoner of war, Vonnegut was in Dresden in Feb., 1945, when British and American firebombings killed 135,000 people — nearly all civilians. When the retrieval and burying of the dead became overwhelming, his crew resorted to flamethrowers.

He was unable to discuss this until 1968, when the horror of Vietnam “freed him” to grapple with the unspeakable. Dresden, he writes, was his loss of innocence. Before then, he thought there was an American ideal of democracy that was worth fighting and dying for. Now, he says, “there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable.”

Vietnam, he writes, “only made billionaires out of millionaires. Today’s war is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress.”

His sharpest barbs are aimed at the present administration, who he says came to power through a “Keystone Cops coup d’état” and is riddled with psychopathic personalities (PPs). PPs, he says, are decisive as hell because they never doubt themselves. They are boisterous “haters of information” who see “persuasive guessing” as the best way to run the world. He proposes “C-Students from Yale” as the next hair-raising reality television show.

Our soldiers in the Middle East, he says, are “being treated like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.”

Vonnegut is a humanist who doesn’t believe in God but says that if the Sermon on the Mount didn’t exist he wouldn’t want to be human. “I’d just as soon be a rattlesnake,” he says. Quoting his son, he defines the purpose of life as helping “each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”

This collection of brief personal essays is like having a rambling chat with the funniest, most humane, yet saddest person you’ve ever met. While the bitterness is palpable, he remains an engaging voice of sanity. There is little sunshine here, but the view is clear.