Cold Turkey

By Kurt Vonnegut
May 10, 2004

Many years ago, I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we
could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my
generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great
Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for
that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.

But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America’s becoming
humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power
corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on
power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in
danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the
Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces.
They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for
Christmas.

---

When you get to my age, if you get to my age, which is 81, and if you have
reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are
themselves middle-aged, what life is all about. I have seven kids, four of
them adopted.

Many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren.
They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer
corporations and government.

I put my big question about life to my biological son Mark. Mark is a
pediatrician, and author of a memoir, The Eden Express. It is about his
crackup, straightjacket and padded cell stuff, from which he recovered
sufficiently to graduate from Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to
help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.� So I pass that on
to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it.

I have to say that’s a pretty good sound bite, almost as good as, “Do unto
others as 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, 500 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.

But back to people, like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark,
who’ve said how we could behave more humanely, and maybe make the world a
less painful place. One of my favorites 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 only 4, ran 5 times as the
Socialist Party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, 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’m 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?

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 Donald Rumsfeld or
Dick Cheney stuff.

For some rea
so
n, 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!

---

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.

But, when you stop to think about it, only a nut case would want to be a
human being, if he or she had a choice. Such treacherous, untrustworthy,
lying and greedy animals we are!

I was born a human being in 1922 A.D. What does “A.D.� signify? That
commemorates an inmate of this lunatic asylum we call Earth who was nailed
to a wooden cross by a bunch of other inmates. With him still conscious,
they hammered spikes through his wrists and insteps, and into the wood. Then
they set the cross upright, so he dangled up there where even the shortest
person in the crowd could see him writhing this way and that.

Can you imagine people doing such a thing to a person?

No problem. That’s entertainment. Ask the devout Roman Catholic Mel Gibson,
who, as an act of piety, has just made a fortune with a movie about how
Jesus was tortured. Never mind what Jesus said.

During the reign of King Henry the Eighth, founder of the Church of England,
he had a counterfeiter boiled alive in public. Show biz again.

Mel Gibson’s next movie should be The Counterfeiter. Box office records will
again be broken.

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on
television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

---

And what did the great British historian Edward Gibbon, 1737-1794 A.D., have
to say about the human record so far? He said, “History is indeed little
more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.�

The same can be said about this morning’s edition of the New York Times.

The French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, who won a Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1957, wrote, “There is but one truly serious philosophical
problem, and that is suicide.�

So there’s another barrel of laughs from literature. Camus died in an
automobile accident. His dates? 1913-1960 A.D.

Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human
being: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, the Iliad and
the Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible and The Charge of the Light
Brigade.

But I have to say this in defense of humankind: No matter in what era in
history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got there. And, except
for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these crazy games going on,
which could make you act crazy, even if you weren’t crazy to begin with.
Some of the games that were already going on when you got here were love and
hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf and
girls’ basketball.

Even crazier than golf, though, is modern American politics, where, thanks
to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of
human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

Actually, this same sort of thing happened to the people of England
generations ago, and Sir William Gilbert, of the radical team of Gilbert and
Sullivan, wrote these words for a song about it back then:
I often think it’s comical
How nature always does contrive
That every boy and every gal
That&ac
irc;€™
s born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative.

Which one are you in this country? It’s practically a law of life that you
have to be one or the other? If you aren’t one or the other, you might as
well be a doughnut.

If some of you still haven’t decided, I’ll make it easy for you.

If you want to take my guns away from me, and you’re all for murdering
fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give
them kitchen appliances at their showers, and you’re for the poor, you’re a
liberal.

If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you’re a
conservative.

What could be simpler?

---

My government’s got a war on drugs. But get this: The two most widely abused
and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal.

One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W. Bush, no less, and
by his own admission, was smashed or tiddley-poo or four sheets to the wind
a good deal of the time from when he was 16 until he was 41. When he was 41,
he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop
gargling nose paint.

Other drunks have seen pink elephants.

And do you know why I think he is so pissed off at Arabs? They invented
algebra. Arabs also invented the numbers we use, including a symbol for
nothing, which nobody else had ever had before. You think Arabs are dumb?
Try doing long division with Roman numerals.

We’re spreading democracy, are we? Same way European explorers brought
Christianity to the Indians, what we now call “Native Americans.�

How ungrateful they were! How ungrateful are the people of Baghdad today.

So let’s give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That’ll teach bin Laden
a lesson he won’t soon forget. Hail to the Chief.

That chief and his cohorts have as little to do with Democracy as the
Europeans had to do with Christianity. We the people have absolutely no say
in whatever they choose to do next. In case you haven’t noticed, they’ve
already cleaned out the treasury, passing it out to pals in the war and
national security rackets, leaving your generation and the next one with a
perfectly enormous debt that you’ll be asked to repay.

Nobody let out a peep when they did that to you, because they have
disconnected every burglar alarm in the Constitution: The House, the Senate,
the Supreme Court, the FBI, the free press (which, having been embedded, has
forsaken the First Amendment) and We the People.

About my own history of foreign substance abuse. I’ve been a coward about
heroin and cocaine and LSD and so on, afraid they might put me over the
edge. I did smoke a joint of marijuana one time with Jerry Garcia and the
Grateful Dead, just to be sociable. It didn’t seem to do anything to me, one
way or the other, so I never did it again. And by the grace of God, or
whatever, I am not an alcoholic, largely a matter of genes. I take a couple
of drinks now and then, and will do it again tonight. But two is my limit.
No problem.

I am of course notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things
will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other.

But I’ll tell you one thing: I once had a high that not even crack cocaine
could match. That was when I got my first driver’s license! Look out, world,
here comes Kurt Vonnegut.

And my car back then, a Studebaker, as I recall, was powered, as are almost
all means of transportation and other machinery today, and electric power
plants and furnaces, by the most abused and addictive and destructive drugs
of all: fossil fuels.

When you got here, even when I got here, the ind
ustrialize
d world was
already hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there won’t be
any more of those. Cold turkey.

Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn’t like TV news, is it?

Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a
state of denial, about to face cold turkey.

And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now
committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked
on.

Well, I got a job watering plants and such at Forever Elmwood! Thank God! six bucks an hour, just what I've been looking for. I'll have money to live on again and I can stop being a mooch, Thank the fucking rad ass swinging spirits of the world! It doesn't start until June 1st so I might fly to GA for a week to see my crazy family. I'm going to another job interview at 5pm for NYPIRG. I'm a little scared of this one because I think they make you walk around and collect donations. I'm still going to go see what it's all about.

At the end of last semester I got rid of my debit card after I ran up $450.00 in bounces. I've been writing out checks for five months now and I'm understanding why so many people have debit cards. I'm always given a hard time because my drivers license was issued in Georgia so I've started to carry my passport with me as well and my UB card.
The only place I ever go to write checks is Walgreens. Pretty much every time it takes around 10 - 15 minutes to make a simple exchange. The cashiers always have to call in their managers. Last night when I went in my check would not go through. When I got home I called a number they gave me and the person I talked with apologized to me for not accepting my check and told me she would put me on checking V.I.P. or something like that.
Today I went back to Walgreens, ready to write another check and the lady told me that I'm not allowed to purchase cigarettes with a check. WHAT the FUCK? I mean, I just don't understand that they were going to let me last night. Why is it that people can use their debit cards to purchase cigarettes and I can't write a fucking check? On man, that cashier sucks so bad, she's fat and ugly and has a monotone voice teamed with a lack of expression. After that I'm like OK well, I need the tampons so whatever. Then she tells me she has to call over the manager because my license is out of state. There is some guy standing in line behind me who is just has one item. I get all pissed and tell the lady to just forget it. Then I get home and realize that I left my blank check laying on the counter so I have to go back and make sure no one took it.
I'm frustrated because I really need tampons, cigarettes, and medicine for cramps.

accurary - right on
precision - hitting the bullseye

Well, my sleeping schedule is fucked up right now. I should have been asleep a long time ago but I decided to get up and send in an insurance form so I can go to the fucking dentist. I lost a filling in one of my back teeth several months ago while eating chicken wings and a few minutes ago I noticed a nasty ass cavity forming on one of my front teeth on the right side.



Before that I found another gray hair in my head. I found the first one last week. They are weird gray hairs they change from brown to white. I decided to scan this one in.



I'm fascinated with my gray hair and I kind of wish it would just all turn gray. Here is a picture I made with one of the gray hair scans. It symbolizes the fading of my oddly attractiveness. Thankfully!

I just went by Forever Elmwood and filled out a job application. It's beautiful out today. I kind of hate to go to sleep but I've been up so long I can barely keep my eyes open and my belly is starting to ache.
The guy at forever Elmwood was nice and I think I might get a job if they can get the funding. Please powers that be let them get the funding! It doesn't pay much but I would get to be outdoors and get some exercise, which I really need after sitting on my ass all winter long. I can't wait to have grocery money. I can't wait to watch the flowers grow.
I worked in a greenhouse in high school. They smell so good, the dirt and the plants. It's one of the best things in the world to watch a little seed grow into a seedling and then a plant that flowers.
I wonder if teaching kids video will be as fulfilling? I think it might. I hope I get some good seeds.

I was giving thought to the whole penis measuring thing and I decided to measure my vaginal depth with my vibrator.



My vibrator was marketed toward gay men, I think, mainly because it was called the vibro dong anal probe on the package and it had a picture of a handsome necked man from behind turning his head around smiling.
Well, anyway I got about 3.5 inches with this thing, not very impressive I reckon.
It makes me reconsider sex with others even more. I mean, most dicks are well beyond 3.5 inches. I've been realizing that sex is just not worth the risk, Jesus Christ, I don't want a child! and I never get off anyway. I've had sex around 600 or so times in my life and out of those times I've had maybe 10 orgasms. I never fake either! I'm disgusted with myself. I love to talk about sex but I find sexual intercourse to be most unsatisfying. That's my fault I guess. I need to tell my partners exactly what to do but why does it matter? I know how to get myself off very well and if I can make my guy cum then what's the problem? It's a bad thing. It turns sex into a power issue which is totally fucked up.

Well, I called up my mother around 7pm to tell her, I love you Mama but I never got to it. My sister answers the phone and the first thing she says is "Scott just broke his leg on Eric's motorcycle." Scott is my oldest brother(34), Eric my 2nd oldest brother(32).
So my sister puts me on with my Dad and he asks if I found a job and says that if I don't find one I have to come home. Then he puts me on with my Mom and she asks me if I bought some groceries with the money she sent. I told her yes I have food but I'm out of money. She starts fussing about that but at the same time my brother Scott is sitting on a huge rock in my front yard and it's coming up a thunderstorm there. I tell my Mama if he's really broken his leg they should call an ambulance and I hear my Mama shout "Scott, do you want an ambulance?" My niece, Kiah, starts crying because they will not let her go outside.
So I ask to be put on the phone with Kiah and I calm her down by saying "Oh, poor baby, are they being mean to you? I'll get em. I'll give em all spankings but you and I'll give you candy." Kiah eventually calms down and tells me "Scott broke his leg." Kiah has the most adorable kid southern accent. Well, then she tells me "Poxy(cat) is here, she's not dead," and "the ducks like me." I hear my Dad in the background, he says "Scott broke his damn leg" so I say Kiah, "Did you hear Papa cuss? I remember when you used to cuss." It's true, one of Kiah's first twenty words was "Shit!" and she used it appropriately to, at not even a year old.
Well, after that my Dad gets back on the phone and says they just took Scott to the hospital. And they've gotta let me go cause it's coming up a storm and he can't afford the phone bill and they'll call and let me know how Scott is.

I just spent two hours going in and out of AOL chat rooms sending out links to the Baubo animation I made www.dreamdilation.com/robin I had a conversation or two about it. People seem to think that children should not see it but that's who I made it for, ages 2-5. I tried to make a point to them. I told them that when I was 14 I used to visit AOL chat rooms in order to collect pornography. Regular old female submissive porn for the most part but I never knew what I was getting until I downloaded the pic so I got a lot of sicko crap, like animal and shit fetish pictures.
The point I was trying to make is that no way is my Baubo animation as bad for young teens as a photograph of a snake coming out of a woman's vagina but who knows, maybe it is. Anyway, Liz if you read this maybe you could check the number of visits to my web page on your site and let me know how successful I was in getting it out there.

Well, I never in my life. Liz sure knows how to make a person feel welcome, from the Cheese, to the peppers, to the vodka, and back.
What interesting company there was. I've never been around so many nude people all at once. Penises and balls are so funny. I wonder what it feels like to have those things attached to your body? They're so swingy.
Yes, when me and Liz get together all sorts of drunken debauchery is likely to occur.