God Bless You, Mr Vonnegut

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."  - Kurt Vonnegut.

For practically all my adult life, Kurt Vonnegut was the writer I tried to pretend to be. The literary snobs ignored him and tried to put him down. But that’s because they didn’t know what to do with a pure original, someone with way too much imagination and wisdom and humanity for his own good, with a dark and wicked sense of humor who, incidentally, could write rings around the best of them.

Like many in my generation, I first came across Vonnegut while in college. Despite what conservative commentators would like us to think, this was an era of unprecedented social change and enlightenment. The sixties and early seventies was a time of some of our worst stupidities – such as the Vietnam war, the drug culture, crass materialism, and bad guitar solos – along with our greatest accomplishments, including civil rights, women’s rights, the moon landing, environmentalism, and spiritual awakening.

It was an era driven by youth who were at once disaffected and visionary, and by their enlightened parents. For one brief shining moment, many of us saw the world as it could be, united in an indefinable sense of higher purpose. How stupid was that? Naturally, the forces of darkness prevailed.

So it goes.

But not without a few major concessions.

Vonnegut spoke to us, spoke to me in particular.

He wrote about the end of the world, the extinction of the human race, the horrors of war, the consequences of greed, the insufferable pain of life, and the folly of pretending that we control our own fate. In Vonnegut’s world, man was a helpless creature, caught up in events not of his own making, immobilized and skewered in crazy and bizarre paradoxes and ironies that only some cosmic Machiavelli could have masterminded.

And somehow he managed to chronicle his dark side while being incredibly funny. In one short story, he wrote about purple-roofed suicide parlors located right next to orange-roofed Howard Johnsons.

But no true cynic is a cynic through-and-through. Scratch down deep enough and you will find a boundless optimist. Cynics are only the way they are because they have been to the mountain and have seen the Promised Land. They are frustrated because they are at the mercy of idiotic people who are homesick for slavery in Egypt and are too stupid to navigate their way out of the desert.

Vonnegut once suggested carving the following message for flying saucers flying over our doomed planet: "We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard... and too damned cheap."

So it goes.

Vonnegut was depressed throughout his life. Despite the great fame he would achieve, in 1984 he attempted suicide, then joked how he botched the attempt. Mental illness was a constant in his family. His mother committed suicide, his father was depressed, and his son was diagnosed with schizophrenia.