This from Kurt Vonnegut, by way of my friend Lisa Cooper.

>>Published on Wednesday, May 12, 2004 by In These Times
>>
>>
>>Cold Turkey
>>
>>by Kurt Vonnegut
>>
>>
>>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 America¹s 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: ³Father, we are here to
>>help
>>each other get through this thing, whatever it is.² 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 that¹s a pretty good sound bite, almost as good as, ³Do unto
>>others as you would have them do unto you.² 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,
>>who¹ve 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, I¹m of it. As long as
>>there
>>is a soul in prison, I am not free."
>>
>>Doesn¹t anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public
>>schools or health insurance for all?
>>
>>How about Jesus¹ 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. Š"
>>
>>And so on.
>>
>>Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly Donald Rumsfeld or
>>Dick Cheney 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 that¹s Moses, not
>>Jesus. I
>>haven¹t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the
>>Beatitudes, be
>>posted anywhere.
>>
>>³Blessed are the merciful² in a courtroom? ³Blessed are the peacemakers² in
>>the Pentagon? Give me a break!
>>
>> -------------------------
>>
>>There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don¹t 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 ³A.D.² 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. That¹s 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 Gibson¹s 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, ³History is indeed little
>>more
>>than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.²
>>
>>The same can be said about this morning¹s edition of the New York Times.
>>
>> The French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, who won a Nobel Prize for
>>Literature in 1957, wrote, ³There is but one truly serious philosophical
>>problem, and
>>that is suicide.²
>>
>>So there¹s 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 weren¹t 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 girls¹
>>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 it¹s comical
>>How nature always does contrive
>>That every boy and every gal
>>That¹s born into the world alive
>>Is either a little Liberal
>>Or else a little Conservative.
>>
>>Which one are you in this country? It¹s practically a law of life that you
>>have to be one or the other? If you aren¹t one or the other, you might as
>>well
>>be a doughnut.
>>
>>If some of you still haven¹t decided, I¹ll make it easy for you.
>>
>>If you want to take my guns away from me, and you¹re all for murdering
>>fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give
>>them
>>kitchen appliances at their showers, and you¹re for the poor, you¹re a
>>liberal.
>>
>>If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you¹re a
>>conservative.
>>
>>What could be simpler?
>>
>> -------------------------
>>
>>My government¹s 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.
>>
>>We¹re spreading democracy, are we? Same way European explorers brought
>>Christianity to the Indians, what we now call ³Native Americans.²
>>
>>How ungrateful they were! How ungrateful are the people of Baghdad today.
>>
>>So let¹s give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That¹ll teach bin Laden
>>a lesson he won¹t 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 haven¹t noticed, they¹ve
>>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 you¹ll 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. I¹ve 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 didn¹t 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 I¹ll tell you one thing: I once had a high that not even crack cocaine
>>could match. That was when I got my first driver¹s 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 industrialized world was
>>already
>>hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there won¹t be any more
>>of those. Cold turkey.
>>
>>Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn¹t like TV news, is it? Here¹s 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 we¹re hooked
>>on.
>>
>>© 2004 In These Times