For a (nearly) complete listing of Kurt Vonnegut's writings including his articles, please go to this page: Out of Kurt Vonnegut's Pen

Last Words for a Century, published in Playboy, January 1999, pp 82-84.

On The Work To Be Done, published in Rolling Stone Magazine, May 28th,1998, 787:183

Vonnegut's Ginsberg Tribute

My fellow Americans: what I'd say if they asked me. An acceptance speech for Michael Dukakis, published in The Nation, July 16th, 1988 v247.2:53f.

Preface to"Between Time and Timbuktu: A Space Fantasy", published by Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence in 1972

More articles from KV, especially interesting for students and future writers, can be found here.

An interview with KV is here.

I am here to serve the people of the United States of America--all of them, in all ways which are lawful.

I will not now speak of my humbleness. It has been said with some truth, I suppose, that almost anyone can grow up to be President. I have to add, "But surely not an humble child." The Presidency is simultaneously a pinnacle of power and of vanity, and God help us all.

An aspect of my vanity, which seems to have found favor with a majority of those who chose to vote, is my belief that, with the help of the fourth branch of government mentioned in our Constitution, "We the people," I can do a lot to help the United States of America become the United States of America--at last, at last.

The echo of Martin Luther King in my words is intentional when I say "at last, at last."

It will do us no harm today, as it has surely done no harm to other nations I need not name, to acknowledge a past soiled with atrocities, including, in our case, slavery and genocide, and the treatment of women of whatever race under law as though they were not citizens but property. Let us celebrate how far we have come from such bad old days in so short a time, and measure how far we have yet to go.

What better measurement might we use for progress made and progress yet to come than the health and happiness and wisdom and safety of all our people? And make no mistake about it: This nation is the most astonishing and admirable experiment in pluralistic democracy in history. Because of our wealth, the fairness of our Bill of Rights and the openness of our long borders, every conceivable sort of human being is now an American.

We are the world.

There is much in the recent past I would undo, if I could, especially our overwhelming national debt, whose undoing will be slow and painful. I will try to find out what good things, if any, we bought with all that money, borrowed mostly from foreigners. I will report back to you, whose children and grandchildren must pay it back with interest. I will be surprised, as I am sure most of you will be, too, if I find many purchases our descendants might thank us for.

With your encouragement, and with the cooperation of your elected representatives, I will attempt, after listening to the best-informed advisers I can find, to give future generations reasons to think well of us after all. There you have it, the principal mission of my administration: to create and bequeath to the future a decent habitat for all, free of poisons, free of hunger, free of ignorance, free of hate.

Too much, too much?

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?

Those are the words of Robert Browning, of course. I can put it a lot less elegantly, if you like:

Company's coming! Let's clean up this mess.

Many of the poisons in the water and the air and the topsoil are new. One which can sicken our spirit is ancient, and offly since World War 11 has this country begun to fight it with any seriousness: the idea that females and persons of color are second-class citizens. That poison would love to make a great big comeback, to take its lethal place alongside nerve gas and radioactive wastes and PCBs and crack, and DDT and Agent Orange and the AIDS virus, and on and on.

Not while I'm President. In the words of Patrick Henry:

If this be treason, make the most of it.

Am I proposing a redistribution of wealth? You bet, since the wealth is being redistributed in any case, and often most crazily, and against the national interest. Am I proposing that we tax and tax and spend and spend? Yes, I am. Virtually every transaction is being skimmed already, and some private persons have done this at such confiscatory rates as to become as rich as smaller sovereign nations in a few years' time. And they spend and spend. On what? On what?

Ah, me.

Am I proposing an enormous public works program? How else might we describe our military-industrial complex, so mistrusted by that great Republican, General of the Armies Dwight David Eisenhower, when he himself became our President? With your encouragement I want to take much of the money now going into that public works program, and invest it instead in the arts of peace, the noblest of which are public health and education.

Who says otherwise? And why?

Company's coming.

I thank you for your attention.

From: http://www.duke.edu/~crh4/vonnegut/americans.html

Please, please, please. Nobody else die!

Allen Ginsberg and I were inducted into the American Institute of Arts and Letters in 1973. A reporter from Newsweek telephoned me at that time, and asked me what I thought about two such outsiders being absorbed by the Establishment. I replied, "If we aren't the Establishment, I don't know who is."

Allen was inducted nominally as a poet, but had in fact become world-famous for the radiant love and innocence of his person, from head to toe.

Let us be frank, and admit that the greatest poetry satisfies few deep appetites in modern times. But the appearance in our industrialized midst of a man without guile or political goals or congregation, who was doing his utmost to become wise and holy, was for many of us a surprising, anachronistic feast for our souls.

Allen and I met at a dinner given in Cambridge by the Harvard Lampoon in 1970. We would hold hands during the ensuing entertainment.

I had returned from witnessing the end of a civil war in southern Nigeria. The losing side, the rebellious Ibos, had been blockaded for more than a year. There had been widespread starvation. I was there with my fellow novelist Vance Bourjailly. We arrived on a blockade-running Catholic relief DC-3. We were surrounded at once by starving children begging for mercy. They had distended bellies, everted rectums, hair turned yellow, running sores, that sort of thing. They were also dirty.

We were afraid to touch them, least we get an infection to take back home. But Vance was ashamed of his squeamishness. He said that if Allen Ginsberg had been with us, Allen would have hugged the children, and gone down on his knees and played with them.

I told this story at the Lampoon dinner, and then said directly to Allen: "We have not met before, sir, but such is your reputation."

From http://www.duke.edu/~crh4/vonnegut/ginsberg.html

The only specifically American inventions that have made this a better world are Alcoholics Anonymous and jazz, and jazz has no bad side effects.

But one piece of AA's advice to recovering addicts, that they live one day at a time, so infects the brains of those who are wrecking the planet as a life-support system nowadays, recovering addicts or not, that it might as well be Hong Kong chicken flu or mad-cow disease. To have gotten through Tuesday, say, with an atmosphere still breathable and water still potable at bedtime is for those so afflicted to be as happy as pigs in shit, so to speak.

Some accomplishment!

Rolling Stone has asked me to discover what the American Dream looks like in the mind of some young person of my acquaintance, with the year 2000 hanging over his or her head by a thread, like the sword of Damocles. Without even looking into such a mind, I can offer at least this much comfort: The year 2000 has come and gone, and damned if we didn't survive it!

Listen: The best information we have today is that Jesus was born in 5 B.C., or five years before Himself. Chalk that up as another miracle!

Yes, and that means that the 2,000th year of the Christian era was what we mistakenly called "1995."

What apocalypse, what test of our determination to go on living, did we endure back then? Friends and neighbors, young and old alike, think a minute, think TV.

It was the O.J. Simpson case!

As for our young:

Those who graduate from high school or college this spring are not Generation X or Y, as envious middle-aged baby boomers have been pleased to tag them. They are as much Generation A as Adam and Eve were, as the middle-aged baby boomers, their parents, used to be.

As I read the Book of Genesis, God didn't give Adam and Eve a whole planet.

He gave them a manageable piece of property, for the sake of discussion let's say 200 acres.

I suggest to you Adams and Eves that you set as your goals the putting of some small part of the planet into something like safe and sane and decent order.

There's a lot of cleaning up to do.

There's a lot of rebuilding to do, both spiritual and physical.

And, again, there's going to be a lot of happiness. Don't forget to notice!

What painters and sculptors and writers do, incidentally, is put very small properties indeed into good order, as best they can.

A painter thinks, "I can't fix the whole planet, but I can at least make this square of canvas what it ought to be." And a sculptor thinks the same about a lump of clay or marble. A writer thinks the same about a piece of paper, conventionally eleven inches long and eight and a half inches wide.

We're talking about something less than 200 acres, aren't we?

If not you, then surely your children will see the day when not one drop of petroleum and not one whiff of natural gas is left to power any sort of machinery, or cook or heat or light anything, and precious little coal. Junkyard!

Chilblains in the wintertime, and darkness indoors and out when the sun goes down? Light a candle made from the fat of a lower, dumber, deader animal? Who's got a wooden match when there are no trees? Our century should be called this: the Age of the Planet Gobblers. We, the ancestors of all Generation A's still to come, inherited an aromatic, juicy blue-green planet, and we ate it up!

In our defense, we can only say, "We never asked to be born such prolific, voracious creatures in the first place. It would have been much better for all concerned if we had been sea lions instead, provided, of course, that nobody else got to be a human being, or a great white shark, or a killer whale."

Meanwhile, there is jazz, which, as I've said, has no harmful side effects. And I am put in mind now of a lawsuit against a pharmaceutical manufacturer years back, in which the plaintiff's lawyer had this to say about a certain pill, a nostrum that might be likened to our indifference to what we are doing to our environment: "Death is not an acceptable side effect."

© Rolling Stone magazine, May 28,1998

After World War II, I set out to become an anthropologist -- and in fact earned an M.A. in that field from the University of Chicago. That was a big mistake. I couldn't stand primitive people. They were so stupid! But I still have a favorite Native American tribe, the Fuh-kar-wee, who actually exist only in a joke my brother, Bernie, told me.

The joke: In the late 19th century, supposedly, there was this tribe of Indians, see, who had become nomadic. They were forced off their ancestral lands by pioneers, peace treaties and the United States Cavalry.

OK?

So an agent from the Bureau of Indian Affairs was sent to interview them at one of their temporary encampments, to learn who and what they are -- or to be more exact -- who and what they used to be. He asked the name of the tribe. They said, "We are the Fuh-kar-wee."

The agent wanted to know if the name had a special meaning. They said it had in fact been adopted only recently and was based on what their chief, who had just died, wailed in despair at sunset on every day of their aimless wandering:

"Where the Fuh-kar-wee?"

Ancient Romans didn't say, "Where the Fuh-kar-wee?" but they might as well have. "Quo vadis?" they said.

Yes, and where the Fuh-kar-wee as the odometer, which Christians have hooked up to the wheels of history, is about to come up with the number 2000? That all depends on who you are. One thinks of signs displayed next to elevators of many hotels - featuring a floor plan and an arrow and these words: YOU ARE HERE.

Describe yourself: height, weight, hair color, eye color, age, race or subrace, home address, marital status, number and ages of children, make and year of car, known health problems, present occupation and who should be notified in case of an accident.

Besides waiting for an elevator in such-and-such a year, where the Fuh-kar-yew?

In nations employing the Christian calendar, of which ours is one, we will almost all, for the fun of it, become numerologists at the start of the third millennium. Numerology is an entertaining, sociable superstition like astrology -- benign except to paranoid schizophrenics.

It pretends that the inevitable, predictable, clockwork behavior of Arabic numerals locked into the decimal system can, on occasion, give us occult messages we should not ignore. If a year numbered 2000 isn't an all-points bulletin from on high, what is?

Any excuse for a party.

That the odometer is slightly out of whack, that Jesus was born in 5, 6 or 7 B.C. shouldn't be allowed to spoil the party. Jesus was born a few years before himself? Chalk that up as another miracle and party on.  

My late brother, Bernie, who introduced me to Fuh-kar-wee, said the non-stop, maniacal merchandising during the Christmas season made him feel as though clowns were beating him in the face with bladders. The whole of the year 2000 is going to make many of us feel that way, or I miss my guess. Simply because of what the calendar says, and not because of anything Jesus said, God knows, we will be told to go out and buy a lot of crap for ourselves and our business associates and loved ones: millennium wristwatches and cars, bras and boxer shorts, toilet tissue and Coca-Cola.

Why not give an enemy on your shopping list a millennium wireless telephone? It will encourage the recipient to make a perfect asshole of himself or herself by standing in the middle of a crowd, relating to no one in it but chuckling and cooing and snorting, getting happy, getting mad and gesticulating extravagantly, and maybe even doing a little dance, while talking to something the size of a bar of bath soap.

The science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, dead like my brother now, and God rest both their souls, wrote a story about flying-saucer people who visited earth. Two things about the United States really bewildered them. "What is it," they wanted to know, "about blow jobs and golf?"  

Trout wrote that story long before American television newsreaders, for the better part of a whole year and to get the largest possible audiences for their advertisers, who had made them multimillionaires, made this the major issue facing the country: whether or not the president of the most powerful nation on earth had had an extra-marital blow job in the Oval Office.

The actual millennium has come and gone, as unremarked as a sneeze.

Gesundheit!

Trout's story, published in the now-defunct Black Garterbelt magazine, was eerily prescient in yet another way. His E.T.s predicted what is happening only now: that the slathering of antibiotics on every sort of itch or worse would cause germs to evolve into countless diseases that are incurable.

One perfect communicable disease, but the only one so far, AIDS, had been identified back then, in the nick of time to make that issue of Black Garterbelt. And Trout's bug-eyed little green anthropologists had this to say about AIDS: "After the Rape of Nanking, the Holocaust and the gratuitous atomic bombing of Nagasaki, not to mention humankind's poisoning of the air, the waters and the topsoil, your planet's immune system is trying to get rid of you."

Yes, and the planet will soon run out of petroleum in any case -- so our great-grandchildren will inherit an enormous junkyard.

But listen:

Back in 1932 A.D., when I was 10 years old, Dad, Bernie, my sister Allie, and I were driving along somewhere in Indiana in our family's old four-door Studebaker sedan - with Dad at the wheel. I don't know where Mom was. I don't know where Mom is.

The Great Depression was going on. Dad, and architect, had just let his secretary and his draftsmen go and closed his office in downtown Indianapolis. There was no work. The stock market had gone bust and banks had failed, and people had lost their savings.

We were rolling along on our way to somewhere. I don't remember where. And then, unexpectedly, for no apparent reason, Dad steered the car to the side of the road and stopped it in the middle of nowhere.

Where the Fuh-kar-wee?

But then Dad told us three kids to look at the car's odometer.

It read 99,999.9. We were only one tenth of a mile from 100,000!

The moment was breathtaking!

You want to hear about a high adventure? It was as though we had unexpectedly arrived at the rim of the Grand Canyon! Oh my God!

Oh wow! Oh wee!

Dad put the car in motion again. When the Studebaker had gone one tenth of a mile more, the odometer sent the old sludge of all those toxic nines down the toilet of history.

Catharsis!

In their place was an innocent, dinky little one, and then all those zeros. So unsoiled by life - so new, so spanking brand new.

And our father was so happy! He laughed and laughed. His troubles had vanished along with the nines. The odometer had made him feel like a lucky kid again -- in a world that was his oyster.

Tabula rasa.

And so it will be for me, If I'm still around, and for all the rest of the braves and squaws of the Fuh-kar-wee tribe when the Christian odometer of history reads 1999 A.D. And our calendar says it's December 31. And our digital watches tell us it is 11:59 P.M.

Holy shit! I can't breathe!

And then the stinking past will go down the toilet of history.

The year will become 2000 -- and Fuh-kar-wees everywhere, no matter how old they are, and even if their lives as grown-ups have been lousy, will do what my dad did during the Great Depression so long ago: They will laugh like crazy and feel like lucky kids again.

And the world will be their oyster.

This book is said to have been written by me. And I did write it, too, pretty much -- over the past twenty-two years. But it would never have occurred to me to put my words in this particular order. That vision was received by some friendly people at National Educational Television in New York and at WGBH in Boston. With my permission, they took unrelated incidents from several of my stories, and they tacked them together to form a rough draft of a script for a ninety-minute TV show.

I was reminded of the bizarre surgical experiments performed in the H.G. Wells tale The Island of Dr. Moreau. Dr. Moreau cut up all sorts of animals -- and he assembled grotesque new creatures from the parts.

I began to fool around with the script myself. I grafted the head of a box turtle onto the neck of a giraffe, so to speak -- and so on. Amazingly, chillingly, hilariously, the impossible creature lived for a little while. It was clumsy, funny-looking, and almost pathetically eager to please.

It had a soul, too, which was mainly supplied by an extraordinarily gifted actor my own age, William Hickey. Bill, played the part of the reluctant astronaut, Stony Stevenson. Since Stony was not a strongly motivated character, and since we weren't sure what he was supposed to represent anyway, we asked Bill to be himself. He demonstrated that Bill as Bill, adrift in time and space, was an enchanting human being.

Hello, Bill.

My father loved the music of Kurt Weill, and he said one time, admiringly, that the music sounded as though it were written by an inspired amateur. My father was a professional architect. I think he came to resent the neatness and tightness and slickness which his professionalism (and his clients) imposed on his designs. He could never be slapdash and childish or passionately crude. He could never do what inspired amateurs did, which, among other things, was to leave a lot to Lady Luck.

This script, it seems to me, is the work of professionals who yearned to be as charming as inspired amateurs can sometimes be. True, we hired the finest actors and technicians we could find. As for the meaning of the show, though, we left that to Lady Luck. She was good to us this time.

We shot first and asked questions afterwards, which is the American way. It was a picnic. It was a lark. I have never had more skilful, amusing associates.

While we were filming the show, usually on weekends, I told other writers, "Hey, get into non-commercial television." I said this only to writers who were rich. "The pay is lousy," I said, "but the freedom is total, as nearly as I can tell. They'll get you almost any actor you want, they'll break their necks to create any effect you want, and the writer has as much authority as Alexander the Great."

I still feel that way.

As for myself, though, I am not going to have anything more to do with film -- for this reason: I don't like film.

I love National Educational Television. I love WGBH of Boston, which had so much to do with the making of this film. I love George Roy Hill and Universal Pictures, who made a flawless translation of my novel Slaughterhouse-Five to the silver screen. I drool and cackle every time I watch that film, because it is so harmonious with what I felt when I wrote the book.

Even so -- I don't like film.

Film is too clankingly real, too permanent, too industrial for me. As a stingy child of the Great Depression, I am bound to complain that it is also too fucking expensive to be much fun. I get the heebie-jeebies every time I hear how much it will cost to fix a scene that doesn't work quite right. "For God's sake," I say, "leave it just like it is. It's beautiful! Leave it be!"

I have become an enthusiast for the printed word again. I have to be that, I now understand, because I want to be a character in all of my works. I can do that in print. In a movie, somehow, the author vanishes. Everything of mine which has been filmed so far has been one character short, and the character is me.

I don't mean that I am a glorious character. I simply mean that, for better or for worse, I have always rigged my stories so as to include myself, and I can't stop now. And I do this so slyly, as do most novelists, that the author can't be put on film.

Every deeply felt novel which has been turned into a movie has, as a movie, seemed one character short to me. It has made me uneasy on that account. I suspect that the audience has been vaguely uneasy, too -- for the same reason.

The worst thing about film, from my point of view, is that it cripples illusions which I have encouraged people to create in their heads. Film doesn't create illusion. It makes them impossible. It is a bullying form of reality, like the model rooms in the furniture department of Bloomingdale's.

There is nothing for the viewer to do but gawk. For example: there can be only one Clockwork Orange by Stanley Kubrick. There are tens of thousands of Clockwork Oranges by Anthony Burgess, since every reader has to cast, costume, direct, and design the show in his head.

The big trouble with print, or course, is that it is an elitist art form. Most people can't read very well.

Well, so much for film as compared with print. As a friend said of another terrific theory of mine: "It has everything but originality."

I might as well say something about the filming of my play Happy Birthday, Wanda June. It was one of the most embarrassing movies ever made, and I am happy that it sank like a stone.

It was all the director's show, which is usually the case. So was Slaughterhouse-Five. That';s fine, as long as the director is a great director. George Roy Hill is a great director.

I had nothing to do with the script of Slaughterhouse-Five, incidentally. That was the work of Steven Geller -- and a good job it was. I didn't meet him until after the picture opened. He is a novelist, too, and I asked him which he liked best, writing novels or screenplays. He preferred novels by far, since they were wholly under his control.

I told him what Bill Hickey, my actor friend, had said to me about writing for the legitimate theatre of the screen , in effect: "Be prepared to direct what you write, or forget it. If you're going to write something but not direct it, you'll be doing only half your job."

Which is true.

I would like to say something about American comedians: they are often as brilliant and magical as our best jazz musicians, and they have probably done more to shape my thinking than any writer. When people ask me who my culture heroes are, I express pious gratitude for Mark Twain and James Joyce and so on. But the truth is that I am a barbarian, whose deepest cultural debts are to Laurel and Hardy, Stoopnagel and Bud, Buster Keaton, Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Charlie Chaplin, Easy Aces, Henry Morgan, and on and on.

They made me hilarious during the Great Depression, and all the lesser depressions after that. When Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding agreed to work on this TV show, I nearly swooned. I would have been less in awe of Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle.

I wrote some of their jokes in this script, and they delivered them gracefully. But they also made up a lot of new stuff, even when the cameras weren't operating, which made me laugh so hard that I thought I would spend the rest of my life wearing a truss.

One of them said this about Stony Stevenson's mother: "She certainly has nice manners for a welfare deadbeat." When they were asked out of the blue what an astronaut's favorite food as out in space, there was no hesitation. The prompt answer was, "Dehydrated artichoke hearts." And so on.

Cheers.

From: Between Time and Timbuktu or Prometheus-5: a space fantasy based on materials by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1972, pp. xii-xvii).

from:http://www.duke.edu/~crh4/vonnegut/btt.html

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