(This was first posted last Veterans Day on Open Salon as "Kurt Vonnegut:  My Favorite Veteran."  It was then picked up by Rant and Reason, the American Humanist Association's website, an organization for which KV was honorary president.) 

 http://blog.thehumanist.org/2010/11/kurt-vonnegut-my-favorite-veteran/

Photo Credits: Google Images

His Story

Before I explain how much this author means to me, let me tell you a few things about him. Kurt Vonnegut, war hero and popular twentieth century author, was born in Indianapolis just three years after U. S. President Woodrow Wilson declared November 11^th Armistice Day, a holiday commemorating the end of World War I, in 1919. “To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with lots of pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service,” proclaimed the president to a nation still shell-shocked from the War to End All Wars.” Although the name of the celebration was changed in 1954 to Veterans Day to honor the service of all veterans, November 11^th is a day still dedicated to world peace.

The irony of his birthday on Veterans Day was never lost to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. He dedicated his life to promoting peace even though he fought in World War II and was proud of his service to our country. As a soldier who lived through the Battle of the Bulge, he knew the hell of war first hand. Vonnegut was taken prisoner by the Germans and sent to Dresden where the starving young man worked in a vitamin factory and risked beatings by sneaking teaspoons of the life-giving stuff. It was located in a meat storage locker with a cellar that on February 13, 1945, served very well as a shelter during the firebombing of Dresden by British Allied Forces.

One hundred and thirty five thousand people were killed and to the end of his days Vonnegut wondered why he and his fellow prisoners were not killed also. Dresden, the once magnificent European showplace, looked like the craters of the moon when they emerged from the meat locker into the still smoking ruins. The prisoners were ordered to pull hundreds of bodies out of basements but the city became so putrid that the liquefying remains of the citizenry were burnt with flamethrowers for expediency.

He defended his participation in World War II but reminded us of the human cost of wars. “One of the great American tragedies is to have participated in a just war. It's been possible for politicians and movie-makers to encourage us we're always good guys. The Second World War absolutely had to be fought. I wouldn't have missed it for the world. But we never talk about the people we kill. This is never spoken of,” Vonnegut said in a 2002 interview.

Vonnegut was able to write about his war experiences in his masterwork Slaughterhouse-Five many years later finally publishing it in 1969. It was a bestseller and he was haunted by a terrible sense of loss and riddled with guilt about the riches he made from the book’s publication. In a speech he stated ruefully, "… not one Allied soldier was able to advance as much as an inch because of the firebombing of Dresden. Not one prisoner of the Nazis got out of prison a microsecond earlier. Only one person on Earth clearly benefited, and I am that person. I got about five dollars for each corpse, counting my fee tonight."

The astonishing thing about all this is that Vonnegut tells us his story of war with exquisite humor as well as sadness. He’s been called “a moral mad scientist” and “the pinball wizard of cosmic cool.” However, his humor does not in the least take away from his serious themes about dark, foolish humanity and its responsibility for this messed up world.

In the early 1970s, the Viet Nam War was still playing on the television’s evening news every night—as well as the sometimes violent resistance to student demonstrations against it. Vonnegut was then a successful author who had paid his dues working as a PR man for General Electric and writing short stories for the sci-fi pulps. He was also a teacher and for a time owned a SAAB Dealership. The man had had his ups and downs but in this stage of his life he seemed to be enjoying what was called a cult following in the literary world of New York City. Or so my boyfriend affirmed, who was an English major and thought his bimbo art major girlfriend, me, needed some smartening up.

My ears perked at the words “cult following.” I thought it meant “cultured” and that college kids dug it. A dog-eared copy of Sirens of Titan was handed to me with a somewhat doubtful look. He knew all too well of my unenthusiastic study habits. I honestly don’t think he thought I would, but I read it. Then I read Slaughterhouse-Five which completely blew my mind because I didn’t realize that a book could be so inventive in form and style. I read every other thing he wrote and has written since.

Here is why. I understood him. It had been a long time since I had read something that I enjoyed-- probably something like Nancy Drew, no doubt. College students long to read something other than textbooks and I was no exception. Classics like Pride and Prejudice, The Scarlet Letter, and the Red Badge of Courage held me not in thrall. I couldn’t get past the antiquated diction and for that reason, I couldn’t stay interested. Here at last was a writer who explained things thoroughly and was not in the least condescending about it. He used words I knew when asking the big questions and he even dared to answer them. Is there a God? Kurt created The Church of God of the Utterly Indifferent. What are we here for? “We are here to fart around and don’t let anyone tell you differently.”

Vonnegut warned us that we are what we pretend to be so we should be careful what we pretend -- kind of like Shakespeare’s All the World’s a Stage passage from As You Like It but followed with a good postmodern and paternal admonition. With his blend of dark satire, science fiction, philosophy, and jokes, he perfectly captured the reeling mindset of the latter twentieth century. From politics to consumer culture, from the Mind of God to the destruction of the environment, nothing was sacred in Vonnegut’s comic canon of truth.

I appreciated how many of his novels interconnect. Characters appear as minor players in one book and re-emerge as the chief protagonist in another. And the crazy scenarios! In his world characters are capable of practically anything. Billy Pilgrim (Slaughterhouse-five) experiences the ultimate in stream-of-consciousness by becoming unstuck in time living any moment in his life in random order. Millionaire do-gooders (God Bless You, Eliot Rosewater) befriend science fiction writers who look like F. Scott Fitzgerald one day away from death and whose books can only be found in the bargain bins at pornography shops. Semi-retarded twin giants (Slapstisck) devise a plan to eradicate loneliness from the human race by creating artificial extended families. Vonnegut created a whole world for a spaceship replacement part (Sirens of Titan). The author was almost godlike conceiving fictional life-forms such as the alien Tralfamadorians and the Mercurian Harmoniums. The concept of chrono-synclastic infundibula, places in the universe where all truths intersect with perfection was only one of his utopian dreams.

One of the most important lessons Vonnegut taught me was to notice when I was happy—to “be here now” and appreciate. “I wanted all things to make some sense,” he wrote in a short poem, “so we could all be happy, yes, and not tense. And I made up lies, so they all fit nice, and I made this sad world a paradise.” What a sweet and funny idealist!

However, he was certainly not a perfect person. For a counter-culture hero, Vonnegut was a bit of a square--didn’t do drugs, raised seven children, and was a volunteer fireman. He was caustic, too, and a chain-smoker. Because he minced no words, I imagine it would have been hard to be in a relationship with him at times; he admitted he’d say anything for a joke. (Oh, no! I just used a semi-colon, the punctuation mark Vonnegut saw as pretentious.) You also don’t want to be Geraldo Rivera or George W. Bush.

Nevertheless, all this reading and philosophy made me a much smarter person than I would have been otherwise and so I began to read books by more authors, too, including those old classics I had dismissed as too outmoded. Eventually, I became a high school English teacher and it has been my pleasure to introduce students to one of my favorite authors. You can be sure they have embraced Vonnegut’s quirky wisdom just I did many years ago. I recently got a text from a former student who told me he was reading Player Piano while on break at Peter Piper’s Pizza and my daughter called me one morning to tell me that she had just finished Breakfast of Champions and that she laughed then cried.

I wrote a letter once to thank him and let him know how much he meant to me over the years. It was sent in care of Delacorte Publishers who printed his beautiful hardbacks with the handsome dust jackets with a request to please forward. One morning, several months later, I went to the mailbox and to my wonderment there was a postcard from Kurt Vonnegut addressed to me.

This cool author was really an old fashioned gentleman who answers his mail! I felt like that famous painting by Michelangelo, you know, the one with God and Adam reaching out toward each other. On the front of it was a playful advertisement for Absolut Vodka that was designed by Vonnegut who was also an artist. Written with a Sharpie, on the flipside it read: “You have no idea how much it means to an old geezer with his memories and Pall Malls to get a literate and warm letter like the one you sent to me! I am close to manly tears.” There was the familiar self portrait, a profile with his wild hair, cigarette dangling from his lips. His signature decorated with a cartoon asshole.

 The card had a Christmas stamp on it of depicting Madonna and Child. I am still thrilled about it.

Not everyone is a fan. A number of the elements I like about Vonnegut, his mostly short sentences and simple diction, have made his work a target of harsh critics. They mistake his scientific elegance (Vonnegut was also a chemist and an anthropologist.) for being kind of a simpleton. Others have called him a “comic book philosopher and purveyor of empty aphorisms” perhaps because they don’t like his politics. Some people just don’t get him. When he died in 2007, Fox ran a reprehensible obituary which I shall try to link:

After having read Vonnegut again years later as a more sophisticated reader, my opinion of him has not changed. I am struck by his sweetness and loving-kindness for individual humans especially the least of them. With this humble offering, I have not even begun to share the richness, despair, comfort, and joy derived from knowing him through his work. Read him and be amazed again and again. He is also on YouTube if reading is not something you do. You will laugh out loud and then cry like the rest of us who love him. The man is never boring. Prepare to be surprised. Once an honorary president of the American Humanist Association, he recommended posting the Beatitudes in front of courthouses instead of The Ten Commandments. He is an American Master who will be appreciated even more by future generations for his ingenious literary innovation and fun postmodern flair. Who else can use Coke bottles and Three Musketeers candy bars for symbols or end a war by running a movie backwards?  I would leave you with a short video that illustrates the famous passage from Slaughterhouse-Five. I found it on YouTube:

 “American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses, took off backwards from an air field in England. Over France, a few German fighters flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen... The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames.

The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the flames, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes.... When the bombers got back to base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating day and night, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_72wGGgtv9I