A U.S. view: Tears for Kurt Vonnegut

It's the morning of April 12, 1945, the day U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died. Winston Churchill remarked that on hearing the news it was “as if I had been struck a physical blow.”

I felt that way the morning I heard that Kurt Vonnegut had died [2].

I did what I normally do in the morning before going off to a useless job at a soulless American bookseller chain âe" I switched between two cable “news” channels CNN and MSNBC.

I was treated to non-stop stories about Don Imus. White people bloviating about Imus. Non-white people bloviating about Imus over and over again, ad nauseum. Imus may have been off television but television was not through with him.

I fired up my laptop and the AP headline [3] leapt out at me like a rock to the head: “Author Kurt Vonnegut Dies at 84.”

And the tears came. Not so much for Kurt whose own website [4] now shows only an open birdcage (it looks like one of his own drawings) but for all of us in America. I read several obits while switching between news channels in vain, hoping one of the models-turned-newsreaders would mention the passing of an original American genius.

No such luck. America seems fascinated by a man who will go to his grave best known for a careless racist crack and a lifetime greatly influenced by binging on cocaine and vodka. Eliot Rosewater he ain't.

The boob tube continued its veritable parade of useless, forgettable trivialities: Imus, Duke lacrosse players, Anna Nicole Smith.

Breaking news! “This just in.” I paused, waiting. “The CEO of Vonage has resigned.”

So it goes.

I wasn't asking for much, just maybe 15 seconds of recognition for the man who gave us Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse Five and my personal favourite Breakfast of Champions.

It was that book, read in high school, that reassured me that I was not insane. Breakfast let me know that someone else got it: that our society was basically insane and, in fact, ran on and profited from, that insanity.

There was a harbinger of Vonnegut's death for me on Tuesday. A young man who reminded me of, well, me at that age, came up to my register clutching a cache of dog-eared Vonnegut paperbacks including another one of my favorites Mother Night.

The young man had a happy glow about him. He had recently discovered this American treasure and was soaking up his various works like a sponge.

“I'm trying to read everything I can find,” the customer said. “Have you read Breakfast of Champions,” I asked. “Not yet,” he said. “You've got to read that one,” I said. “It's the ultimate expression of the banality of American life.”

The customer assured me he would be checking back later for additional works by the sage of Indianapolis (if he does, he'll find my soulless chain just jacked up the price of all his works). It made my day to see that even in the jaded first decade of what will probably be human civilization's final century, that some other young person would rediscover Kurt Vonnegut.

And then Thursday morning, I found out he was gone. I'm not sure that Kurt fully embraced the Internet but if it weren't for this new medium, I would have probably gone to work without knowing he was gone.

Now CNN's feature on conspicuous consumption Your American Home, was assaulting my senses. I found it ironic that the Financial Times obit contained this gem: “Best known for his novels of the 1960s and early 1970s Cat's Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut believed that art was a way to make your soul grow, a way to stave off television's capacity to numb through repetition.”

We are all pretty numb right now. Every day we're bombarded with images of a world gone mad âe" an endless slaughter for empire and oil in Iraq, a parade of mindless celebrity-induced vomit at home and a world whose infrastructure is disintegrating with all deliberate speed.

Vonnegut understood all of this and it tortured him. Like everyone else who refused to look at life through rose coloured glasses, the burden of knowing reality wore heavily on him. He suffered from severe depression and even made a halfhearted suicide attempt in 1984. He also suffered from the strain of trying to reach an increasingly less literate population that, as America headed toward a new century, seems less able to grasp the subtleties in his work and less patient with the nuance of the written word.

It is probably just and fitting that Kurt leaves us now. In his last work A Man Without A Country, (2005) he acknowledged the gap between the reality-based community in which he dwelt, and a growing segment of the American public. He wrote about the knowledge the Earth was running short of oil and that everything we believed modern life to be would soon irrevocably change and probably for the worse.

In A Man Without A Country, Vonnegut, a humanist and agnostic, wanted us to have a laugh on him when he went:

“I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, 'Isaac is up in heaven now.' It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, 'Kurt is up in heaven now.' That's my favourite joke.”

Vonnegut gave two radio interviews that I heard shortly after his last book was released. One was for National Public Radio [5]; the other was for the CBC Radio's Anna Maria Tremonti on the February 1 edition of The Current [6] (audio), which was far franker and darker than the previous week's NPR interview. Perhaps Kurt knew Canadian listeners could take it straight and in fact, said at the beginning of the interview that perhaps he'd rather be a Canadian.

Listening to the interview, I felt that Vonnegut captured the mood of so many of his readers that the great tragedy of living in America was that he had such high dreams for the country, now dashed.

“God, this could have been such a great country,” Vonnegut said.

In any case, he gave a frank assessment of the bleak future we faced but said it no longer troubled him so much since he would soon be dead. Tremonti, seemingly disbelieving what she was hearing, said he had to still care and Vonnegut agreed he still did care.

“I do care because I have grandchildren and I am ashamed of the country they are trying to make a living in,” Vonnegut said. “It's heartless; such a heartless country.”

The 23 minutes of the interview is hard to listen to, or at least it was for me. And yet there was nothing in Vonnegut's painful observations with which I would disagree. It has made his passing all the harder for those of us who came of age reading him but perhaps we can take some solace from the fact that he is free of the reality that tortured him, from that horrible night in Dresden in Slaughterhouse Five to his fatal fall at home.

For those of us who feel we have lost our greatest voice raging against the inanity and insanity of our society (call us Vonnegut's orphans), I would prefer to end this small tribute with the best advice Kurt gave us through his literary creation and alter ego Eliot Rosewater:

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies — 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.'

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