Kurt Vonnegut Documentary

God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian by Kurt Vonnegut (Audiobook)

Ever wonder what famous people would tell us from beyond the grave? Kurt Vonnegut, with the aid of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, satisfies our curiosity through a little elbow grease, investigative journalism and several controlled near death experiences. In this collection of essays, Vonnegut interviews Eugene Debs, Adolph Hitler, Isaac Newton and many more for National Public Radio. It is to our benefit and immense delight Vonnegut was able to finish this off-beat work before passing away. Kurt may be up in heaven but he did us the small courtesy of writing some of the best fiction of the 20th Century for us to read while we fart around down here on Earth.


Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17

Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut (1961)

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.


Some things about living still weren’t quite right, though. April, for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.


It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn’t think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.


George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel’s cheeks, but she’d forgotten for the moment what they were about.


On the television screen were ballerinas.


A buzzer sounded in George’s head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm.


“That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did,” said Hazel.


“Huh?” said George.


“That dance – it was nice,” said Hazel.


“Yup,” said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren’t really very good – no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn’t be handicapped. But he didn’t get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.


George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.


Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself she had to ask George what the latest sound had been.


“Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer,” said George.


“I’d think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds,” said Hazel, a little envious. “All the things they think up.”


“Um,” said George.


“Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what I would do?” said Hazel. Hazel, as a matter of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper General, a woman named Diana Moon Glampers. “If I was Diana Moon Glampers,” said Hazel, “I’d have chimes on Sunday – just chimes. Kind of in honor of religion.”


“I could think, if it was just chimes,” said George.


“Well – maybe make ‘em real loud,” said Hazel. “I think I’d make a good Handicapper General.”


“Good as anybody else,” said George.


“Who knows better’n I do what normal is?” said Hazel.


“Right,” said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped that.


“Boy!” said Hazel, “that was a doozy, wasn’t it?”


It was such a doozy that George was white and trembling and tears stood on the rims of his red eyes. Two of the eight ballerinas had collapsed to the studio floor, were holding their temples.


“All of a sudden you look so tired,” said Hazel. “Why don’t you stretch out on the sofa, so’s you can rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch.” She was referring to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot in canvas bag, which was padlocked around George’s neck. “Go on and rest the bag for a little while,” she said. “I don’t care if you’re not equal to me for a while.”


George weighed the bag with his hands. “I don’t mind it,” he said. “I don’t notice it any more. It’s just a part of me.


“You been so tired lately – kind of wore out,” said Hazel. “If there was just some way we could make a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of them lead balls. Just a few.”


“Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out,” said George. “I don’t call that a bargain.”


“If you could just take a few out when you came home from work,” said Hazel. “I mean – you don’t compete with anybody around here. You just set around.”


“If I tried to get away with it,” said George, “then other people’d get away with it and pretty soon we’d be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn’t like that, would you?”


“I’d hate it,” said Hazel.


“There you are,” said George. “The minute people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society?”


If Hazel hadn’t been able to come up with an answer to this question, George couldn’t have supplied one. A siren was going off in his head.


“Reckon it’d fall all apart,” said Hazel.


“What would?” said George blankly.


“Society,” said Hazel uncertainly. “Wasn’t that what you just said?”


“Who knows?” said George.


The television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn’t clear at first as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For about half a minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say, “Ladies and gentlemen – ”


He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read.


“That’s all right –” Hazel said of the announcer, “he tried. That’s the big thing. He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for trying so hard.”


“Ladies and gentlemen” said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred-pound men.


And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for a woman to use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. “Excuse me – ” she said, and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.


“Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen,” she said in a grackle squawk, “has just escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under–handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous.”


A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen – upside down, then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed the full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall.


The rest of Harrison’s appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever worn heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H–G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.


Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.


And to offset his good looks, the H–G men required that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle–tooth random.


“If you see this boy,” said the ballerina, “do not – I repeat, do not – try to reason with him.”


There was the shriek of a door being torn from its hinges.


Screams and barking cries of consternation came from the television set. The photograph of Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again, as though dancing to the tune of an earthquake.


George Bergeron correctly identified the earthquake, and well he might have – for many was the time his own home had danced to the same crashing tune. “My God –” said George, “that must be Harrison!”


The realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an automobile collision in his head.


When George could open his eyes again, the photograph of Harrison was gone. A living, breathing Harrison filled the screen.


Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood in the center of the studio. The knob of the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians, musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die.


“I am the Emperor!” cried Harrison. “Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!” He stamped his foot and the studio shook.


“Even as I stand here –” he bellowed, “crippled, hobbled, sickened – I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!”


Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand pounds.


Harrison’s scrap–iron handicaps crashed to the floor.


Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his head harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles against the wall.


He flung away his rubber–ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor, the god of thunder.


“I shall now select my Empress!” he said, looking down on the cowering people. “Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her throne!”


A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow.


Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all, he removed her mask.


She was blindingly beautiful.


“Now” said Harrison, taking her hand, “shall we show the people the meaning of the word dance? Music!” he commanded.


The musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them of their handicaps, too. “Play your best,” he told them, “and I’ll make you barons and dukes and earls.”


The music began. It was normal at first – cheap, silly, false. But Harrison snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them like batons as he sang the music as he wanted it played. He slammed them back into their chairs.


The music began again and was much improved.


Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while – listened gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it.


They shifted their weights to their toes.


Harrison placed his big hands on the girl’s tiny waist, letting her sense the weightlessness that would soon be hers.


And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!


Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well.


They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.


They leaped like deer on the moon.


The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it. It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling.


They kissed it.


And then, neutralizing gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time.


It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.


Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.


It was then that the Bergerons’ television tube burned out.


Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George.


But George had gone out into the kitchen for a can of beer.


George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. “You been crying?” he said to Hazel.


“Yup,” she said,


“What about?” he said.


“I forget,” she said. “Something real sad on television.”


“What was it?” he said.


“It’s all kind of mixed up in my mind,” said Hazel.


“Forget sad things,” said George.


“I always do,” said Hazel.


“That’s my girl,” said George. He winced. There was the sound of a riveting gun in his head.


“Gee – I could tell that one was a doozy,” said Hazel.


“You can say that again,” said George.


“Gee –” said Hazel, “I could tell that one was a doozy.”

Brainy and Breezy: Smart books for stupid people

Reading. Is there a bigger waste of a summer? School's out, the days are long and the nights - even longer. Dostoevsky's great, but not while sucking down a belly shot or setting off Works Bombs during the 4th of July. But then the dog days hit. Your body wreaks of Kessler's and bug spray, and you've pissed off all those barflies you started June with after one too many Jose Cuervo-charged, "Real World" smackdowns. After the secondhand smoke clears, all that's left is you and your books. These are a couple of my favorites, originally recommended by my girlfriend the blogger at Where I Drown (love you, honey).

Daniel Quinn has a secret he's not going to tell you - his large, telepathic gorilla will. Quinn sounds certifiable, I know, but Ishmael, the title character and the name of the aforesaid primate, will have you thinking it's the rest of us who're loony. The too-simple plot is an afterthought, acting as wallpaper behind the dialog. The navel-gazing protagonist answers a classified ad requesting a student who has a strong desire to save the world. When he answers the ad he is greeted by Ishmael who agrees to take the nameless main character under his tutelage.

Beyond the plot it's difficult to reveal much more without diluting the joy of discovery that accompanies every turn of the page. This much I can say: Ishmael promises to so profoundly alter your understanding of the human animal that you'll feel a subtle sense of alienation from the rest of the world. It takes until chapter two to start fearing he just might deliver. The trouble is not religious or racial or economic, although it encases all three. And, unlike many contemporary problem-spotters, Quinn offers a single solution which could save the world if only we had the courage to pursue it. By the end it is you, the reader, who become Ishmael's student.


Rule number 6 for writing fiction according to Kurt Vonnegut: "Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of." Kurt ain't playin' either. Not only does he put a character or two characters or even a cluster of characters under duress he puts humanity under taxing, even misanthropically fatal, conditions and watches it squirm. You need only recall Cat's Cradle to know we don't always make it out alive. Galapagos is Vonnegut's version of Utopia, which reads like a Dystopian saga for us technocrats. The narrative includes multiple continents and travels across a million years of human destiny. It's an interweaving tangle of characters colliding against each other all converging at the same place Darwin made his heretical discovery with his ship, "The Beagle," 180 years ago. After the onset of a worldwide nuclear war all of humanity is poisoned, except for that remote archipelago supporting the last survivors of the human race. From there we evolve into a species more suited for that environment - developing flippers, shedding hair and losing intelligence.

What makes the novel so terrifying is how right Vonnegut could turn out to be. Well-conceived satires like Network have proven the more outlandish one tries to portray the world the more closely the world adheres to his or her forecast. The reality of complete nuclear destruction is urine-inducing by itself, but to imagine mankind without its identity is petrifying.

Kurt Vonnegut: November 11, 1922 - April 11, 2007

My story is not unlike a multitude of others, many of who became lifelong admirers of Vonnegut's fiction. I was in college. A friend had slipped me a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five which I immediately read cover to cover. Down to his style, it was unlike anything else I've read.

My first literary crush was on Salinger, I thought The Catcher in the Rye was written just for me. That was until I found out that there were several million kids just like myself who thought the exact same thing. Then, I fell in love with Vonnegut, and this wasn't puppy love, this was head-over-heels, fat-kid-and-chocolate-cake kind of love. Half the fun of reading Vonnegut is sharing your experience with other fans, and converting new ones. Since then I've permanently loaned "Slaughterhouse" along with several other Vonnegut classics to friends. That's the miracle of Vonnegut, his work is the currency of the disenfranchised hipster with a heart of gold. Although he had a misanthropic streak in him, he was always funny, and radiated a warmth in his writing nobody else could match. Every author wanted to be him.

Always topical Vonnegut's last book, Man without a Country, demonstrated how sharp the guy was even until the very end. On The Daily Show in 2005 he said this of evolution:

"I do feel that evolution is being controlled by some sort of divine engineer. I can't help thinking that. And this engineer knows exactly what he or she is doing and why, and where evolution is headed. That’s why we’ve got giraffes and hippopotami and the clap."

When "Country" was published and he appeared on Realtime and PBS, he was funny, but he looked bad. He appeared more haggard than normal and age had damaged his voice. A few weeks before he died Kurt had fallen, his condition worsened. Kurt Vonnegut died at the age of 84, and he will be missed.

"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"

Charlie Rose - Tom Wolfe / Kurt Vonnegut / Michael Johnson