It feels like a time that Kurt Vonnegut would not like to be witnessing
It’s war and destruction, but kindness and common human decency right along with the cruelty
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The eighth graders were excited that they got to keep the books Julia Whitehead told me. They weren’t used to that. People giving them free books. As part of one of their outreach programs with the community the founder of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library in Indianapolis had arranged for the eighth grade students to receive a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five. They were then asked to write a personal narrative of their own that shared a trauma they might have experienced in their lives in keeping with the spirit of Vonnegut’s novel which happens to be celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. (Another thing they’re doing this year is trying to donate 86,000 copies of the book to every high school sophomore in the state. Another type of thing they do is introduce members of the Indiana Prison Writers Workshop to Vonnegut’s work.)
It was an economically challenged school and the stories the kids shared were particularly heartbreaking Whitehead said. One wrote of how his brother was killed in a gang-related shooting and another said her mother was deported and a third said his baby brother had died when he was supposed to be watching him. One young woman used it as an opportunity to come out.
“To be able to do that in this environment that was so supportive and loving? It’s so important for us to be able to tell our stories and to be accepted for that, for what happened to us, or what we’ve done,” Whitehead told me. “To be forgiven for things and just loved? That’s Vonnegut. That’s what he wanted.”
I was talking to Whitehead because as I just learned this morning a Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library exists. What a thing. Another thing I learned is that they’re up against the wall when it comes to crossing the finish line for a fundraiser to secure a permanent home for their museum and community space. If you’d like to send them a few bucks you can do so here.
Whitehead told me another thing the students said after reading Slaughterhouse-Five which may or may not be relevant to our purposes here at Hell World.
“Some of them liked the way that Vonnegut connects with his readers, which is unusual with writers, the way he would insert himself into stories and not just tell the plot, but include his own thoughts about things.”
Sometimes people will write to me and say some shit like Hell World reminds them of Vonnegut and I’ll write back to them and say shut the fuck up because it’s embarrassing to get a compliment you feel is unearned. Just kidding I usually say thank you that is too kind but what I really think is something like just because you hit a couple of jump shots in a row on a busted playground hoop while shouting Curry! doesn’t mean you’re anything like him.
I have of course read almost everything Vonnegut ever published but it’s been at least ten years or more since I’ve cracked open one of his books. I was poking through one earlier today to try to get my head back in the proper spirit and I came across something he wrote about librarians which seemed appropriate considering the topic of today’s newsletter. I was going to quote it in part but then the entire chapter from A Man Without a Country really hit me and it seemed almost exactly the type of shit that would fit in here so here’s the whole thing and then after that read the rest of my interview with Whitehead below about the library and museum’s mission and what they do in the community and what have you. Please do not sue me Random House although that would probably be good for me come to think of it. Please do sue me Random House.
Side note: Kurt Vonnegut join the DSA.
“Do unto others what you would have them do unto you.” 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, five hundred 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.
We’ve sure come a long way since then. Sometimes I wish we hadn’t. I hate H-bombs and the Jerry Springer Show.
But back to people like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark, each of whom have said in their own way how we could behave more humanely and maybe make the world a less painful place. One of my favorite humans 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 not yet four, ran five times as the Socialist Party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, almost 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, I’m of it.
As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
Doesn’t anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?
When you get out of bed each morning, with the roosters crowing, wouldn’t you like to say. “As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
How about Jesus’ 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.
And so on.
Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld 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 that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.
“Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon? Give me a break!
It so happens that idealism enough for anyone is not made of perfumed pink clouds. It is the law! It is the U.S. Constitution.
But I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened instead is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’état imaginable.
I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: “C-Students from Yale.”
George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.
To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of Georgia, and published in 1941. Read it!
Some people are born deaf, some are born blind or whatever, and this book is about congenitally defective human beings of a sort that is making this whole country and many other parts of the planet go completely haywire nowadays. These were people born without consciences, and suddenly they are taking charge of everything.
PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!
And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And they are waging a war that is making billionaires out of millionaires, and trillionaires out of billionaires, and they own television, and they bankroll George Bush, and not because he’s against gay marriage.
So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.
They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin’ day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they don’t give a fuck what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!
There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president.
The title of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury’s great science-fiction novel Fahrenheit 451. Four hundred and fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury’s novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.
While on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, their powerful political connections or great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and destroyed records rather than have to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.
So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
And still on the subject of books: Our daily news sources, newspapers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books do we learn what’s really going on. I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published in early 2004, that humiliating, shameful, blood-soaked year.
Ok here’s the interview with the founder and CEO of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library in Indianapolis Julia Whitehead now.
Tell me about the museum. What do you actually do there?
We’re not just a museum in the classic sense, although we have Vonnegut’s typewriter, we have his purple heart. We have every piece of writing that was published by Vonnegut from the start including all of those magazine back in the 1950s that published short stories. We have his reading glasses, we have a box of Pall Malls from the 1970s behind his book shelf. So there is all of that.
But also, what makes us relevant to people who are not necessarily Vonnegut fans, is that our venue is a community for people to learn about things that mattered to Vonnegut and matter to all of us like free speech, mental health awareness, we do suicide prevention training, we have Banned Books Week. We had someone living in the front window of the library during Banned Books Week. In September we have different notable people reading from their favorite banned book. We do a lot with veterans, like veterans writing workshops and book discussion groups. We go into schools and teach personal narrative. It’s a therapeutic thing for students.
What other sorts of things do you do? Tell me about the book giveaway and the fundraiser.
This year we’re giving away 86,000 copies of Slaughterhouse-Five because it’s the 50th anniversary of that book. We’re giving them away to any high school sophomore in the state of Indiana who wants one thanks to generous donors who want to see that book carried forward.
We do so much stuff that is about things that matter to people in their daily lives. And having a place to go? It feels like you’re walking into Cheers when you come into the Vonnegut library. It’s a community gathering place. You can hear music, comedians, there’s beautiful art work on the walls because Vonnegut was an artist. It’s just a beautiful place, and now we’re trying to get a building that has the square footage that we need to be able to hold our collection and conduct our programs. It’s in the historic jazz district of Indianapolis, right across the street from one of our public universities that Vonnegut loved. He loved that it was an urban university for everybody. So it’s just a wonderful plan, this building.
How many people come through there a year?
We’ve been open for more than eight years, so we’ve reached almost 400,000 people in that time. Some of that is including when we go into schools and talk to twenty five people or whatever. But this new building is in an area that is easily seen by anybody who’s coming into the heart of Indianapolis. It’s a great opportunity for us to reach students, people who work there and live there, and all of our visitors who come from all over the world to see Kurt Vonnegut’s typewriter and other things.
How did the museum come together? Were you there from the beginning?
I was. I was rocking my baby to sleep back in 2008. I had been to a funeral for someone I didn’t know very well. Everybody was so devastated at the loss of this person, and I was thinking: Wow who would I memorialize in such a way? And my mind just immediate went to Kurt Vonnegut. I rushed my baby to sleep, put him down, and started Googling, thinking how can we learn more about Kurt Vonnegut? I realized there was not a place to go that was uniquely devoted to Vonnegut’s life and work and that night I just knew that’s what I wanted to do with my life. I left a very good job to open the library! We had like three months salary for me when we opened.
There’s this great Vonnegut quote and it’s basically “We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” That’s what this whole experience has been, just taking a chance that people care enough.
I get these emails, people donating ten bucks, twenty bucks, fifty bucks, we have survived all these years because of those folks. We don’t have any million dollar donors or $500,000 donors. We don’t have those kinds of major donors, what we have are thousands of people who have been influenced by Vonnegut, and they are loyal to us. Some of them might never step foot in the library in their lives but they know what we are doing and it’s so wonderful.
I assume you’ve been a lifelong fan. Do you have a first memory or first book of his this has stuck with you? I think it happens for a lot of people where they probably read one and then realize wow there’s like twenty of these books!
Yeah, I read Slaughterhouse-Five first and I knew it was important. I had served in the military and stuff and I read it before that, but now when I read it I read it differently and I love it for different reasons. But the one I read right before I had the idea for the library was God Bless You Mr Rosewater. That character Eliot Rosewater, he’s a character that some readers might not get. They might not see what an angel this person is, and how beautifully regular he is and also saintly at the same time. That’s kind of what inspired me, that book meant a lot to me. And then also there’s a wonderful collection of Vonnegut’s letters compiled by a writer named Dan Wakefield. I like the biographies the most, I like the novels and short stories, but I love the man. His ability to survive all these horrific things he suffered in his life and to do it with humor and to continue to love people and to expect love. So for me the collected letters, I got to know him that way. I never met him during his lifetime.
You’re a veteran, did you happen to see any combat?
No I was a veteran during the Bill Clinton years. So I sat in an office the whole time. That’s one of those things when you’re that person you’re sort of embarrassed about your war service, but having said that I love the work we do connecting with war veterans. We do a lot of stuff to try to help people cope with their war experience wherever they are in that journey.
Certainly nothing to be embarrassed about in front of me at all! The reason I was asking is it’s the 50th anniversary of Slaughterhouse and I wonder if you think there are any lessons from the book that are particularly poignant during this era.
Slaughterhouse has a heavy dose of absurdity that he points out in so many different ways. That’s one thing that kind of helps to keep the book light, even with all the horrors of war. That absurdity is what we see these days in every part of society, whether it’s somebody trying to shut down free speech or just poor diplomatic relations. It feels like a time that Kurt Vonnegut would not like to be witnessing. And also, just the book itself, as reflected by Vonnegut, as a post-war PTSD sufferer, he has to make sense of his war experience, and to do it through the arts. Like I said we’re doing that now with our veteran friends, trying to help people make sense of the chaos that is our current reality. The book is timeless. He talked about the same stuff we’re dealing with today and probably will be the same fifty years from now when it reaches it’s one 100th anniversary. It’s war and destruction, but kindness and common human decency right along with the cruelty.
I also love the free speech aspect of his book. He wanted to shock people a little bit with that book, but I love that so many people that come into the museum do not want their free speech to be trampled on. Even if they don’t like the book they are supporting Vonnegut’s ability to write whatever he wanted, at a time when it wasn’t very popular to speak out against war or veterans. He made it ok to be real, and to call out the emperor who has no clothes. Boy is that important now.
Well I certainly would love to see what he would think of the emperor we have now.
…
I can’t imagine he would be a big fan.
[Laughing] Yeah, well, I’m not supposed to comment on those type of things… but I suspect you might be right!
Is it a bipartisan fandom you see in the museum?
In the beginning it was those kind of left-leaning readers who were coming and offering their volunteer services. As time has gone on and people have learned what we do, like free speech events and veterans writings programs, it’s amazing who supports us. In fact here’s one who is going to shock you: Vice President Pence…
Oh boy…
…has been to the Vonnegut Library and said he met Kurt Vonnegut, he liked Kurt Vonnegut. He showed up for us during Banned Books Week. We were not expecting to see at the time Governor Pence at the library that week. But he showed up and said he supports free speech. He’s a former journalist did you know that?
I did!
He was a broadcast journalist. We had a really interesting conversation. In other ways I’m sure he would not agree with Vonnegut, but that’s one cool thing about us, that we can unite people with common ground. Free speech is one of those intersections for people, and that’s super cool.
I’m certainly no fan of Pence, but it’s good that he supported the museum in that way I guess. I noticed there’s some connection to Jimmy Kimmel?
Yes he is one of our donors and advocates. He has been kind of the chair of this 86,000 book giveaway this year. Since we’ve switched over our public talk recently to the building, he’ll get more involved again as we get this building purchased, then move back into some of our other things we’re doing.
Wait, what’s the significance of the number 86,000?
There are 86,000 high school sophomore in Indiana. Each one of those students will get a copy of the book.
Is there a memory from working with students that sticks with you?
One specific thing really got me. We often do things with high school students, but we started this kind of pilot project for eighth grade students. What’s it like to take Slaughterhouse into eighth grade? Unfortunately we did it at the end of the year, two years ago. The students read the book, then wrote about something horrific in their own lives to kind of get the sort of cleansing personal narrative experience. We had a salon and students were able to read their work and talk about Vonnegut. Some of the students were so grateful to have a book given to them that wasn’t a text book. That was something that was surprising to me, some of the comments like, you mean we get to keep it? That kind of thing.
Some of them liked the way that Vonnegut connects with his readers, which is unusual with writers, the way he would insert himself into stories and not just tell the plot, but include his own thoughts about things.
What made that project so special was this particular school, inner city, economically challenged, every one of these students had something traumatic. The other students and teachers did not know about what these students were going through. One said my brother was gunned down in gang violence, my mom was sent back to Mexico, my baby brother died and I was supposed to be watching him and I was playing my video games. One thing after another. The teacher said wow we really wish we had done this at the beginning of the school year because we had no idea what these students were going through. One young woman came out as a lesbian as part of this process. To be able to do that in this environment that was so supportive and loving, wow, that’s so important for us to be able to tell our stories and to be accepted for that, for what happened to us, or what we’ve done. To be forgiven for things and just loved? That’s Vonnegut. That’s what he wanted.