Farewell, Hello, Farewell, Hello

If you’re feeling down, I suggest you read “Humour Noir” to help you through the coming Dark Times (https://outofunitedstates.com/p/humour-noir). In it I discuss, among others, the late, great novelist Kurt Vonnegut.

Vonnegut often called himself a "child of the Great Depression" (like my father, born in 1922 and, like Vonnegut, a WWII combat veteran), and spoke of how the Depression fueled pessimism about the American Dream’s validity. Like many of his readers, I admire his unrestrained, ironic, comic negativity, raw and genuine, as he dared to voice truths that others avoided. He had a knack for addressing humanity’s darkest impulses—the bleak urges, the sense that everything’s unraveling—with humor, wit, a poetic cadence, and catchy refrains.

Early in his career, Vonnegut chose to emulate Henry David Thoreau, who wrote with a childlike perspective, making his work broadly accessible. This youthful voice allowed Vonnegut to present ideas simply and directly. Other influences included H. G. Wells, author of The War of the Worlds, and satirist Jonathan Swift. Vonnegut also credited journalist H. L. Mencken for inspiring his own journalistic path.

Throughout his work, Vonnegut explored hypothetical technologies, anticipating not only emerging fields like artificial intelligence and geoengineering but also their cultural and political impacts on society.

His 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle introduced the precautionary principle—the notion that society should act cautiously when deploying potentially dangerous technologies. Widely embraced in Europe, this principle has shaped policies on nuclear power, genetically modified organisms, and conservation; it’s referenced in numerous international environmental treaties. Yet, the United States has largely dismissed Vonnegut’s warning, viewing precaution as a barrier to innovation.

Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), like most of Vonnegut’s novels, grapples with man’s cruelty to man. How does one address war, violence, madness, and injustice without preaching or trivializing? This was Vonnegut’s unique talent. Through the story of a man unstuck in time—reliving his past as a WWII POW in Dresden and his future as a captive of benevolent aliens—he portrays the alienation and loneliness of those crushed by life’s pressures and absurdities. Never before had humor and horror coexisted so seamlessly on the page.

The occasional sci-fi elements in Vonnegut’s early work presciently tackled real-world horrors post-atom bomb, showing how science fiction critiques today by imagining tomorrow. We see similar themes in works like Catch-22, which satirizes the military, or Revolutionary Road and A Fan’s Notes, which expose the quiet desperation beneath the 1950s’ sitcom veneer, or in Flannery O’Connor and Charles Bukowski, who depict the desperate, overlooked, and unredeemed. Yet Vonnegut, more than any single writer, wove these threads together.

After speaking at the first Earth Day in 1970, Vonnegut revised prepublication drafts of Breakfast of Champions to emphasize urgent climate issues. He included a story of an extinct automobile colony that depleted its planet’s resources, a tale that spreads to Earth, where humans worship these machines and destroy their own world.

At the 1987 Sag Harbor Initiative, Vonnegut said, “Why we’re gathered here is what we don’t dare talk about. We talk about short-term thinking. What we are here to talk about is what’s going to happen to everything we have now when the excrement hits the air-conditioning…Experts on finance say that [our financial San Andreas fault] is surely going to crumble. If we treat each other this badly in a time of prosperity, on borrowed money, how are we going to treat each other when the trouble comes?…I think you know what the Weimar Republic was a prelude to. If the excrement is gonna hit the air conditioning, the Nazi thing will start here, and that’s what we’re meeting about—how the hell are we gonna fight that? We can’t stop this damn fool depression that’s gonna come along now. To hear the experts talk, it was like the mobilization for World War I. Once the mobilization began, there was no stopping it. There was no speech you could give. There’s no speech you can give now to prevent this collapse of our economy, according to the experts.”

In a 1988 letter to anyone alive a hundred years later, Vonnegut wrote: “Ladies & Gentlemen of A.D. 2088, It has been suggested that you might welcome words of wisdom from the past, and that several of us in the twentieth century should send you some. Do you know this advice from Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: ‘This above all: to thine own self be true’? Or what about these instructions from St. John the Divine: ‘Fear God, and give glory to Him; for the hour of His judgment has come’? …The sort of leaders we need now are not those who promise ultimate victory over Nature through perseverance in living as we do right now, but those with the courage and intelligence to present to the world what appears to be Nature’s stern but reasonable surrender terms:

1. Reduce and stabilize your population.

2. Stop poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil.

3. Stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems.

4. Teach your kids, and yourselves, too, while you’re at it, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.

5. Stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.

6. Stop thinking your grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is really mean, and stupid.

7. And so on. Or else.

In a 2005 interview that was not published, as per his request, Vonnegut said, “Mankind is doomed. We have no hope. There is no future. We've ruined our environment and ruined ourselves. We used to have a great country, and we crippled it. We used to have a great educational system, and now it's disgraceful.”

Thomas F. Marvin, in Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical Companion, notes: "Vonnegut warns that unchecked capitalism will undermine America’s democratic foundations." Marvin argues Vonnegut’s works show the consequences of a "hereditary aristocracy," where inherited wealth stifles social mobility, leaving the poor with little chance to rise. Vonnegut also decried social Darwinism and “survival of the fittest” ideologies, which blame the poor for their plight and justify neglecting them, as they “deserve their fate.”

Unsurprisingly, Vonnegut identified as “a lifelong Northern Democrat in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt tradition, a friend of the working stiffs,” openly embracing his “sappy” side. After God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian (1999), a collection of fictional interviews, he planned to stop publishing, but outrage at the George W. Bush administration spurred him to write A Man Without a Country in 2005.

Coincidentally or not, Hunter S. Thompson—another frustrated moralist and humanist—died by suicide in February 2005, shortly after Bush’s second term began, a period Thompson found deeply disheartening, compounded by his declining health. His final Rolling Stone piece, written in February, is titled “Football Season Is Over,” and is often regarded as his suicide note: “No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun—for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax—This won’t hurt.” Ralph Steadman, Thompson’s friend and illustrator, wrote in his 2006 memoir: “He told me 25 years ago he’d feel trapped without the option of suicide. I don’t know if that’s brave, foolish, or what, but it was inevitable…He couldn’t stand boredom. But there must be Football too.”

Vonnegut defined his humanist creed as trying "to behave as decently, as fairly and as honorably as we can without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife." He was perpetually out of sorts with the human race, in particular, our wanton disregard for the environment and for one another. It drove him crazy, even to the point of losing his sense of humor: "The biggest truth to face now -- what is probably making me unfunny now for the remainder of my life -- is that I don't think people give a damn whether the planet goes on or not." He credited a young man who proposed making t-shirts of Vonnegut’s with saving his life, as the idea of making t-shirts led him to reconsider committing suicide. Nevertheless, towards the end he was, like Thompson had been, “very feeble, very depressed and almost morose.”

Having been a pretty active, kinesthetic person throughout my six decades, with injuries to prove it, I find the slow, steady onset of feebleness pretty depressing, too. Unlike both Thompson and Vonnegut, however, I experiential knowledge of and, thus, faith in, the Four Noble Truths. Meditation is a good way to spend sedentary days; reincarnation is definitely a thing; and, if this one dies, there are plenty of other habitable planets in the universe. In any case, the thought that you will eventually get to see beyond the veil is a good reason to cheer up.