On a gloomy late-August afternoon, Kurt Vonnegut sits at the trestle table in his Manhattan townhouse kitchen, wreathed in a haze of Pall Malls, watching Cable News Network`s running spectacle of saber-rattling in the Persian Gulf.
”These are depressing times, and we haven`t even sent everybody to the Middle East yet,” he says, snapping off the set.
But, according to ”Hocus Pocus” (Putnam, $21.95), Vonnegut`s new book due out this month, when it comes to depressing times, we haven`t seen anything yet.
In his 13th novel, Vonnegut, the wry, dark-humored guru of the `70s counterculture, goes beyond his previous, it`s-not-too-late-to-wake-up parables of the perils of war, technology, pollution and other 20th Century horrors to present a 21st Century allegory of a crumbling American civilization, mired in an economic, cultural and social nightmare from which there is no hope of awakening.
The Amazon rain forest is a desert and America is a mess. Denver and Santa Fe have been abandoned because of radioactive waste in their water. Lawlessness is rampant. Racism has become so bad that prisons and the armed forces are segregated. Illiteracy is rife; half of all citizens can`t find their own country on a map of the world. Bridges and highways are crumbling because no one knows how to fix them. Coffee and gasoline are no longer affordable for most.
The Social Security system is bust. Infant mortality, suicide, murder and drug-addiction rates are soaring. Drugs are the nation`s No. 1 industry. Nearly eradicated diseases, like tetanus, have staged a comeback because immunization is no longer available; the public health system has failed and there are no foreigners interested in reviving it for profit.
In ”Hocus Pocus,” the puckish author of such books as ”Cat`s Cradle”
and ”Slaughterhouse-Five” has written an obituary for the society he has so relentlessly tweaked for almost 40 years. Twenty years ago, when a generation of disaffected youth adopted ”So it goes,” the cynically sanguine refrain to carnage in ”Slaughterhouse-Fi ve,” as their signoff, it was easier to be blithely ironic. There was a chance that things would change. Vonnegut seems to think that we`ve run out of chances.
”I am so disappointed finally,” he says, wearily. At 67, he is a craggy-faced man with kind eyes, a silvering mop of curls and a nicotine-gilded mustache. He speaks slowly, with a tendency to reflectively ramble, in a manner that sometimes seems as surreal as the dialogue in one of his books.
”I had such high hopes for the planet and so did everyone else, after everyone had sacrificed so much and behaved so well,” he says, recalling his return from service in World War II and the energetic, can-do America he came home to find.
”The day the war ended,” he says, ”for a magical 24 hours, it all could have been so good. But we went on manufacturing weapons that are so powerful. And now we have this huge generation of crack babies and utterly demoralized poor people of all colors. You know, you couldn`t write an optimistic book about some institution which refurbishes these people, gets them all cleaned up and makes them industrious. There`s no place for them to work, anyhow. So, we`re mighty sick.
”The fact that Americans would willingly wreck this country, it`s unbelievable.” But in ”Hocus Pocus,” he has them do just that.
Mortgaged beyond hope, America in 2001, in fact, is not just dependent on the financial kindness of strangers, but is owned by them. Du Pont belongs to Germany`s I.G. Farber, Budweiser is brewed by Italians and The New York Times is published by Koreans.
And then, of course, there is the ”Japanese Army of Occupation in business suits.” They own just about everything else, including Blue Cross/
Blue Shield and the federal prisons, which they run for profit. It`s not hard. Prisons are booming because a higher percentage of citizens is jailed in America than anywhere but Haiti and South Africa.
It is from one of these prisons that this surreal tale is told as a
”gallows speech” by 61-year-old Eugene Debs Hartke, a Hoosier like Vonnegut, named for the famous American socialist and labor organizer from Indiana. A West Point-educated information officer, whose Vietnam duties involved spin-doctoring the war with ”lethal hocus pocus,” Hartke was the last American to leave the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, when, as he delicately puts it, ”the excrement hit the air conditioning.”
From there, Hartke, a philanderer with an addled wife and two alienated children, winds up as a professor at Tarkington College, a school devoted to the learning-disabled offspring of the wealthy. Located in upstate Scipio, N.Y., a sort of Twin Peaks East, it sits just across the lake from a maximum- security prison. Eventually, when the inmates riot and overrun the town, Hartke is convicted of masterminding the breakout. The authorities simply can`t believe that the black inmates were capable of doing it on their own.
It ends with Hartke`s coda to the era: ”Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn`t mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.”
A lukewarm reception
This may not be Vonnegut`s most popular book. It already has been been gently bashed by Time (”as literature it is minor Vonnegut”) and chided by The Wall Street Journal for being ”so random as to stir no outrage and provoke no laughter.”
Although Vonnegut`s tendency might be to shrug off such negative reviews as having been written by ”Republicans,” he probably wouldn`t argue either charge.
He admits he is no longer laughing. ”Hocus Pocus” is devoid of a punch line because contemporary American problems, in his view, finally have become too painful for even him to joke about.
”Joking is a defense,” he says. ”Soldiers do it. It`s a defense, like crying. What I`ve said is that it beats crying because there`s less cleaning up to do afterwards. You know, you can get back to dealing with life as best you can. But, now, I think that most forces people deal with are overwhelming, simply overwhelming, on the order of tidal waves or earthquakes.”
As for the book`s alleged inability to stir outrage, this would come as little surprise to a man who believes that many Americans, already semi-lobotomized by television, are incapable of outrage.
Vonnegut says he dropped off the college lecture circuit in 1988 when he found his observations on the state of the world were depressing him-but not his audiences. Indeed, he could barely get a rise out of them.
”I think TV has distanced people from everything that`s going on. TV requires no response from the audience whatsoever. They like it or they don`t like it, but it`s just another show they watched last night,” he says with a bitter cackle.
”There are perfectly awful messages around and there I was volunteering to deliver them,” he says. ”What I said in my lectures was that had my German family remained in Germany instead of coming over here, how would we have reacted to the rise of Hitler? My guess was that we wouldn`t have done much about it until it was too late.
”But we face a threat now, and it`s terrible. It`s not as personalized as Hitler was, but what we`re doing to the biosphere is going to be as dire as Auschwitz-without I.G. Farber having to make a poison gas. I felt I should start yelling about that in public the way I should have been, had I been in Germany in the 1920s, yelling about Hitler coming to power.”
`Nitwits` of the ruling class
Through his protagonist, Hartke, whom he characterizes as a modern-day Don Quixote, Vonnegut tilts at some of the same windmills that have always attracted him, but this time around, he sighs, rather than yells, as he goes at them.
The environment, in his view, is a lost cause. In ”Hocus Pocus,” one character provides its epitaph: ”We could have saved it, but we were too doggone cheap.”
The American ideal, he feels, is fading away, but he still holds on to his dream of the ideal citizen. ”I still have one and what it is, it grows out of the German freethinkers. They decided that the highest service you could perform, since God was unknowable, was to the community. It seems to me that that doesn`t exist in Washington, if our president thinks that Dan Quayle is good enough for us in case he dies. It seems to me that that`s a very unpatriotic thought.”
Another favorite target is the lassitude of the ”ruling class,” at whose well-shod feet he lays the blame for the decline of American industry, debacles like the savings and loan scandal and the auction of the country to foreign investors.
”You once had people like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford who were just nuts about manufacturing. You couldn`t get them away from the damn factory, the noise and the glamor of it. And that`s all died down.”
Contemporary American captains of industry and their heirs and stockholders, he maintains, have converted factories and the workers in them
”into a form so liquid and abstract . . . that there are few reminders from anywhere that they might be responsible for anyone outside their own circle of friends and relatives.”
In his view, members of the ruling class have reached the point where they consider other, ”less highly evolved” Americans to be foreign. He calls these elitists ”nitwits.”
”They are nitwits, in a sense, and it`s too bad,” he says. ”You know, all the Rockefeller heirs-I know several of them and they`re nice enough people-but they want the capital. They don`t want the responsibility for this broad spectrum of businesses that the Rockefeller fortune is invested in. They don`t know anything about manufacturing. They don`t know anything about chemistry. They don`t know anything about math. They don`t know anything about labor relations and they don`t want to. They just want to sell it and get the $17 million or $3 million or whatever and redecorate the house.”
Thus arrive the foreign investing invaders. ”Do you know, I just bought a sports coat at J. Press, where I buy my clothes, and they`re owned by the Japanese,” he says, raising an eyebrow.
”Look, there are Japanese restaurants all over the place. You can sit on our front stoop there and see this army of occupation in business suits.
”It is, in fact, that,” he says, suddenly sober. ”A lot will depend on how they behave, just as a lot depended, in Japan, on how we behaved when we were the army of occupation over there.”
Supporting U.S. enterprise
It`s not clear, he says, just how that will work out. ”But I think my prediction is right, that they`ll get sick of it because the social problems that come along with owning any kind of valuable property over here now are so massive.”
In the book, the Japanese, considering America their own version of Vietnam, withdraw in defeat from the burdens of administering their newly purchased empire, keeping only Oahu, as the British did Bermuda, as a souvenir of their imperialism.
”But if they walk out, nobody will run anything, nobody knows how to run anything. We`ll become like Nigeria, just a great big thing where people survive somehow,” Vonnegut warns.
Meanwhile, he says he does his best to support what`s left of American enterprise. ”I keep switching publishers. When Dell was sold to the Germans, I changed publishers. I want to do business with Americans as much as possible-but I drive a Honda,” he admits. ”It`s the best car I`ve ever owned.”
Doesn`t that make him a bit suspect? ”Yes, of course,” he laughs, ”but then I`m a conservationist who smokes his head off.”
Having delivered all his bad news between the glossy covers of ”Hocus Pocus,” Vonnegut says he plans to resume the college lecture circuit this fall.
”I don`t know quite what I`ll be telling them,” he muses. ”My main job, onstage, is to leave them feeling good. Let the book depress them.”
Isn`t that copping out?
He grins. ”I`ll see what copping out feels like. I`ll try it out and let you know.”
So it goes.
