A Man Without a Country - Kurt Vonnegut [19]
I wrote back:
The shoe thing at the airports and Code Orange and so on are world-class practical jokes, all right. But my all-time favorite is one the holy, anti-war clown Abbie Hoffman (1936-1989) pulled off during the Vietnam War. He announced that the new high was banana peels taken rectally. So then FBI scientists stuffed banana peels up their asses to find out if this was true or not. Or so we hoped.
People are so afraid. Take the man, with no address, who wrote:
If you knew that a man posed a danger to you—may be he had a gun in his pocket, and you felt that he would not hesitate one moment to use it on you—what would you do? We know Iraq poses a threat to us, to the rest of the world. Why do we sit here and pretend we are protected? That is exactly what happened with al-Qaeda and 9/11. With Iraq, though, the threat is on a much larger scale. Should we sit back, be little children that sit in fear and just wait?
I wrote back:
Please, for the sake of us all, get a shotgun, preferably a 12-gauge double-barrel, and right there in your own neighborhood blow off the heads of people, cops excepted, who may be armed.
A man from Little Deer Isle, Maine wrote me and asked:
What genuinely motivates al-Qaeda to kill and self-destruct? The president says, “They hate our freedoms”—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other, which surely is not what has been learned from the captives being held in Guantanamo, or what he is told in his briefings. Why do the communications industry and our elected politicians allow Bush to get away with such nonsense? And how can there ever be peace, and even trust in our leaders, if the American people aren’t told the truth?
Well, one wishes that those who took over our federal government, and hence the world, by means of a Mickey Mouse coup d’état, who disconnected all the burglar alarms prescribed by the Constitution, which is to say the House and Senate, and the Supreme Court, and We, the People, were truly Christian. But as William Shakespeare told us long ago, “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.”
Or as a man from San Francisco put it in a letter to me:
How can the American public be so stupid? People still believe that Bush was elected, that he cares about us and has some idea of what he is doing. How can we “save” people by killing them and destroying their country? How can we strike first on the belief that we will soon be attacked? No sense, no reason, no moral grounds have gotten through to him. He is nothing but a moron puppet leading us all over the precipice. Why can’t people see that the military dictator in the White House has no clothes?
I told him that if he doubted that we are demons in Hell, he should read The Mysterious Stranger, which Mark Twain wrote in 1898, long before the First World War (1914-1918). In the title story he proves to his own grim satisfaction, and to mine as well, that Satan and not God created the planet earth and “the damned human race.” If you doubt that, read your morning paper. Never mind what paper. Never mind what date.
11
Now then, I have some good news for you and some bad news. The bad news is that the Martians have landed in New York City and are staying at the Waldorf Astoria. The good news is that they only eat homeless men, women, and children of all colors, and they pee gasoline.
Put that pee in a Ferrari, and you can go a hundred miles an hour. Put some in an airplane, and you can go as fast as a bullet and drop all kinds of crap on Arabs. Put some in a school bus, and it’ll