A Man Without a Country - Kurt Vonnegut [21]
On Tuesday, January 20, 2004, I sent Joel Bleifuss, my editor at In These Times, this fax:
ON ORANGE ALERT HERE. ECONOMIC TERRORIST ATTACK EXPECTED AT 8 PM EST. KV
Worried, he called, asking what was up. I said I would tell him when I had more complete information on the bombs George Bush was set to deliver in his State of the Union address.
That night I got a call from my friend, the out-of-print-science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout. He asked me, “Did you watch the State of the Union address?”
“Yes, and it certainly helped to remember what the great British socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw said about this planet.”
“Which was?”
“He said, ‘I don’t know if there are men on the moon, but if there are, they must be using the earth as their lunatic asylum.’ And he wasn’t talking about the germs or the elephants. He meant we the people.”
“Okay.”
“You don’t think this is the Lunatic Asylum of the Universe?”
“Kurt, I don’t think I expressed an opinion one way or the other.”
“We are killing this planet as a life-support system with the poisons from all the thermodynamic whoopee we’re making with atomic energy and fossil fuels, and everybody knows it, and practically nobody cares. This is how crazy we are. I think the planet’s immune system is trying to get rid of us with AIDS and new strains of flu and tuberculosis, and so on. I think the planet should get rid of us. We’re really awful animals. I mean, that dumb Barbra Streisand song, ‘People who need people are the luckiest people in the world’—she’s talking about cannibals. Lots to eat. Yes, the planet is trying to get rid of us, but I think it’s too late.”
And I said good-bye to my friend, hung up the phone, sat down and wrote this epitaph: “The good Earth—we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.”
12
I used to be the owner and manager of an automobile dealership in West Barnstable, Massachusetts, called Saab Cape Cod. It and I went out of business thirty-three years ago. The Saab then, as now, was a Swedish car, and I now believe my failure as a dealer so long ago explains what would otherwise remain a deep mystery: Why the Swedes have never given me a Nobel Prize for Literature. Old Norwegian proverb: “Swedes have short dicks but long memories.”
Listen: The Saab back then had only one model, a bug like a VW, a two-door sedan, but with the engine in front. It had suicide doors opening into the slipstream. Unlike all other cars, but like your lawnmower and your outboard, it had a two-stroke rather than a four-stroke engine. So every time you filled your tank with gas, you had to pour in a can of oil as well. For whatever reason, straight women did not want to do this.
The chief selling point was that a Saab could drag a VW at a stoplight. But if you or your significant other had failed to add oil to the last tank of gas, you and the car would then become fireworks. It also had front-wheel drive, of some help on slippery pavements or when accelerating into curves. There was this as well: As one prospective customer said to me, “They make the best watches. Why wouldn’t they make the best cars, too?” I was bound to agree.
The Saab back then was a far cry from the sleek, powerful, four-stroke yuppie uniform it is today. It was the wet dream, if you like, of engineers in an airplane factory who’d never made a car before. Wet dream, did I say? Get a load of this: There was a ring on the dashboard, connected to a chain running over pulleys in the engine compartment. Pull on it, and at the far end it would raise a sort of window shade on a spring-loaded roller behind the front grill. That was to keep the engine warm while you went off somewhere. So, when you came back, if you hadn’t stayed away too long, the engine would start right up again.
But if you stayed away too long, window shade or not, the oil would separate from the gas and sink like molasses to the bottom of the tank. So when you started up again, you would lay down a smokescreen like a destroyer in a naval engagement. And I actually