All my heroes are dead

The world has become much less fun recently, and here’s why. It begins like this:

Listen:

Kurt Vonnegut has finally become unstuck in time.

It end like this:

Poo-tee-tweet.

Kurt Vonnegut has finally become unstuck in time. He passed away Apr. 11, and now I can truly say that all my heroes are dead. For those of you unaware of who this literary genius was, he was one of the greatest writers of the century.

He wrote such great classics as Slaughterhouse-five about an optometrist, Billy Pilgrim, who lives his life like some non-linear Tarantino movie, constantly reliving moments of his past, present and future. Nothing surprises Pilgrim, not when he was taken as a POW by Germans in World War II and witnesses the Dresden firebombing, when American and British aircraft dropped thousands of gallons of napalm on the town killing more people that the Hiroshima/Nagasaki nuclear bombs combined, including thousands of American POWs. Nor was he surprised when he was abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who see everything in four dimensions, kind of like Pilgrim himself. These did not surprise Pilgrim, because he had literally seen it all.

Vonnegut himself was taken as a POW to Dresden during his war years, and he even makes a cameo in the story as a POW who Pilgrim encounters while locked away in Slaughterhouse-five in Dresden. That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book. (125) He writes.

Another great book by Vonnegut was Mother Night. A story about an American playwright Howard W. Campbell, Jr. who was living in Germany before the Second World War broke out. He is drafted by the CIA to send secret messages to the allies. In order to do this, Campbell is forced to get in good with the Nazis and become one of their most popular radio propagandists. Through his radio broadcasts, he would alert the Allies about Axis unit placements, strategies and the like. Once the war ends, the CIA denies any involvement with Campbell who, because of the anti-Semitic garbage he was forced to spew, became the most hated war criminal in the world. Those of you who have read Slaughterhouse-Five will recall Campbell as one of the characters who visited Pilgrim in Dresden to recruit Americans to fight alongside the Nazis, but I digress. Mother Night was later made into a movie with Nick Nolte as Campbell, and John Goodman as the CIA operative who recruits him.

I first came across Vonnegut while watching the Rodney Dangerfield movie Back to School, when Dangerfield hires Vonnegut to write an essay about Vonnegut. He made a brief cameo in the film. Dangerfield was later derided by his professor for the paper he submitted about the infamous author, saying whoever wrote this doesn’t know the first thing about Vonnegut. (Back to School). Of course when that movie came out I had no idea who Vonnegut was. As far as I was concerned, he was a fictional creation of the movie writers.

A little side-note about this movie. Keith Gordon, who played Dangerfield’s son later went on to direct the movie version of Mother Night.

But I digress.

When I was seventeen, my dad brought home a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five which he gave me. I read it once, and I was in love with the writing. I read it again and again (there are few books that I will read over and over). I was hooked on Vonnegut, and it is my goal to read all that he has written.

I don’t shed a tear for Vonnegut, because I know Vonnegut would not shed a tear for me. Also, I shed no tears because I know that he welcomed death. In his 2005 book, A Man Without a Country, Vonnegut writes:

I am going to use the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, manufacturers of Pall Mall cigarettes for a billion bucks! Starting when I was only twelve years old, I have never chain-smoked anything but unfiltered Pall Malls. And for many years now, right on the package, Brown and Williamson have promised to kill me.

But I am now eighty-two. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick, and Colon. (39-40).

And in his essay Fates Worse than Death, he writes:

American humorists or satirists or whatever you want to call them, those who choose to laugh rather than weep about demoralizing information, become intolerably unfunny pessimists if they live past a certain age.

Of all of Vonnegut’s characters, one touched him more than others and made appearances in several of his stories. This character was none other than the mediocre science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, who Vonnegut refers to as his alter-ego. In Timequake published in 1997, Vonnegut kills Trout who was getting old and believed that being alive is a crock of shit.

So I shed no tears for my fallen hero. Just as I shed no tears for Hunter S. Thompson, another of my hero writers when he took his own life two years ago. These were men who realized that life was harsh and pointless, and that there was much humour and beauty to be found in that reality. Men who were not afraid of death, who saw death as a prize for having lived.

Vonnegut taught me that the traditional narrative structure of English literature hampered creativity. That life is to be enjoyed, that laughter is the only cure for tragedy, and that taking yourself too seriously can be detrimental to your mental health. He taught me that cautious satire was a much more useful tool of social criticism than yelling and screaming and raising a stink. And that radicalism, no matter how noble the ideas it espouses, breeds horrible acts in men. And that those horrible acts have some humour hidden deep within. And that in the end, we should always laugh, no matter how much we feel like crying.

Although I don’t believe in heaven, I hope for Vonnegut’s sake that I am wrong. I hope that he is united with all the loved ones he has lost and written about. But regardless, I know that at his final resting place, there will be a headstone with the epitaph “Life is no way to treat an animal”. And atop of the headstone, at the crack of dawn as the sun rises and glimmers off the grave marker, there will be a bird perched, and the bird will sing its song: poo-tee-tweet.

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