If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young by Kurt Vonnegut

Author:Kurt Vonnegut
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Published: 2013-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

I was so innocent once that I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.

But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America’s becoming humane and reasonable. That is because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. I myself have experienced that intoxication. I was once a Corporal.

By saying our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our men and women fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many of their bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

But I will say this:

No matter how corrupt and greedy our government and our corporations and our media and Wall Street and our religious and charitable organizations may become, the music will still be perfectly wonderful.

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC.

And I have arranged for a Strauss waltz to be played as you depart, so you can waltz the heck out of here when it is time to go. For those of you who don’t know how to waltz, nothing could be easier and more human. You go step, slide, rest, step, slide, rest, step, slide, rest. Oom, pah, pah, oom, pah, pah.

Bill Gates doesn’t seem to realize that we are dancing animals.

During our catastrophically idiotic war in Vietnam, the music just kept getting better and better. We lost that war, by the way. Order couldn’t be restored in Indochina until the locals could finally kick us the hell out of there.

That war only made billionaires out of millionaires. This war4 is making trillionaires out of billionaires. I call that progress.

And how come the people in countries we invade can’t fight like ladies and gentlemen, in uniforms, and with tanks and helicopter gunships?

About music: I like Strauss and Mozart and all that, but I would be remiss not to mention the absolutely priceless gift which African Americans gave to the whole wide world when they were still in slavery. I mean the blues. All pop music today, jazz, swing, bebop, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Stones, rock ’n’ roll, hip-hop, and on and on is derived from the blues.

How do I know it’s a gift to the world? One of the best rhythm-and-blues combos I ever heard was three guys and a girl from Finland, playing in a club in Krakow, Poland.

The wonderful writer Albert Murray, who is a jazz historian among other things, told me that, during the era of slavery in this

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