Not Your Sweetie

Interview with Kurt Vonnegut


Based on what you’ve read and seen in the media, what is not being said in
the mainstream press about President Bush’s policies and the impending
war
in Iraq?

That they are nonsense.

My feeling from talking to readers and friends is that many people are
beginning to despair. Do you think that we’ve lost reason to hope?

I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war,
might as well
have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had
been. What
has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the
sleaziest,
low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in
charge of
the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or
geography,
plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka “Christians,” and plus, most
frighteningly,
psychopathic personalities, or “PPs.”

To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical
diagnosis, like saying
he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs
is The Mask
of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. Read it! PPs are presentable, they know
full well the
suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They
cannot care
because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and
WorldCom and on
and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and
investors and
country, and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what
anybody may say
to or about them? And so many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in
our federal
government, as though they were leaders instead of sick.

What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in
government, is
that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with
doubts, for the
simple reason that they cannot care what happens next. Simply can’t. Do
this! Do that!
Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health
care! Tap
everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile
shield! Fuck
habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!