When it came to politics, Kurt Vonnegut was a left-wing nutjob — his 2005 bestseller, A Man Without a Country, is thin in every way: a dull screed that’s full of name-calling as opposed to argument. I read it because I’ve enjoyed several of Vonnegut’s novels, especially Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan. I came away from the book with the sense that Vonnegut was depressed, not just with the state of politics in America but with life in general. He seemed to have grown weary of it and was simply waiting for his own to end. The views in the book were irritating, but they were also joyless and the overall impression was one of sadness. A poem in it, which the NYT quotes in its obituary, sums up life on earth this way: “People did not like it here.”
He should speak for himself. At any rate, Vonnegut was also the author of “Harrison Bergeron,” a wonderful short story that makes the utterly conservative point that forced equality is the enemy of freedom. It’s amazing to think that an ACLU socialist wrote it. Here’s the first paragraph:
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
I’m grateful for this story and its lesson. RIP, Kurt.