#a man without a country

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: ‘C-Students from Yale.’

George W. Bush has gathered around him 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, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.

To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot...

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!...

So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.

They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin' day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reasons that they don't give a fuck 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!

There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country: A Memoir of Life in George W. Bush's America (2005)

[litsnaps]

[rafamonzo]

R. Tanaka - “No trace of Mr. Braeckman”

http://rafamonzo.tumblr.com   / http://tanaka-clan.tumblr

[allthedesiredusernamesaretaken]

" You meet saints everywhere.

They can be anywhere.

They are people behaving decently in an indecent society. "

- Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without A Country

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[runawaymarbles]

I'm

[quotessentially]

From Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man Without a Country

[thepursuitofunderstanding]

The truth is, we know so little about life, we don't really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.

Kurt Vonnegut 

[papas-majadas]

Obligatory Kurt Vonnegut appreciation post.

[philosophybitmaps]

[seideegiapulp]

Kurt Vonnegut - A Man Without a Country (2017)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Project "Propaganda and Awareness"COWARDS PosterGreat OM & Co ( Kloer illustración y street art )Feb 23 / May 22

"It Is Easier To Accept The Idea Of The Apocalypse And The Judgement, Of UFOs, Zombies And Gods In General, Than The Idea Of Radical Social Change"

[Gran OM]

* * * *

“And I apologize to all of you who are the same age as my grandchildren. And many of you reading this are the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.”

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country

+

“I had hoped, as a broadcaster, to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate. So many people wanted to believe me! Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.”

― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

[litsnaps]

[rafamonzo]

R.Tanaka - From the series “ No trace of Mr. Braeckman”

http://rafamonzo.tumblr.com   / http://tanaka-clan.tumblr

[allthedesiredusernamesaretaken]

" We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is. "

- Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

[frankenstein-was-a-grad-student]

This was not helpful in my “never again a grad student” existential crisis. My grandpa wrote in his autobiography about a “period of intense work” that was roughly fifteen years long. And he wrote about it longingly, noting he is now a watcher not a doer. And it fucked me up then bc I was stressed and felt like I was accomplishing nothing. And now I look back, literally immediately having left, and wish I could go in tomorrow just like the day before. Did have that moment on Saturday though. A group of us, my advisor, another student, and a postdoc—we all went for tea as a break in our Saturday afternoon of experiments. When we left it was just starting to drizzle. No problem we said, it’s fifty degrees in Boston in January. We’re fine. Half way through the ten minute walk the sky opened and drenched us, only half our party wearing boots and the right coats. We got our tea and lamented our bad luck. “We should walk inside on the way back,” we said. But it had stopped raining and we chanced it. We ended up seeing this rainbow. It lasted all of five minutes. If we’d left fifteen minutes later it’d have been at our back. Five minutes earlier or slipping inside early and we’d have missed the whole thing.

My boss was upset it was going away, but idk. If this isn’t a time to say “if this isn’t nice I don’t know what is” I don’t know if there’s ever a time.

"There are old poops who will say that you do not become a grown-up until you have somehow survived, as they have, some famous calamity -- the Great Depression, the Second World War, Vietnam, whatever. Storytellers are responsible for this destructive, not to say suicidal, myth. Again and again in stories, after some terrible mess, the character is able to say at last, 'Today I am a woman. Today I am a man. The end.' When I got home from the Second World War, my Uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he said, 'You're a man now.' So I killed him. Not really, but I certainly felt like doing it. Dan, that was my bad uncle, who said a male can't be a man unless he'd gone to war. But I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. He was my father's kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life-insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.' So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'"

— Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country (2005)