America - an excerpt from Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

America

This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, old white men on a planet which was dying  fast.

            One of them was a science-fiction writer named Ki1gore Trout.  He was a nobody at the time, and he supposed his life was over. He was mistaken. As a consequence of the meeting, he became one of the most beloved and respected human beings in history.

            The man he met was an automobile dealer, a Pontiac dealer named Dwayne Hoover. Dwayne Hoover was on the brink of going insane.

            Listen:

            Trout and Hoover were citizens of the United States of America, a country which was called America far short. This was their national anthem, which was pure balderdash, like so much they were expected to take seriously:

0, say can you see by the dauwn’s early light

What so proudly me hailed at the twilight’s

        last gleaming,

Whose broad stripes and bright stars,

        thru the perilous fight

0’er the ramparts we watched were so

        gallantly streaming?

And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs

        bursting in air,

Gave proof through the night that our

        flag was still there.

0, say does that star-spangled banner

        yet wave

O’er the land of the free and the home

        of the brave?

            There were one quadrillion nations in the Universe, but the nation Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout belonged to was the only with the national anthem which was gibberish springled with question marks.

            Here is what their flag looked like:

It was the law of their nation, a law no other nation on the p1anet had about its flag, which said this: ”The flag shall not be dipped to any person or thing..”

             Flag-dipping was a form of friendly and respectfu1 salute, which consisted of bringing the flag on a stick closer to the ground, then raising it up again.

            The motto of Dwayne Hoover’s and Kilgore Tmut’s nation was this, which meant in a language nobody spoke anymore, Out of Many, One: ”E pluribus unum.”

            The undippable flag was a beauty, and the anthem and the vacant motto might not have mattered much, if it weren’t for this: a lot of citizens were so ignored and cheated and insulted that they thought they might be in the wrong country, or even on the wrong planet, that some terrible mistake had been made. It might have comforted them some if their anthem and their motto had mentioned fairness or brotherhood or hope or happiness, had somehow welcomed them to the society and its real estate.

            If they studied their paper money for clues as to what their country was all about, they found, among a lot of other baroque trash, a picture of a truncated pyramid with a radiant eye on top of it, like this:

            Not even the president of the United States knew what was all about. It was as though the country were saying to its citizens, “In nonsense is strength.”

            A lot of nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to show off their useless education, which consisted of the study of focus-pocus from ancient times. They were bum poets as well.

            But some of the nonsense was evil,  since it concealed great crimes. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy:

            The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.

            Here was another piece of nonsence which children were taught: that the sea pirates eventually created a government which became a beacon of freedom of human beings everywhere else. There were pictures and statues of this supposed imaginary beacon for children to see. It was sort of ice-cream cone on fire. It looked like this:

            Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines.

            The sea pirates were white. The people who were already on the continent when the pirates  arrived were copper-colored. When slavery was introduced onto the continent, the slaves were black.

            Color was everything.

            Here is how the pirates  were able to take  whatever they wanted from anybody else: they had the best boats in the world, and they were meaner than anybody else, and they had gunpowder, which s a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulphur. They touched the seemingly listless powder with fire, and it turned violently into gas. This gas blew projectiles out of metal tubes at terrific velocities. The projectiles cut through meat and bone very easily; so the pirates could wreck the wiring or the be1lows or the plumbing of a stubborn human being, even when he was far, far away.

            The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and. greedy they were.

            When Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout met each other, their country was by far the richest and most powerful country on the planet, It had most of the food and minerals and machinery, and it disciplined other countries by threatening to shoot big rockets at them or to drop things on them from the airplanes.

            Most other countries didn’t have a doodley-squat. Many of them weren’t even inhabitable anymore. They had too many people and not enough space. They had sold everything that was any good, and there wasn’t anything to eat anymore, and still the people went on fucking all the time.

            Fucking was how babies were made.

            A lot of people on the wrecked planet were communists. They had a theory that what was left on the planet should be shared more or less equally among all people, who hadn’t asked to come to a wrecked planet in the first place. Meanwhile, more babies were arriving all the time - kicking and screaming, yelling for milk.

            In some places people would actually try to eat mud or suck on gravel while babies were being born just a few feet away.

            And so on.

            Dwayne Hoover’s and Kilgore Trout’s country, where there was still plenty of everything, was opposed to Communism. It didn’t think that Earthlings who had a lot should share it with others unless they real1y wanted to, and most of them didn’t want to.

            So they didn’t have to.

            Everybody in America was supposed to grab whatever he could and hold onto it. Some Americans were very good at grabbing and holding, were fabulously well-to-do.  Others couldn’t get their hands on doodley-squat.

(Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions)