A wampeter is an object around which the lives of many otherwise unrelated people may revolve. The Holy Grail would be a case in point. Foma are harmless untruths, intended to comfort simple souls. An example: “Prosperity is just around the corner.” A granfalloon is a proud and meaningless associaton of human beings.

now believe that the only way in which Americans can rise above their ordinariness, can mature sufficiently to rescue themselves and to help rescue their planet, is through enthusiastic intimacy with works of their own imaginations.

there are those who adore being classified as science-fiction writers anyway, who are alarmed by the possibility that they might someday be known simply as ordinary short-story writers and novelists who mention, among other things, the fruits of engineering and research. They are happy with the status quo because their colleagues love them the way members of old-fashioned big families were supposed to do. Science-fiction writers meet often, comfort and praise one another, exchange single-spaced letters of twenty pages and more, booze it up affectionately, and one way or another have a million heartthrobs and laughs. I have run with them some, and they are generous and amusing souls, but I must now make a true statement that will put them through the roof: They are joiners. They are a lodge. If they didn’t enjoy having a gang of their own so much, there would be no such category as science fiction. They love to stay up all night, arguing the question, “What is science fiction?” One might as usefully inquire, “What are the Elks? And what is the Order of the Eastern Star?”

it would be a drab world without meaningless social aggregations. There would be a lot fewer smiles, and about one-hundredth as many publications.

“Women only pretend to like boats—to hook a man who owns one,” a skipper told me. “A boat to your average woman is just one more damn house to take care of, only it’s more uncomfortable, and the man orders her around like Captain Bligh, and she doesn’t trust the machinery or the plumbing, and she has to walk six blocks to buy groceries or get the laundry done.”

I believe all this, and much, much more, because I guess it is my duty to. But I pay a price for my gaga credulity, which I want to describe as a sort of intellectual seasickness.

“Who comes to writers’ conferences?” you ask. A random sample of twenty students will contain six recent divorcées, three wives in middle life, five schoolteachers of no particular age or sex, two foxy grandmas, one sweet old widower with true tales to tell about railroading in Idaho, one real writer, one not merely angry but absolutely furious young man, and one physician with forty years’ worth of privileged information that he wants to sell to the movies for a blue million.

All that keeps me from becoming a meditator myself is laziness. I would have to get out of the house and go to Boston, and spend several nights there. Also: I doubt that I have the courage and the humorlessness to present myself at somebody’s apartment door with fruit, flowers, a clean handkerchief, and a gift of seventy-five dollars.

While I was writing that story about Ice-9, I happened to go to a cocktail party where I was introduced to a crystallographer. I told him about this ice which was stable at room temperature. He put his cocktail glass on the mantelpiece. He sat down in an easy chair in the corner. He did not speak to anyone or change expression for half an hour. Then he got up, came back over to the mantelpiece, and picked up his cocktail glass, and he said to me, “Nope.” Ice-9 was impossible. Be that as it may, other scientific developments have been almost that horrible. The idea of Ice-9 had a certain moral validity at any rate, even though scientifically it had to be pure bunk.

I WENT TO HIGH SCHOOL in Indianapolis with a nice girl named Barbara Masters. Her father was an eye doctor in our town. She is now the wife of our Secretary of Defense. I was having lunch in Indianapolis recently with another man who had known her in school. He had an upper-class Hoosier accent, which sounds like a bandsaw cutting galvanized tin. He said this: “When you get to be our age, you all of a sudden realize that you are being ruled by people you went to high school with.” He was uncomfortably silent for a moment, then he said: “You all of a sudden catch on that life is nothing but high school. You make a fool of yourself in high school, then you go to college and learn how you should have acted in high school, and then you get out into real life, and that turns out to be high school all over again—class officers, cheerleaders, and all.

A friend of mine, who is also a critic, decided to do a paper on things I’d written. He reread all my stuff, which took him about two hours and fifteen minutes, and he was exasperated when he got through. “You know what you do?” he said. “No,” I said. “What do I do?” And he said, “You put bitter coatings on very sweet pills.”

It has been said many times that man’s knowledge of himself has been left far behind by his understanding of technology, and that we can have peace and plenty and justice only when man’s knowledge of himself catches up. This is not true. Some people hope for great discoveries in the social sciences, social equivalents of F = ma and E = mc2, and so on. Others think we have to evolve, to become better monkeys with bigger brains. We don’t need more information. We don’t need bigger brains. All that is required is that we become less selfish than we are.

Thomas Aquinas had some other recommendations as to what people might do with their lives, and I do not find these made ridiculous by computers and trips to the moon and television sets. He praises the Seven Spiritual Works of Mercy, which are these: To teach the ignorant, to counsel the doubtful, to console the sad, to reprove the sinner, to forgive the offender, to bear with the oppressive and troublesome, and to pray for us all. He also admires the Seven Corporal Works of Mercy, which are these: To feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to clothe the naked, to shelter the homeless, to visit the sick and prisoners, to ransom captives, and to bury the dead.

Do not take the entire world on your shoulders. Do a certain amount of skylarking, as befits people your age. “Skylarking,” incidentally, used to be a minor offense under Naval Regulations. What a charming crime. It means intolerable lack of seriousness. I would love to have had a dishonorable discharge from the United States Navy—for skylarking not just once, but again and again and again.

When it really is time for you to save the world, when you have some power and know your way around, when people can’t mock you for looking so young, I suggest that you work for a socialist form of government. Free Enterprise is much too hard on the old and the sick and the shy and the poor and the stupid, and on people nobody likes. They just can’t cut the mustard under Free Enterprise. They lack that certain something that Nelson Rockefeller, for instance, so abundantly has.

“The happiest day of my life, so far, was in October of 1945. I had just been discharged from the United States Army, which was still an honorable organization in those Walt Disney times. I had just been admitted to the Department of Anthropology of the University of Chicago. “At last! I was going to study man!” • • • I began with physical anthropology. I was taught how to measure the size of the brain of a human being who had been dead a long time, who was all dried out. I bored a hole in his skull, and I filled it with grains of polished rice. Then I emptied the rice into a graduated cylinder. I found this tedious. I switched to archaeology, and I learned something I already knew: that man had been a maker and smasher of crockery since the dawn of time. And I went to my faculty adviser, and I confessed that science did not charm me, that I longed for poetry instead. I was depressed. I knew my wife and my father would want to kill me, if I went into poetry. My adviser smiled. “How would you like to study poetry which pretends to be scientific?” he asked me. “Is such a thing possible?” I said. He shook my hand. “Welcome to the field of social or cultural anthropology,” he said. He told me that Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead were already in it—and some sensitive gentlemen as well. One of those gentlemen was Dr. Robert Redfield, the head of the Department of Anthropology at Chicago. He became the most satisfying teacher in my life. He scarcely noticed me. He sometimes looked at me as though I were a small, furry animal trapped in an office wastebasket. (I stole that image from George Plimpton, by the way. God love him.) • • • Dr. Redfield is dead now. Perhaps some physical anthropologist of the future will fill his skull with grains of polished rice, and empty it out again—into a graduated cylinder. While he lived, he had in his head a lovely dream which he called “The Folk Society.” He published this dream in The American Journal of Sociology, Volume 52, 1947, pages 293 through 308. He acknowledged that primitive societies were bewilderingly various. He begged us to admit, though, that all of them had certain characteristics in common. For instance: They were all so small that everybody knew everybody well, and associations lasted for life. The members communicated intimately with one another, and very little with anybody else. The members communicated only by word of mouth. There was no access to the experience and thought of the past, except through memory. The old were treasured for their memories. There was little change. What one man knew and believed was the same as what all men knew and believed. There wasn’t much of a division of labor. What one person did was pretty much what another person did. And so on. And Dr. Redfield invited us to call any such society “a Folk Society,” a thing I often do. I will now give you a sample of Dr. Redfield’s prose, and an opportunity to taste his nostalgia for a sort of society once inhabited by all races of men. In a folk society, says Dr. Redfield, and I quote him now: …behavior is personal, not impersonal. A “person” may be defined as that social object which I feel to respond to situations as I do, with all the sentiments and interests which I feel to be my own; a person is myself in another form, his qualities and values are inherent within him, and his significance for me is not merely one of utility. A “thing,” on the other hand, is a social object which has no claim upon my sympathies, which responds to me, as I conceive it, mechanically; its value for me exists in so far as it serves my end. In the folk society, all human beings admitted to the society are treated as persons; one does not deal impersonally (“ thing fashion”) with any other participant in the little world of that society. Moreover [Dr. Redfield goes on], in the folk society much besides human beings is treated personally. The pattern of behavior which is first suggested by the inner experience of the individual—his wishes, fears, sensitivities, and interests of all sorts—is projected into all objects with which he comes in contact. Thus nature, too, is treated personally; the elements, the features of the landscape, the animals, and especially anything in the environment which by its appearance or behavior suggests the attributes of mankind—to all these are attributed qualities of the human person. [I stop quoting now.] And I say to you that we are full of chemicals which require us to belong to folk societies, or failing that, to feel lousy all the time. We are chemically engineered to live in folk societies, just as fish are chemically engineered to live in clean water—and there aren’t any folk societies for us anymore.

Older persons form clubs and corporations and the like. Those who form them pretend to be interested in this or that narrow aspect of life. Members of the Lions Club pretend to be interested in the cure and prevention of diseases of the eye. They are in fact lonesome Neanderthalers, obeying the First Law of Life, which is this: “Human beings become increasingly contented as they approach the simpleminded, brotherly conditions of a folk society.”

There are other good clubs. The Loyal Order of the Moose is open to any male who is Christian and white. I myself admire The War Dads of America. In order to become a War Dad, one must have had a friend or a relative who served in the armed forces of the United States sometime during the past 195 years. The friend or relative need not have received an honorable discharge, though that helps, I’m told. It also helps to be stupid. My father and grandfather were not stupid, so they did not join the Moose or anything. They chose solitude instead. Solitude can be nearly as comforting as drugs or fraternities, since there are no other people to remind a solitary person how little like a folk society his society has become.

As for my own happiest day: I was happy because I believed that the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago was a small, like-minded family which I was being allowed to join. This was not true.

These Indians had been harrowingly defeated by white men in greedy, unjust wars. They had been offered death or unconditional surrender—death, or life under hideous conditions. Those who had chosen life, which some people think is a holy thing, asked for mercy now. Their average life expectancy was only forty-six years. Their babies died with sickening regularity. Their water rights had been stolen. Some of their best men were woozy with tuberculosis and narcotics and booze. Their government-run schools were indifferent to Indian ideas of holiness, and so were the white man’s laws of the land. One of the things the Indians had come to beg from President Nixon, who never begged anything from anybody, was that their religions be recognized as respectable religions under law. As the law now stands, they told me, their religions are negligible superstitions deserving no respect.

My father collected guns. He kept them oiled. He traded them with other gun nuts—those man-killing machines. This was his way of proving to Indianapolis, Indiana, that he wasn’t a pansy, even though he was in the arts: He was an architect. I simply left Indianapolis, which is a big improvement on spitting into corners and collecting guns.

It is the feeling in several countries, I know, that fiction can hurt a social order a lot. And by fiction I mean any person’s written report of what is going on in his head, as opposed to the daily news.

Writers are specialized cells in the social organism. They are evolutionary cells. Mankind is trying to become something else; it’s experimenting with new ideas all the time. And writers are a means of introducing new ideas into the society, and also a means of responding symbolically to life. I don’t think we’re in control of what we do.

VONNEGUT: You understand, of course, that everything I say is horseshit. PLAYBOY: Of course. VONNEGUT: Well, we do live our lives simultaneously. That’s a fact. You are here as a child and as an old man. I recently visited a woman who has Hodgkin’s disease. She has somewhere between a few months and a couple of years to live, and she told me that she was living her life simultaneously now, living all the moments of it. PLAYBOY: It still seems paradoxical. VONNEGUT: That’s because what I’ve just said to you is horseshit. But it’s a useful, comforting sort of horseshit, you see? That’s what I object to about preachers. They don’t say anything to make anybody any happier, when there are all these neat lies you can tell. And everything is a lie, because our brains are two-bit computers, and we can’t get very high-grade truths out of them. But as far as improving the human condition goes, our minds are certainly up to that. That’s what they were designed to do. And we do have the freedom to make up comforting lies. But we don’t do enough of it.

PLAYBOY: What’s your religious background? VONNEGUT: My ancestors, who came to the United States a little before the Civil War, were atheists. So I’m not rebelling against organized religion. I never had any. I learned my outrageous opinions about organized religion at my mother’s knee. My family has always had those. They came here absolutely crazy about the united States Constitution and about the possibility of prosperity and the brotherhood of man here. They were willing to work very hard, and they were atheists.

PLAYBOY: Is there any religion you consider superior to any other? VONNEGUT: Alcoholics Anonymous. Alcoholics Anonymous gives you an extended family that’s very close to a blood brotherhood, because everybody has endured the same catastrophe. And one of the enchanting aspects of Alcoholics Anonymous is that many people join who aren’t drunks, who pretend to be drunks because the social and spiritual benefits are so large. But they talk about real troubles, which aren’t spoken about in church, as a rule. The halfway houses for people out of prisons, or for people recovering from drug habits, have the same problems: people hanging around who just want the companionship, the brotherhood or the sisterhood, who want the extended family. PLAYBOY: Why? VONNEGUT: It’s a longing for community. This is a lonesome society that’s been fragmented by the factory system. People have to move from here to there as jobs move, as prosperity leaves one area and appears somewhere else. People don’t live in communities permanently anymore. But they should: Communities are very comforting to human beings.

Whenever I go to Indianapolis now, a childish question nags at me, and I finally have to say it out loud: “Where is my bed?” I grew up there, and nearly 1,000,000 people live there now, but there is no place in that city where a bed is mine. So I ask, “Where is my bed?”—and then wind up in a Holiday Inn. You can’t go home again.

Until recent times, you know, human beings usually had a permanent community of relatives. They had dozens of homes to go to. So when a married couple had a fight, one or the other could go to a house three doors down and stay with a close relative until he was feeling tender again. Or if a kid got so fed up with his parents that he couldn’t stand it, he could march over to his uncle’s for a while. And this is no longer possible. Each family is locked into its little box. The neighbors aren’t relatives. There aren’t other houses where people can go and be cared for.

How do you feel about those who are making attempts at alternate social structures—such as communes? VONNEGUT: They want to go back to the way human beings have lived for 1,000,000 years, which is intelligent. Unfortunately, these communities usually don’t hold together very long, and finally they fail because their members aren’t really relatives, don’t have enough in common. For a community really to work, you shouldn’t have to wonder what the person next to you is thinking. That is a primitive society. In the communities of strangers that are being hammered together now, as young people take over farms and try to live communally, the founders are sure to have hellish differences. But their children, if the communes hold together long enough to raise children, will be more comfortable together, will have more attitudes and experiences in common, will be more like genuine relatives. PLAYBOY: Have you done any research on this? VONNEGUT: No. I’m afraid to. I might find out it wasn’t true. It’s a sunny little dream I have of a happier mankind. I couldn’t survive my own pessimism if I didn’t have some kind of sunny little dream. That’s mine, and don’t tell me I’m wrong: Human beings will be happier—not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That’s my utopia. That’s what I want for me.

PLAYBOY: You don’t have a community? VONNEGUT: Oh, there are a lot of people who’ll talk to me on the telephone. And I always receive nice welcomes at Holiday Inns, Quality Motor Courts, Ramada Inns. PLAYBOY: But you have no relatives? VONNEGUT: Shoals of them, but scattered to hell and gone, and thinking all kinds of crazy different ways. PLAYBOY: You want to be with people who live nearby and think exactly as you do? VONNEGUT: No. That isn’t primitive enough. I want to be with people who don’t think at all, so I won’t have to think, either. I’m very tired of thinking. It doesn’t seem to help very much. The human brain is too high-powered to have many practical uses in this particular universe, in my opinion. I’d like to live with alligators, think like an alligator. PLAYBOY: Could this feeling come from the fatigue of having just finished a book? VONNEGUT: No.

One time a few years ago, I was speaking at the University of Hawaii and somebody came up to me and said, “Who’s Fred Vonnegut?” I said I didn’t know and he told me that Fred Vonnegut’s name was in the newspaper all the time. So I picked up a Honolulu paper and in it there was this big used-car ad with a picture of Fred and a headline like “COME IN AND ASK FRED VONNEGUT FOR A GOOD DEAL.” So I looked him up and we had supper together. Turned out that he grew up in Samoa and his mother was a Finn. But the meeting, the connection, was exciting to both of us. PLAYBOY: Aren’t links by name, though, what you call a false karass in Cat’s Cradle—a group that finds its identity in an irrelevant or artificial shared experience? VONNEGUT: I don’t know, but if it works, it doesn’t matter. It’s like the drug thing among young people. The fact that they use drugs gives them a community. If you become a user of any drug, you can pick up a set of friends you’ll see day after day, because of the urgency of getting drugs all the time. And you’ll get a community where you might not ordinarily have one. Built around the marijuana thing was a community, and the same is true about the long-hair thing: You’re able to greet and trust strangers because they look like you, because they use marijuana, and so forth. These are all magical amulets by which they recognize one another—and so you’ve got a community. The drug thing is interesting, too, because it shows that, damn it, people are wonderfully resourceful.

VONNEGUT: Well, thousands of people in our society found out they were too stupid or too unattractive or too ignorant to rise. They realized they couldn’t get a nice car or a nice house or a good job. Not everybody can do that, you know. You must be very pleasant. You must be good-looking. You must be well connected. And they realized that if you lose, if you don’t rise in our society, you’re going to live in the midst of great ugliness, that the police are going to try to drive you back there every time you try to leave. And so people trapped like that have really considered all the possibilities. Should I paint my room? If I get a lot of rat poison, will the rats go away? Well, no. The rats will still be there, and even if you paint it, the room will still be ugly. You still won’t have enough money to go to a movie theater; you still won’t be able to make friends you like or can trust. So what can you do? You can change your mind. You can change your insides. The drug thing was a perfectly marvelous, resourceful, brave experiment. No government would have dared perform this experiment. It’s the sort of thing a Nazi doctor might have tried in a concentration camp. Loading everybody in block C up with amphetamines. In block D, giving them all heroin. Keeping everyone in block E high on marijuana—and just seeing what happened to them. But this experiment was and continues to be performed by volunteers, and so we know an awful lot now about how we can be changed internally. It may be that the population will become so dense that everybody’s going to live in ugliness, and that the intelligent human solution—the only possible solution—will be to change our insides.

laughter is a response to frustration, just as tears are, and it solves nothing, just as tears solve nothing. Laughing or crying is what a human being does when there’s nothing else he can do. Freud has written very soundly on humor—which is interesting, because he was essentially such a humorless man. The example he gives is of the dog who can’t get through a gate to bite a person or fight another dog. So he digs dirt. It doesn’t solve anything, but he has to do something. Crying or laughing is what a human being does instead.

the people Bruce Jay Friedman named as black humorists weren’t really very much like one another. I’m not a whole lot like J. P. Donleavy, say, but Friedman saw some similarity there and said we were both black humorists. So critics picked up the term because it was handy. All they had to do was say black humorists and they’d be naming twenty writers. It was a form of shorthand. But Freud had already written about gallows humor, which is middle-European humor. It’s people laughing in the middle of political helplessness. Gallows humor had to do with people in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There were Jews, Serbs, Croats—all these small groups jammed together into a very unlikely sort of empire. And dreadful things happened to them. They were powerless, helpless people, and so they made jokes. It was all they could do in the face of frustration. The gallows humor that Freud identifies is what we regard as Jewish humor here: It’s humor about weak, intelligent people in hopeless situations. And I have customarily written about powerless people who felt there wasn’t much they could do about their situations.

It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can’t get out of, but I think this is very usual in life.

it strikes me as gruesome and comical that in our culture we have an expectation that a man can always solve his problems. There is that implication that if you just have a little more energy, a little more fight, the problem can always be solved. This is so untrue that it makes me want to cry—or laugh. Culturally, American men aren’t supposed to cry. So I don’t cry much—but I do laugh a lot.

I’m in the business of making jokes; it’s a minor art form. I’ve had some natural talent for it. It’s like building a mousetrap. You build the trap, you cock it, you trip it, and then bang! My books are essentially mosaics made up of a whole bunch of tiny little chips; and each chip is a joke. They may be five lines long or eleven lines long. If I were writing tragically, I could have great sea changes there, a great serious steady flow. Instead, I’ve gotten into the joke business. One reason I write so slowly is that I try to make each joke work. You really have to or the books are lost. But joking is so much a part of my life adjustment that I would begin to work on a story on any subject and I’d find funny things in it or I would stop.

rather than writing for a teacher, which is what most people do, writing for an audience of one—for Miss Green or Mr. Watson—I started out writing for a large audience. And if I did a lousy job, I caught a lot of shit in twenty-four hours. It just turned out that I could write better than a lot of other people. Each person has something he can do easily and can’t imagine why everybody else is having so much trouble doing it. In my case, it was writing. In my brother’s case, it was mathematics and physics. In my sister’s case, it was drawing and sculpting.

The majority of my contemporaries who are science-fiction writers now went absolutely bananas over science-fiction pulps when they were kids, spending all their money on them, collecting them, trading them, gloating over them, cheering on authors the straight world thought were hacks. I never did that, and I’m sorry. I’m shy around other science-fiction writers, because they want to talk about thousands of stories I never read. I didn’t think the pulps were beneath me; I was just pissing away my life in other ways.

When IBM brought out an electric typewriter, they didn’t know if they had a product or not. They really couldn’t imagine that anybody was that discontented with the typewriter already. You know, the mechanical typewriter was a wonderful thing; I never heard of anybody’s hands getting tired using one. So IBM was worried when they brought out electric typewriters, because they didn’t know whether anybody would have any use for them. But the first sales were made to pulp writers, writers who wanted to go faster because they got paid so much a word. But they were going so fast that characterization didn’t matter and dialog was wooden and all that—because it was always first draft. That’s what you sold, because you couldn’t afford to take the time to sharpen up the scenes.

the science-fiction passages in Slaughterhouse-Five are just like the clowns in Shakespeare. When Shakespeare figured the audience had had enough of the heavy stuff, he’d let up a little, bring on a clown or a foolish innkeeper or something like that, before he’d become serious again. And trips to other planets, science fiction of an obviously kidding sort, is equivalent to bringing on the clowns every so often to lighten things up.

While you were writing Slaughterhouse-Five, did you try at all to deal with the subject on a purely realistic level? VONNEGUT: I couldn’t, because the book was largely a found object. It was what was in my head, and I was able to get it out, but one of the characteristics about this object was that there was a complete blank where the bombing of Dresden took place, because I don’t remember. And I looked up several of my war buddies and they didn’t remember, either. They didn’t want to talk about it. There was a complete forgetting of what it was like. There were all kinds of information surrounding the event, but as far as my memory bank was concerned, the center had been pulled right out of the story. There was nothing up there to be recovered—or in the heads of my friends, either.

Our generation did believe what its Government said—because we weren’t lied to very much. One reason we weren’t lied to was that there wasn’t a war going on in our childhood, and so essentially we were told the truth. There was no reason for our Government to lie very elaborately to us. But a government at war does become a lying government for many reasons. One reason is to confuse the enemy. When we went into the war, we felt our Government was a respecter of life, careful about not injuring civilians and that sort of thing. Well, Dresden had no tactical value; it was a city of civilians. Yet the Allies bombed it until it burned and melted. And then they lied about it. All that was startling to us. But it doesn’t startle anybody now. What startled everybody about the carpet bombing of Hanoi wasn’t the bombing; it was that it took place at Christmas. That’s what everybody was outraged about.

Also, I hate officers. PLAYBOY: Why? VONNEGUT: They’re all shits. Every officer I ever knew was a shit. I spoke at West Point on this subject and they found it very funny. But all my life I’ve hated officers, because they speak so badly to the ground troops. The way they speak to lower-ranking persons is utterly unnecessary. A friend of mine was here the other day and he had bought a new overcoat he was very proud of. But I didn’t like it, because it had epaulets—and I think he’s going to take them off.

What about scientists such as Wernher Von Braun? VONNEGUT: Well, he’s an engineer, of course, not a scientist. But what do I think of him? I don’t know him, but it seems to me that he has a heartless sort of innocence, the sort of innocence that would allow a man to invent and build an electric chair—as an act of good citizenship. He has been an inventor of weapons systems in the past. Inventors of weapons systems, and Leonardo da Vinci was among them, are not friends of the common man.

PLAYBOY: What’s your opinion of Nixon? VONNEGUT: Well, I don’t think he’s evil. But I think he dislikes the American people, and this depresses us. The President, particularly because of television, is in the position to be an extraordinarily effective teacher. I don’t know exactly how much executive responsibility a President has, or how much the Government runs itself, but I do know that he can influence our behavior for good and ill. If he teaches us something tonight, we will behave according to that tomorrow. All he has to do is say it on television. If he tells us about our neighbors in trouble, if he tells us to treat them better tomorrow, why, we’ll all try. But the lessons Nixon has taught us have been so mean. He’s taught us to resent the poor for not solving their own problems. He’s taught us to like prosperous people better than unprosperous people. He could make us so humane and optimistic with a single television appearance.

His opponent had too powerful an issue: the terror and guilt and hatred white people feel for the descendants of victims of an unbelievable crime we committed not long ago—human slavery. How’s that for science fiction? There was this modern country with a wonderful Constitution, and it kidnaped human beings and used them as machines. It stopped it after a while, but by then it had millions of descendants of those kidnaped people all over the country.

I wanted Sarge Shriver to say, “You’re not happy, are you? Nobody in this country is happy but the rich people. Something is wrong. I’ll tell you what’s wrong: We’re lonesome! We’re being kept apart from our neighbors. Why? Because the rich people can go on taking our money away if we don’t hang together. They can go on taking our power away. They want us lonesome; they want us huddled in our houses with just our wives and kids, watching television, because they can manipulate us then. They can make us buy anything, they can make us vote any way they want. How did Americans beat the Great Depression? We banded together. In those days, members of unions called each other ‘brother’ and ‘sister,’ and they meant it. We’re going to bring that spirit back. Brother and sister! We’re going to vote in George McGovern, and then we’re going to get this country on the road again. We are going to band together with our neighbors to clean up our neighborhoods, to get the crooks out of the unions, to get the prices down in the meat markets. Here’s a war cry for the American people: ‘Lonesome no more!’ ” That’s the kind of demagoguery I approve of.

everything I believe I was taught in junior civics during the Great Depression—at School 43 in Indianapolis, with full approval of the school board. School 43 wasn’t a radical school. America was an idealistic, pacifistic nation at that time. I was taught in the sixth grade to be proud that we had a standing Army of just over a hundred thousand men and that the generals had nothing to say about what was done in Washington. I was taught to be proud of that and to pity Europe for having more than a million men under arms and spending all their money on airplanes and tanks. I simply never unlearned junior civics. I still believe in it. I got a very good grade.

PLAYBOY: When did you start laughing about all this? VONNEGUT: When I was just a little kid, I think. I’d wonder what life was all about, and I’d hear what grown-ups had to say about it, and I’d laugh. I’ve often thought there ought to be a manual to hand to little kids, telling them what kind of planet they’re on, why they don’t fall off it, how much time they’ve probably got here, how to avoid poison ivy, and so on. I tried to write one once. It was called Welcome to Earth. But I got stuck on explaining why we don’t fall off the planet. Gravity is just a word. It doesn’t explain anything. If I could get past gravity, I’d tell them how we reproduce, how long we’ve been here, apparently, and a little bit about evolution. And one thing I would really like to tell them about is cultural relativity. I didn’t learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A firstgrader should understand that his culture isn’t a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. I didn’t find that out for sure until I was in the graduate school of the University of Chicago. It was terribly exciting. Of course, now cultural relativity is fashionable—and that probably has something to do with my popularity among young people. But it’s more than fashionable—it’s defensible, attractive. It’s also a source of hope. It means we don’t have to continue this way if we don’t like it.

I felt after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I didn’t have to write at all anymore if I didn’t want to. It was the end of some sort of career. I don’t know why, exactly. I suppose that flowers, when they’re through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been served. Flowers didn’t ask to be flowers and I didn’t ask to be me. At the end of Slaughterhouse-Five, I had the feeling that I had produced this blossom. So I had a shutting-off feeling, you know, that I had done what I was supposed to do and everything was OK. And that was the end of it. I could figure out my missions for myself after that.

As I get older, I get more didactic. I say what I really think. I don’t hide ideas like Easter eggs for people to find. Now, if I have an idea, when something becomes clear to me, I don’t embed it in a novel; I simply write it in an essay as clearly as I can. What I say didactically in the introduction to Breakfast of Champions is that I can’t live without a culture anymore, that I realize I don’t have one. What passes for a culture in my head is really a bunch of commercials, and this is intolerable. It may be impossible to live without a culture.

All my books are my effort to answer that question and to make myself like life better than I do. I’m trying to throw out all the trashy merchandise adults put in my head when I was a little kid. I want to put a culture up there. People will believe anything, which means I will believe anything. I learned that in anthropology. I want to start believing in things that have shapeliness and harmony.

PLAYBOY: So your books have been therapy for yourself. VONNEGUT: Sure. That’s well known. Writers get a nice break in one way, at least: They can treat their mental illnesses every day. If I’m lucky, the books have amounted to more than that. I’d like to be a useful citizen, a specialized cell in the body politic. I have a feeling that Breakfast will be the last of the therapeutic books, which is probably too bad. Craziness makes for some beautiful accidents in art.