Fwd: Vonnegut Commentary is on the money

--- In v911t@yahoogroups.com, "Alfons" <alfons@...> wrote:

http://www.buzzflash.com/store/items/581
Vonnegut is a favorite of several generations, never having lost his
relevancy. He also never lost his sense of trenchant political
analysis either, as he revealed just a few years back in a 2003
interview with "In These Times." He fileted the Bush administration
in just a few paragraphs of concise analysis:

"[In These Times Interviewer]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?

[Kurt Vonnegut]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!"

--- End forwarded message ---