A little bit of literature

“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.”

(...)

“Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times.”

Vocabulary build-up

The adjective folk means “of, occurring in, or originating among the common people; having unknown origins and reflecting the traditional forms of a society.”

The adjective inward means “located inside; inner; of, relating to, or existing in the thoughts or mind.”

Comments

Kurt Vonnegut, before publishing his groundbreaking books, was a World War II veteran. Captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge, he was sent to Dresden as a prisoner of war. There he was starved, beaten, and put to work as a slave laborer. He survived the Allied firebombing of the city, in February 1945, and was forced to help excavate hundreds of bodies of men, women, and children who had been burned alive, suffocated, and crushed to death. A member of the “Greatest Generation”, Vonnegut held increasing sway during the second half of the twentieth century as a hero of the 1960s counter-culture. These youthful writers among the baby-boomers were politically leftist, pro-civil rights, pro-women’s rights, and early defenders of a green world ethic. Therefore, technology, religion, politics, the failing environment, our biological and cultural ancestries, and the issues we leave for the next generation, all inhabit Vonnegut’s vortex. “Slaughterhouse-Five”, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous shelling of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. Most frequently noted for its postmodern narrative structure and constantly discussed as a representative of thinking patterns by PTSD sufferers, “Slaughterhouse-Five” helped usher in the postmodern style of literature with its playful, fragmented form, its insistence that reality is not objective and that history is not monolithic, and its self-reflection on its own status as art. Like Andy Warhol’s soup cans, “Slaughterhouse-Five” blurs the line between high and low culture.