God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut

By Bryan Young

Few authors have had as much influence on the youth of America than Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

He brought morality and humanism to the forefront of millions of minds and into the mind of one man in particular.

Author, documentary filmmaker, and longtime Huffington Post contributor, Bryan Young has been a lifelong fan and student of Vonnegut's. God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut is his love letter to the late writer, collecting essays, short stories, and other material written over the last ten years, all of it about, or directly inspired by, Vonnegut.

Praise for Bryan Young and his first novel, Lost at the Con:

"Young's style is terse and crisp. He writes in a way that compels you to keep flipping pages." --Huffington Post

"Entertaining, funny, and eye-opening..." --Graphic Policy

"Young's hard-hitting style pulled me into the story immediately. No time and words are wasted but nothing is rushed or bland." --Geeks With Curves

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bryan Young
• Release date: Nov 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465815538

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God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut

Copyright © 2011 by Bryan Young

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved.

Cover design by Lucas Ackley

www.ackleydesign.com

Cover illustration by Erin Kubinek

Book design by Bryan Young

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Special Thanks to Dawn Boardman

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing: November 2011

ISBN-13:

Some works herein are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book is for the teachers who made a difference:

Mr. Bock, 5th Grade

Mrs. Garrett, 8th-12th Grades

and Scott Willis, in whose High School English class I read my first Vonnegut book.

-BY 2011

Preface

I wrote the first draft of my first novel on an old Corona typewriter. Thanks to reading too much of Kurt Vonnegut’s work, I found myself with a strong desire to smoke a Pall Mall cigarette with every page I typed.

I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life.

Such is the smallest of impacts Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. had on me, my life, and my writing.

He’s influenced the lives of plenty of our generations greatest thinkers. From Greg Palast and Jon Stewart to Norman Mailer and Elvis Costello, his influence has been seen far and wide. Even Graham Greene (perhaps my second favorite author behind Vonnegut) praised him as one of the greatest living American writers.

Sadly, neither of them are still with us.

Vonnegut’s indelible impression on me and countless others spread much further than just my writing and the preposterous desire to kill myself slowly by cigarette. The complete works of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., when considered as a whole, paints a picture of the world that is at once cynical but twice as optimistic. Looking at his collected writings as a piece-meal philosophical text, you’re given a prescription for a tonic to evil. At his core, he advocates a philosophy as compelling as The New Testament and somehow twice as humane.

I found the works of Vonnegut as a teenager and, like most of the rudderless teens of the world who find him, I was filled up with morality and ethics in such a way that I’d have never otherwise responded to.

They were lessons I learned when I didn’t even know I was being taught.

I was in high school when I read my first Vonnegut novel. Like most people, it was Slaughterhouse-Five. I read it in a banned book club and it forever changed my life. It inoculated me from ever thinking war could be a good idea. It started me on a trajectory of learning that has molded me from a lump of clay into an aerodynamic rocket ship, ready to smash right into injustice and immorality as I see it, as I think Vonnegut saw it, as I think Vonnegut taught me.

For that reason, I think it’s the right thing to do for conservatives to work hard to ban the books of Kurt Vonnegut, particularly Slaughterhouse-Five.

Can you blame them?

Slaughterhouse-Five is dangerous if it can shape unsuspecting teenagers into liberal-socialist-commies like me. How powerful is that one simple book that it can forever evolve kids into better human beings?

Conservatives should work hard to ban the teaching of evolution, too.

Without writers like Vonnegut and Darwin, conservatives would have no danger of going extinct. They have to defend their ideals or their ideals will fall away forever. I don’t agree with them, but they have a right to defend it.

That’s survival of the fittest at work.

They need to fight, adapt or go extinct.

* * *

On April 11, 2007, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. died. To say it took the wind out of my sails would be an understatement.

So it goes.

I felt like someone had punched me in the gut.

Perhaps it's selfish or wrong of me, but, when it happened, I felt like I'd lost an old friend.

I think Vonnegut has influenced me, as both a writer and a person, more than any single artist in my life. Even more than George Lucas. I find myself revisiting Vonnegut’s work over and over and over again. Each time I read one of his books, I feel like I'm visiting with an old friend. Now, although that friend is gone, I still have his books.

During the brief time that my timeline coincided with his, I wrote Kurt Vonnegut three letters. I never sent any of them. While I was busy not sending them, I knew that eventually his time would come and I would regret not sending them.

Truly, I regret not sending them.

In the letters, I told him he didn't need to fear so much about the generations of kids after him. That people still do care about things like Abraham Lincoln and Sacco and Vanzetti and Eugene Debs. Kids, like myself, (although I suppose I'm not much of a kid anymore) really did learn, and care to learn, from people as wise as he.

Perhaps the most important thing he taught me was how vital it is to care about my fellow man. He did it better than all my years studying dogma inside an organized religion. He taught me that I didn't have to believe in a God to do it. He taught me the value of Christianity and the teachings of Christ without having to fall into the trap of all of the spiritual mumbo-jumbo that went with it. He taught me the optimism to see the essential decency in pretty much any human being.

He inspired me to write what I believe to be some of my best short stories and essays. As a tribute and a thank you to Kurt Vonnegut, I wanted to collect some of them and present them to you with some comment.

I hope I’ll have used the time of you, the reader, in a way you don’t feel is wasted.

-BY 2011

I

The night I found out about the passing of my hero, I was in San Francisco, drinking Sangria in a Mexican restaurant, deep in the bowels of the city. It was after a long day of work: we’d interviewed Michael Pollan for our documentary about obesity called Killer at Large.

Elias Pate, my friend, sometimes co-writer, and fellow producer on the film, turned to me with a dour look on his face after checking a text message on his phone.

He said three words that sucked the laughter from me: Kurt Vonnegut died.

I couldn’t believe it.

Elias, being as much a disciple of Vonnegut as I, was clearly just as devastated. The dinner went south from there. We ate, but our hearts weren’t in it.

Quietly, we paid the check and parted ways with the rest of our party and wandered the streets of San Francisco, looking for a place to get drunk and commiserate. Bars and clubs were too loud and boisterous for so solemn an occasion, but few suitable (and open for business) alternatives could be found.

We wandered into a California Pizza Kitchen a few blocks from our hotel and split a bottle of bad wine. We talked of his influence and impact and what he meant to us. We talked about how he shaped our thinking and our ideals.

Soon enough, our drunk ramblings left us smelling of roses and mustard gas and we wanted to move on. With a stop only to buy more booze, we went straight back to our hotel. Elias went to bed and, in a drunken haze, I sat down at my computer and typed out the following piece for The Huffington Post. I wanted people to know what Vonnegut meant, to so many of us, from the tallest platform I had at my disposal.

I hope my drunken ramblings did him some justice:

Kurt Vonnegut is in Heaven Now

I found out late this evening that we have lost one of the most incredible, human authors of the last few generations. Nothing I can say here (or anywhere else) will be as important as anything Kurt Vonnegut wrote, but I feel like I have to try.

And sadly, I know how this will end.

Poo-tee-weet!

I want to say he was one of the most prolific and caring authors of my generation, but I'm only 26 and he passed away young at 84. Vonnegut was one of the most prolific and caring authors of the any generation in the last century and, now that he's gone, all we have left of him are the novels, short stories, and essays that he wrote during his lifetime. In that way, his ideas and ideals have become unstuck in time.

His writings have meant a lot to generations of people and have personally meant the world to me. He taught many of us the ideals that make us who we are, and if he didn't introduce us to those ideals, he certainly reinforced them with some of the most biting, hilarious, and apt social commentary the world has ever had privilege to read between the covers of a book.

He taught me about important moments in history that seem long forgotten, about union strikes and old Socialist heroes, about Abraham Lincoln and World War II. He taught me what was great about what Christ had to say better than any priest I'd ever known. With his novels, he showed me sides of people that I would never have imagined or conceived. With his short stories he offered me insight into the small moments in life that make things interesting. With his essays he showed me that injustice in the world might go unpunished and the public might forget, but history never will.

He taught me about conservatives. Once, he said of Richard Nixon (and I think it remains true of most hard-line conservatives) that it seemed as though somewhere along the line he was told that the only things regarded as crimes were sexual in nature.

That explains a lot.

Vonnegut's writing is full of such wisdom and it’s too bad that we'll never have the gift of his unique insight beyond his currently published works.

What do I think his most important