OK, so he doesn't call President Bush a turkey-- he does much better. Vonnegut points out how we might as well be turkies for getting excited about a political culture that resists evolution. (The "cold turkey" reference is actually used to suggest that America should decrease its dependence on foreign oil and big military intervention/spending as a means of defining and comforting ourselves. See the last few lines of the essay.) Complaining of the overly-simplistic division between "liberals" and "conservatives", Vonnegut then goes on to rant about the drug war and other flies in the peanut butter. He deserves to be quoted at length:
My government’s got a war on drugs. But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal. One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W. Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed or tiddley-poo or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time from when he was 16 until he was 41. When he was 41, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint. Other drunks have seen pink elephants.
And do you know why I think he is so pissed off at Arabs? They invented algebra. Arabs also invented the numbers we use, including a symbol for nothing, which nobody else had ever had before. You think Arabs are dumb? Try doing long division with Roman numerals.
We’re spreading democracy, are we? Same way European explorers brought Christianity to the Indians, what we now call “Native Americans.” How ungrateful they were! How ungrateful are the people of Baghdad today. So let’s give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That’ll teach bin Laden a lesson he won’t soon forget. Hail to the Chief.
That chief and his cohorts have as little to do with Democracy as the Europeans had to do with Christianity. We the people have absolutely no say in whatever they choose to do next. In case you haven’t noticed, they’ve already cleaned out the treasury, passing it out to pals in the war and national security rackets, leaving your generation and the next one with a perfectly enormous debt that you’ll be asked to repay. Nobody let out a peep when they did that to you, because they have disconnected every burglar alarm in the Constitution: The House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the FBI, the free press (which, having been embedded, has forsaken the First Amendment) and We the People."
My personal fear is that liberalism as a political philosophy is dead-- even the champions of multiculturalism want a heavily-censored, semantically-correct version. We think within strictures; we speak between lines. More importantly, we cannot imagine anything else.
As "normalcy" is defined and re-defined by subtle changes in the status quo, our "normal" shifts to encompass different aesthetic and commercial trends withour challenging conventional paradigms and theories. Our taste for trends does not extend to an embrace of true, intellectual creativity. What happens on the surface does not neccessarily reflect substantive changes beneath. Maybe superficial changes (pace Postrel and Brooks) do eventually lead to a re-conceptualization of political culture, but this tends to be more aesthetic than actual.
True liberals who care about America will have to do more than cast a vote for Kerry (though this is a step in the right direction) in November-- true liberals will have to pressure Kerry and his compadres to move away from the center and embrace a more radical, humane politics, a politics that does not promise continued war, aggression, and unrealistic spending sprees to the bankers, professionals, and corporations that reap the the very illiberal benefits. True liberals will have to agitate for liberalism as a philosophy rather than merely a chic sound-bite.
