Kurt Vonnegut, America and Flags

Early on, when they began dating, my father lent to my mother his copy of The Brothers Karamazov. Evidently, the courting rituals of Jews are somewhat different.

Karamazov is a great book, of course. Kurt Vonnegut has a great line about this great book in Slaughterhouse Five:

Rosewater said an interesting thing to Billy one time about a book that wasn’t science fiction. He said that everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov, by Feodor Dostoevsky. ‘But that isn’t enough any more.’ said Rosewater.

For me, Kurt Vonnegut has always been the author, when Karamazov and the greats are not enough anymore. Vonnegut provides a sane perspective of modern Western lunacy. With the lunacy of Trump and his thuggish cult now in full force, Vonnegut’s humane sanity is more valuable than ever. The current tariff madness brought a particular Vonnegut passage to mind.

My favourite Vonnegut book, even if it is definitely not his best, is Breakfast of Champions. It followed on from arguably Vonnegut’s two best, Cats Cradle and then Slaughterhouse Five, the latter with which Vonnegut battled for decades and which catapulted him to fame. Breakfast of Champions was the aftermath, his “What now?” book, after having finally succeeded in getting Slaughterhouse Five on to paper. BoC is silly and confused, but I love its innocence, Vonnegut’s naked attempts to make sense of the world and his writing about it.

Early in the novel, Vonnegut introduces his two main characters, Kilgore Trout and Dwayne Hoover:

Listen:

Trout and Hoover were citizens of the United States of America, a country which was called America for short. This was their national anthem, which was pure balderdash, like so much they were expected to take seriously:

O, say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thru the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
O, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

There were one quadrillion nations in the Universe, but the nation Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout belonged to was the only one with a national anthem which was gibberish sprinkled with question marks.

Vonnegut then gets on to the flag:

Here is what their flag looked like:

It was the law of their nation, a law no other nation on the planet had about its flag, which said this: “The flag shall not be dipped to any person or thing.”

Flag-dipping was a form of friendly and respectful salute, which consisted of bringing the flag on a stick closer to the ground, then raising it up again.

America in a nutshell.

America is not by a mile the worst country in the world, but America is, by a mile, the most gratuitously dickish. Which is the thing about Trump’s tariffs lunacy. It is not just incredibly mad; it is incredibly dickish. It is exceptional but not that exceptional for a country with a law against flag-dipping, with a custom steadfastly against respect and common courtesy. America has always been ready to be dickish, and with enough Americans happy and ready to cheer on America in its dickishness.