Bluebeard

Lecturers traveled all over Northern Europe with such pictures in olden times. With assistants to unroll one end and roll up the other, they urged all ambitious and able persons to abandon tired old Europe and lay claim to rich and beautiful properties in the Promised Land, which were practically theirs for the asking.

Why should a real man stay home when he could be raping a virgin continent?

—Kurt Vonnegut. Bluebeard.

"I can't help it," I said. "My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat keeps right on doing bad, dumb things."

—Kurt Vonnegut. Bluebeard.

The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn't have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks.

This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?

Well—I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.

—Kurt Vonnegut. Bluebeard.

"Maybe, when they suddenly started doing something they'd never done before, and their personalities changed, too—" she said, "maybe they had started picking up signals from another station, which had very different ideas about what they should say and do."

—Kurt Vonnegut. Bluebeard.

That's what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn't make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.

—Kurt Vonnegut. Bluebeard.

That was an ordinary way for a patriotic American to talk back then. It's hard to believe how sick of war we used to be. We used to boast of how small our Army and Navy were, and how little influence generals and admirals had in Washington. We used to call armaments manufacturers "Merchants of Death."

Can you imagine that?

—Kurt Vonnegut. Bluebeard.

"If anybody has discovered what life is all about,", Father might say, "it is too late. I am no longer interested."

—Kurt Vonnegut. Bluebeard.