“Dirty old men”: The two American icons Kurt Vonnegut held in utter disdain
“In case you haven’t noticed, we are now as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazi’s once were. And with good reason.” – Kurt Vonnegut (1922 – 2007)
The evolution of culture is never quite as clear-cut as the history books make out. The general narrative is that the youth spring a sudden liberal revolution – whether that be counterculture, punk, grunge or hip hop – which defibrillates the art’s hold on society with something new and radical. But, in time, these movements lose sight of themselves, stepping one toke over the line, and giving way to a rather more mainstream, capitalist product once more.
However, these concentric circles overlap far more than history makes out. We might think we’re polarised now, but we always have been. John Wayne was still cleaning up at the box office when Easy Rider – the film he labelled “perverse” was riding high – and Frank Sinatra was edging out edgy masterpieces like Highway 61 Revisited at the Grammys.
When we look back at the 1960s now, Bob Dylan and Dennis Hopper might define the iconography far more clearly than their counterparts, but if you dig into the facts and figures, Wayne and Sinatra were still swinging and swaggering in the hearts of middle America. Sometimes the tail wags the dog.
Kurt Vonnegut, however, felt that middle America was grossly misguided. He made that point perfectly clear. While he might have called Dylan the “worst poet alive”, he certainly agreed with the peaceful sentiment of the counterculture revolution that he helped to shape. Vonnegut was sent to fight in Europe in World War II at the age of 21, three months after discovering that his mother had committed suicide.
So, hot on the heels of his own personal tragedy, he witnessed the true terror of war first-hand, sheltering, as a prisoner of war, in a Slaughterhouse in Dresden as the firebombing rained down from above. He said it sounded “ like giant footsteps above. Those were sticks of high-explosive bombs. The giants walked and walked.”
When he arrived in Dresden, he called it “possibly the world’s most beautiful city”. When he emerged from the rubble of the slaughterhouse, he remarked that “the city was gone”. It seemed “everything that would burn” had burned.
So it goes
Vonnegut had also grown up wealthy in the earlier years of his childhood, but the Great Depression hit his father’s architectural firm hard as nobody could afford to build, forcing his family into a relative state of sudden and unexpected poverty. So, the counterculture movement’s core tenets of peace, love, and provisions were firmly aligned with his own hard-earned beliefs.
Despite being slightly older than the bulk of the generation spearheading the cause, he backed them to the hilt and questioned the more conservative voices like John Wayne and Frank Sinatra, who dubbed so-called hippies and their ideals “freaks” and “ugly” respectively.
The counterculture way of doing things was seen as an affront to the traditions of America. But in Vonnegut’s eyes, with the Vietnam War bringing about even more impending bloodshed, an affront to traditions was necessary. Wayne didn’t see it that way, commenting, “The articulate liberal group has caused certain things in our country, and I wonder how long the young people who read Playboy are going to allow these things to go on.”
The use of “articulate” is certainly novel insult, but he continued to get even more conventional, telling Playboy, “George Putnam, the Los Angeles news analyst, put it quite succinctly when he said, ‘What kind of a nation is it that fails to understand that freedom of speech and assembly are one thing, and anarchy and treason are quite another, that allows known Communists to serve as teachers to pervert the natural loyalties and ideals of our kids, filling them with fear and doubt and hate and down-grading patriotism and all our heroes of the past?'” If Vonnegut had been one of the so-called heroes that Wayne referred to, then his hope was that there would never be another.
As the real war veteran would write in his novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, in a scene when he muses over the concept of fictionalising his experiences: “‘Well, I know,’ she said. ‘You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men.”
He continues, “And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.’ So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn’t want her babies or anybody else’s babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.”
Well, it seems that Vonnegut, in turn, figured that the art of the counterculture movement encouraged peace by contrast, and he was happy to attack the stately figures of ‘pretending’, who, inadvertently or otherwise, glamorised ideals that had been shown time and time again to be toxic.
While Sinatra and Wayne would, of course, argue that there’s nothing wrong with patriotism and good old values, Vonnegut clung to a different time in the murky concentric rings of history when peace and socialism were acceptable patriotic tenets, writing in retort: “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.” Sadly, that seems to have slipped out of favour once more.
But Vonnegut’s words on how the “dity old men” often held in esteen in America are far mor naive than those they accuse of idealistic pipedreams, adding: “Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren, so that the message of our principal art forms, movies and television and political speeches and newspaper columns, for the sake of the economy, simply has to be this: War is hell, all right, but the only way a boy can become a man is in a shoot-out of some kind, preferably, but by no means necessarily, on a battlefield.”
