Houston Southard

Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of champions

Kurt Vonnegut is the GOAT of black satire, and I have never once cared about the plot of any of his books because for him plot is just a plot device to inject and distribute his unimpressed philosophy onto his readers.

He wants to tear apart your ability to imagine you are a character living in a story. He doesn’t even want you to have the dignity of thinking that highly of yourself. He deals in slogans, logos, clichés, and other pithy trappings of profiteers to ironically illustrate the sacrilege use of these phrases and logos commit on the sacredness of language.

He says as communicative beings, language is our sacred bond, and slogans and other corporatized media-speech threaten its trustworthiness. At one point he expounds a just-so story about the origins of ideas, saying that ideas were never very important to humans because they were so hard to make a reality.

It used to be easy that it was easy to agree with someone just because you were friends with them. Camaraderie was cheap and ideas were badges friendship or enmity. But then humans made tools, and with the capabilities of an industrialized society, agreeing with friends could be a form of suicide. We went on being friendly anyway when we should have been thinking instead, so ideas became lethal, resulting in the madness of genocides, wars, holocausts, slavery, exploitation, organized religion. Trafficking in lunatic ideas cost humanity a bloody price and there was nothing we could do to stop it.

He also has a bunch of funny drawings, the most popular one of an anal sphincter. So it goes.