If somebody were curious about Kurt Vonnegut and had never read anything by him before, I'd probably have them read Chapter 2 of Player Piano to decide if maybe they'd want to read more. It's like mainlining Vonnegut. For those ideological conservative thinkers, it stands as a stark warning that the things they believe will be brutally and effectively criticized. Do they want more of that? They probably think they don't but I'd say they damn well do need more of it.
The scene consists of Doctor Halyard, a member of the U.S. State Department, showing the Shah of Bratpuhr around New York in a limousine. The Shah is described as rich and fat, almost certainly off the backs of the six million people he's said to be leader of. They pass by a road crew and the Shah asks whose slaves they are. Halyard proceeds to explain capitalism to him and merely winds up convincing the Shah that "citizen" means "slave" and that capitalism is communism. The only differences are the words used to describe the machinery of it all.
To me, the only problem with the Shah thinking Halyard's U.S. is communism is that capitalism actually does communism's job much better. Convince people they're free to choose their jobs and to do what you choose and they'll fight like hell to keep up the illusion. Convince them that a mortgage and kids are the American dream and now they need the constant stream of income that only the great and miraculous job providers can promise them. Maybe tie their health care to the job so they can't leave the job without putting risk to their family and their family's finances. And then maybe, when you've convinced them that taxes are out of control so that they support the highest tax brackets dropping to almost nothing which then makes more sense for business owners and management to give themselves even more of the profit in personal salaries and bonuses instead of putting that money back into the company, you can even take away the free healthcare and the pension and every other promise of a middle class capitalist life. Next, convince them that all of these things were unearned benefits that people shouldn't expect to get by constantly using manipulative language and calling those things entitlements. Get the media to use your language so that it just becomes another fact of life. Pensions, health care, and living wages all become things you have to work hard and fight for (yet again because fighting for them the first time, well, that was ancient history and probably it was an un-American thing to do at the time. Damn anarchists!). But don't fight the corporations and the government! Fight your fellow workers as you struggle to keep your shitty job so charitably given to you by the great and magnificent job provider. As corporations take control of the government, the most important thing is to keep people dependent on the ever shittier jobs offered to them. Every program which the government might have in place as a safety net against poverty or as a means to make life better for everybody must be shut down because if they exist, people will actually feel free enough to not accept work contracts on the worst terms. Corporations need citizens working without a safety net or else the citizen might actually have the ability to choose jobs that offer a real chance at living.
Predatory college tuition has wound up working the same way. If you can't control the educated masses in the same way you control the non-college working class, you just come up with basically the same system! Saddle them with debt so they're forced into the labor force on your terms. They don't come out with a leg up because of their education. They begin life loaded with debt. Yes, a percentage of them will find the exchange worth it. But what can you do? You can't funnel everybody into the slave-labor class! Some are going to get away and get actual jobs they love that provide them with everything they need in every sense. But just label them the elite and "other" the fuck out of them so the working class people think of them as the enemy. How dare they feel fulfilled in their easy ivory tower cushioned offices where they, I don't know, make money by reading Tolstoy or some shit? Have they ever actually had a callous?! Probably not! So un-American! But the others who don't come out of college with a well-paying job are your real targets! The ones who go to college, get loads of debt, and then come out the other side without any real prospects for a lengthy and fulfilling career. You'll have them by the balls, by gum!
A college education is something I think everybody should have, for loads of various reasons. But at this point in time . . . with this cost? I'm no longer sure. Maybe we should just hand out a syllabus of mandatory reading to all graduating high school students and say, "Take a year off. Live at home (like you'd probably do anyway!). Read all of these. Take them in. Absorb them. Don't think of them as a means of escape and entertainment. These are your training manuals. Digest the fuck out of them and learn to fight. Because America isn't giving you shit anymore. America sees its citizens as parasites. If you don't have the money to establish a lobbying firm, America sees you as nothing put a pest in its garden. So take these books and read them, learn from them, and be angry."
America has not been what it purports to be for some time. No longer are we the land of the free and the home of the brave. Now, America is where we signal our virtue while not actually doing anything to make the country better. We praise our troops while not actually caring for them or avoiding unnecessary wars. We praise our economy and laud stock market growth while letting people fall into poverty and starve. We celebrate a (not really but a lot of people think it's true) Christian nature while putting our hand on Jesus's face as we push him back and mutter, "Not now, Messiah." For anybody wondering what America actually is, we should simply remind them that our government decided to start calling French fries "Freedom Fries" when they got annoyed with France for not doing what they wanted them to do. That's about the extent of our bipartisanship ability to get things done.
In the world of Player Piano, those whose jobs have been taken over by machines now must either work for government labor crews or join the armed forces. That's the freedom allowed by privatization of everything. Although that's still a better world than what America is becoming because at least in Vonnegut's world, the machines and the incomes of the wealthy are taxed enough to pay the salaries of everybody else. In our current America, it's nearly the same thing except the wealthy aren't taxed and the poor are told they're lazy fuckers who feel entitled to life, liberty, and happiness which, according to the part of the Declaration of Independence that apparently never gets read, is only for those who work hard at shitty jobs and shut the fuck up about maybe making things better for everybody.
The scene consists of Doctor Halyard, a member of the U.S. State Department, showing the Shah of Bratpuhr around New York in a limousine. The Shah is described as rich and fat, almost certainly off the backs of the six million people he's said to be leader of. They pass by a road crew and the Shah asks whose slaves they are. Halyard proceeds to explain capitalism to him and merely winds up convincing the Shah that "citizen" means "slave" and that capitalism is communism. The only differences are the words used to describe the machinery of it all.
To me, the only problem with the Shah thinking Halyard's U.S. is communism is that capitalism actually does communism's job much better. Convince people they're free to choose their jobs and to do what you choose and they'll fight like hell to keep up the illusion. Convince them that a mortgage and kids are the American dream and now they need the constant stream of income that only the great and miraculous job providers can promise them. Maybe tie their health care to the job so they can't leave the job without putting risk to their family and their family's finances. And then maybe, when you've convinced them that taxes are out of control so that they support the highest tax brackets dropping to almost nothing which then makes more sense for business owners and management to give themselves even more of the profit in personal salaries and bonuses instead of putting that money back into the company, you can even take away the free healthcare and the pension and every other promise of a middle class capitalist life. Next, convince them that all of these things were unearned benefits that people shouldn't expect to get by constantly using manipulative language and calling those things entitlements. Get the media to use your language so that it just becomes another fact of life. Pensions, health care, and living wages all become things you have to work hard and fight for (yet again because fighting for them the first time, well, that was ancient history and probably it was an un-American thing to do at the time. Damn anarchists!). But don't fight the corporations and the government! Fight your fellow workers as you struggle to keep your shitty job so charitably given to you by the great and magnificent job provider. As corporations take control of the government, the most important thing is to keep people dependent on the ever shittier jobs offered to them. Every program which the government might have in place as a safety net against poverty or as a means to make life better for everybody must be shut down because if they exist, people will actually feel free enough to not accept work contracts on the worst terms. Corporations need citizens working without a safety net or else the citizen might actually have the ability to choose jobs that offer a real chance at living.
Predatory college tuition has wound up working the same way. If you can't control the educated masses in the same way you control the non-college working class, you just come up with basically the same system! Saddle them with debt so they're forced into the labor force on your terms. They don't come out with a leg up because of their education. They begin life loaded with debt. Yes, a percentage of them will find the exchange worth it. But what can you do? You can't funnel everybody into the slave-labor class! Some are going to get away and get actual jobs they love that provide them with everything they need in every sense. But just label them the elite and "other" the fuck out of them so the working class people think of them as the enemy. How dare they feel fulfilled in their easy ivory tower cushioned offices where they, I don't know, make money by reading Tolstoy or some shit? Have they ever actually had a callous?! Probably not! So un-American! But the others who don't come out of college with a well-paying job are your real targets! The ones who go to college, get loads of debt, and then come out the other side without any real prospects for a lengthy and fulfilling career. You'll have them by the balls, by gum!
A college education is something I think everybody should have, for loads of various reasons. But at this point in time . . . with this cost? I'm no longer sure. Maybe we should just hand out a syllabus of mandatory reading to all graduating high school students and say, "Take a year off. Live at home (like you'd probably do anyway!). Read all of these. Take them in. Absorb them. Don't think of them as a means of escape and entertainment. These are your training manuals. Digest the fuck out of them and learn to fight. Because America isn't giving you shit anymore. America sees its citizens as parasites. If you don't have the money to establish a lobbying firm, America sees you as nothing put a pest in its garden. So take these books and read them, learn from them, and be angry."
America has not been what it purports to be for some time. No longer are we the land of the free and the home of the brave. Now, America is where we signal our virtue while not actually doing anything to make the country better. We praise our troops while not actually caring for them or avoiding unnecessary wars. We praise our economy and laud stock market growth while letting people fall into poverty and starve. We celebrate a (not really but a lot of people think it's true) Christian nature while putting our hand on Jesus's face as we push him back and mutter, "Not now, Messiah." For anybody wondering what America actually is, we should simply remind them that our government decided to start calling French fries "Freedom Fries" when they got annoyed with France for not doing what they wanted them to do. That's about the extent of our bipartisanship ability to get things done.
In the world of Player Piano, those whose jobs have been taken over by machines now must either work for government labor crews or join the armed forces. That's the freedom allowed by privatization of everything. Although that's still a better world than what America is becoming because at least in Vonnegut's world, the machines and the incomes of the wealthy are taxed enough to pay the salaries of everybody else. In our current America, it's nearly the same thing except the wealthy aren't taxed and the poor are told they're lazy fuckers who feel entitled to life, liberty, and happiness which, according to the part of the Declaration of Independence that apparently never gets read, is only for those who work hard at shitty jobs and shut the fuck up about maybe making things better for everybody.
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