Saying someone needs no introduction used to have some validity—before life in the post-industrial world went all 365/24/7 on us. Now the exponential explosion of sense-wracking gossip, trivia, ED adverts, and religious poppycock renders that gesture anachronistic. Nonetheless I would love to think that Kurt Vonnegut (Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five), who died in 2007, needs no introduction—at least to people who find their way to this outlying outpost.

Let me take care of a couple things on my left-wing, arugula-eating agenda by bringing an unintentionally amusing obituary of Vonnegut to your attention. This in the they-would-be-viewed-as-amusing-if-they-weren’t-so toxic category and a case in point of one of Vonnegut’s Swiftian bon mots from Cat’s Cradle:

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before… He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.

Well anyway, a new volume of Vonnegut short stories has been assembled: Look at the Birdie (Delacorte). Anthologized here are 14 previously unpublished stories (festooned with the author’s chirpy line drawings) written just as Vonnegut was liberating himself from the grind of his servitude to General Electric. The stories are nascent exemplars of Vonnegut’s humorous humanism and are well worth any reader’s time. But what I found especially edifying was the facsimile of a letter he wrote to a friend in 1951 on where his writing was going:

…the obvious alternative is, of course, something to please The Atlantic, Harper’s or The New Yorker. To do this would be to turn out something after the fashion of somebody-or-other, and I might be able to do it. I say might. It amounts to signing on with any of a dozen schools born 10, 20, 30 years ago. The kicks are largely on having passed off a creditable counterfeit. And, of course, if you appear in The Atlantic or Harper’s or The New Yorker, by God you must be a writer, because everybody says so. This is poor competition for the fat checks from the slicks. For want of anything more tempting, I’ll stick with money.

And he did. —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 4, 2009

I actually lived through and participated in the era unimaginatively referred to as the Sixties—there was war and drugs and madness and dancing in the streets, assassinations and a presidential resignation and Woodstock and Watts, the Black Panthers, the White Panthers, the Grey Panthers, and, well, you know, a lot of action. And there were some heroes and villains. Recently, a few books have been published that add some small pieces to the incomplete historical jigsaw puzzle. In 1968, Mark Rudd, author of Underground: My Life With S.D.S. and the Weathermen (William Morrow, excerpt) was a Columbia undergraduate and a member of the radical Students for a Democratic Society. Rudd soon transmogrified into a more militant radical—one who founded the S.D.S. splinter group Weather Underground, which was responsible for the post-1968 “Days of Rage” and a string of bombings.


The Baader-Meinhof gang (Red Army Faction) were ’60s era radical Germans-turned-lethal terrorists who continued operating into the ’70s and ’80s, keeping various European intelligence agencies fully occupied. The monograph Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F. by Stefan Aust and Anthea Bell (Oxford University Press) fills in the huge blank spaces behind the newspaper accounts.


Chesa Boudin’s parents were radicals who were imprisoned in the early 1980s and entrusted his upbringing to Weatherman William Ayers (you know who he is) and Bernardine Dohrn. As a response to his parents’ (real and surrogate) beliefs on issues of economic and labor justice, Boudin crisscrossed Latin America. In Gringo: A Coming of Age in Latin America (Scribner, excerpt), Boudin travels through 25 countries and melds his personal hegira with perceptive observations of the ongoing ecological devastation, intermittent economic crises, and the development and struggles of various indigenous movements.


And then there is subversive satirist and gadfly (or as he describes himself, investigative satirist) Paul Krassner, author of Who’s to Say What’s Obscene: Politics, Culture, and Comedy in America Today (City Lights, excerpt). Friend of martyred comic Lenny Bruce and the editor of Bruce’s autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, Krassner was also publisher of The Realist magazine from 1958 to 1974, and co-founder of the Youth International Party (the Yippies) with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. He has now been inducted into the Counterculture Hall of Fame (created in 1997). Here’s Kurt Vonnegut on Krassner:

…in 1963 created a miracle of compressed intelligence nearly as admirable for potent simplicity, in my opinion, as Einstein’s e=mc2. With the Vietnam War going on, and with its critics discounted and scorned by the government and the mass media, Krassner put on sale a red, white and blue poster that said FUCK COMMUNISM.

At the beginning of the 1960s, FUCK was believed to be so full of bad magic as to be unprintable. In the most humanely influential American novel of this half century, The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield, it will be remembered, was shocked to see that word on a subway station wall. He wondered what seeing it might do to the mind of a little kid. COMMUNISM was to millions the name of the most loathsome evil imaginable. To call an American a communist was like calling somebody a Jew in Nazi Germany. By having FUCK and COMMUNISM fight it out in a single sentence, Krassner wasn’t merely being funny as heck. He was demonstrating how preposterous it was for so many people to be responding to both words with such cockamamie Pavlovian fear and alarm.

 —Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 1, 2009

In fits of attempting constructive self-criticism (also known as navel-gazing), I ponder the possibility that my disaffection with mainstream politics and my lifelong drift from left-leaning liberal to socialist to anarchist is mostly a result of my biography. That probably is supposed to matter, especially to people who think that “balance” and “objectivity” are viable constructs or values or whatever. I am drawn to renegades and skeptics and dissidents—Howard Zinn, Kurt Vonnegut, Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Genet, the Berrigan Brothers, Staughton Lynd, Eduardo Galeano—and even to the right lurch of Christopher Hitchens. (I have not abandoned a healthy respect for his analytic and rhetorical skills.) For some time now, I have caught glimmers and rays of Joe Bageant at his site and at Mark Woods’s web site/media bonanza.

Among other of my cogitations about Bageant was a puzzlement that his commentary did not have a wider audience. Consider this illumination from his Aug. 27 entry, “What will America look like in two years?”:

It’s going to take what most people outside the US would consider a ridiculous level of disaster before most Americans understand that something is deeply wrong with the trajectory of their nation. Personally, I think we are years away from that realization—decades away if we can steal enough oil and keep printing enough fiat currency to keep the public fooled.

Last year Bageant published a book, Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches From America’s Class War, the title of which tips off why he has not been lapped up by the mainstream. Bageant mentions, and in fact insists, that there are class divisions in America. Which contradicts one of the basic myths of our republic. Here’s Studs Terkel’s take:

This recounting of lost lives—of white have-nots in one of our most have-not states—has the power of an old-time Scottish Border ballad. It is maddening and provocative that the true believers in “American exceptionalism” and ersatz machismo side with those stepping all over them. Bagaent’s writing is as lyrical as Nelson Algren’s, and if there’s a semblance of hope, it’s that he catches on with new readers thanks to the alternative media.

 —Robert Birnbaum, Sep. 2, 2008

You all know, or will learn now, that I admired Kurt Vonnegut a great deal—an admiration that began and lasted past my youthful, stupid years into my golden, stupid years. I was looking for some information about Kurt and stumbled upon a note from his daughter, Edie. Res ipsa loquitur:

I never expected Kurt to actually die. He was supposed to break the code and live forever. I’m pretty disillusioned right now. When I was very young, like 12, I went to his study to ask him for answers to this world. He said he didn’t know any more than I did and that he was experiencing everything I was at the very same time. I think it was during the Cuban missile crisis and I was scared. He said he didn’t have a clue. From there on out I regarded him as a fellow clueless comrade who had no extra advantage or wisdom above me. He pulled no rank as ‘Father’ and for that I am eternally grateful.

Though he was the smartest man I ever met and I am rather limited.

Even so he made me feel equal at a very early age and taught me to question authority where ever I found it.

Thank you everyone out there for getting him and loving him and missing him.

Edie Vonnegut

 —Robert Birnbaum, Aug. 25, 2008