Kurt Vonnegut is one of my all-time favorite writers, so I remember taking note a while back that he'd written an introduction for somebody named Micah Ian Wright who was putting out a book of antiwar posters. It was kind of a big deal, because Vonnegut had retired but was making an exception for this. And then I forgot all about it until today. After Googling around a bit, I found his intro for You Back the Attack, We'll Bomb Who We Want. I'm not sure if this is just an excerpt or the whole thing, but I thought it might be of interest. He read it aloud to an interviewer for Nuvo Newsweekly in January 2003:
These anti-war posters by Micah Ian Wright are reminiscent in spirit of works by artists like Kathe Kollwitz and Georg Grosz and on and on during the 1920s, when it was becoming ever more evident that the infant German democracy was about to be murdered by psychopathic personalities — hereinafter P.P.s — the medical term for smart, personable people who have no conscience. P.P.s are fully aware of how much suffering their actions will inflict on others but do not care. They cannot care.The classic medical text about how such attractive leaders bring us into unspeakable calamities is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. An American P.P. at the head of a corporation, for example, could enrich himself by ruining his employees and investors and still feel as pure as the driven snow. A P.P., should he attain a post near the top of our federal government, might feel that taking the country into an endless war with casualties in the millions was simply something decisive to do today. So to bed.
With a P.P., decisiveness is all. Or, to put it another way, we now have a Reichstag fire of our own.
The interviewer's follow-up question to this was, "What's become of conscience?" Vonnegut's reply:
Again, as Cleckley says, these people are around and do rise. Women are attracted to them. I mean, this is a defect, but women are attracted to them because they are so confident. They really don't give a fuck what happens - not even to themselves. But this is a serious defect and, no, we haven't been invaded and conquered by Martians. We have been conquered by psychopathic personalities who are attractive.
Wow. Just... wow. If you don't get why I'm stunned by this, just scroll down through my last several posts about the author of the book he was introducing. And consider that this may be one of the last things Vonnegut ever publishes.
I'm adding this one to your ledger, Wright.
Correction: Vonnegut wrote the foreword. The introduction was written by Howard Zinn. Jimtreacher.com regrets the error.
Posted by Jim Treacher at May 3, 2004 04:06 PM