I’m reading A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut. He may be 83, but he hasn’t lost his bite.

I’ve been reading it in little bits, a page or two at a time, just to prolong it. Besides, it is chock full of ideas to be savored and mulled over. Here are a few quotes:

[Vonnegut’s ancestors] arrived at a time when the Anglo ruling class, like our polyglot corporate oligarchs of today, wanted the cheapest and tamest workers they could find anywhere in the whole wide world. The specifications for such persons, then as now, were those listed by Emma Lazarus in 1883: “tired,” “poor,” “huddled,” “wretched,” “homeless,” and “tempest-tost.” And people like that had to be imported back then. Jobs couldn’t, as today, be sent to them right where they were so unhappy….

There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: only nut cases want to be President. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president….

The shoe thing at the airports and Code Orange and so on are world-class practical jokes, all right. But my all-time favorite is one the holy, anti-war clown Abbie Hoffman (1936-1989) pulled off during the Vietnam War. He announced that the new high was banana peels taken rectally. So then FBI scientists stuffed banana peels up their asses to find out if this was true or not. Or so we hoped….

Great stuff.