Foreword in The Winner of the Slow Bicycle Race

Vonnegut wrote the Foreword in The Winner of the Slow Bicycle Race, a collection of satirical writings by Paul Krassner, published by Seven Stories Press in 1996. It was dated February 14, 1996 from New York.

Summary

Paul Krassner, 2009

Krassner—who, at age 63 in 1996, is old enough to be Vonnegut's baby brother—once made "a miracle of compressed intelligence" in the form of a red, white, and blue poster reading "FUCK COMMUNISM". As potent in its simplicity as Einstein's E=mc², it combined a word 1960s America thought full of evil, and an ideology millions found the most loathsome in the world. Having the two fight it out was not only funny, but showed how absurd it was for so many people to act so strongly to both words. This was harmonious with most of the Ten Commandments, the Bill of Rights, and the Sermon on the Mount. So were Lenny Bruce, Abbie Hoffman, and Jerry Rubin, all of whom were once arrested for bad manners, but are celebrated as heroes in this book. Whether they believed in God or not, they were like the prophets of old, who, in the service of humanity, jeered at the stupidity and hypocrisy which made their societies hell on Earth. This book is about the present, not the past. Time isn't actually divided into discrete decades—the only 1960s people are those who died then. Everyone now has no choice but to be a 1990s person, and Krassner succeeds well at that. Vonnegut once confused him by saying that Krassner's writings made him hopeful. He explained that by making "supposedly serious matters seem ridiculous", many readers became inspired to decide for themselves what's ridiculous and what's not. To know that people are finally doing that is what made Vonnegut optimistic.