Homely Truths

"Homely Truths" is a short piece that appeared in the June 1983 issue of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. Vonnegut had recently delivered the closing address of the Ivy League conference "Issues of Nuclear Arms", with his piece reported as "A Fate Worse Than Death" [sic] about how most people prefer slavery to death. The article is made up a series of short thoughts, some of which can be found in other works.

Summary

Dartmouth College

Unlike Eastern meditation, in which nothing happens, the West meditates books, which is superior since a person with an ordinary mind can meditate with a better mind. This is what is great about civilization and reading. Books don't damage society until 20 years after they're published, since it's young people between 14 and 25 who are most influenced by them. Vonnegut's own character was shaped by "Dos Passos, Steinbeck, Hemingway" but it was decades before he had any power or influence in society. So in twenty years the people who have grown up will be filled with Vonnegut's own "crackpot ideas". His hope is that his books will destroy the American army as an effective fighting force, reduced to simply marching up and down.

His book Slaughterhouse-Five made the Dresden bombing well-known. The destruction of that "world-class city" benefited no one but Vonnegut himself, who got three dollars for each person killed. Nuclear weapons have not prevented a third world war, it was the memory of the first two and the knowledge that wars are not "jolly adventures" but "the most repulsive of all diseases". People are not as ignorant and bloodthirsty as they once were. Western society is built on the same shape as the Cinderella story. The fairy godmother gave her all kinds of good things to go to the party, then she lost them, but has the memory. Then the shoe fits and she's happy forever. Almost all creation myths have the first part, in which gods give humans what they need to survive, but only in the western myth are they taken away again. The story until the shoe fits is the Old Testament, afterwards the New. Vonnegut calls this "a crazy shape for a myth".