Last Words for a Century

"Last Words for a Century" is an article published in Playboy in January 1999. A limited number were printed as an 8-page chapbook by Ragged Edge Press in 1999, entitled Fuh-Kar-Wee Indians and the Christian Year 2000. There were 250 numbered copies, signed by Vonnegut and the cover artist, Thomas Kerr, and an unknown number of regular printings.

Summary

Vonnegut's late brother Bernie often told a joke about a tribe of Native Americans forced off their land in the 19th century. When an agent from the Bureau of Indian Affairs interviews them, they identify themselves as "the Fuh-kar-wee", a name adopted only recently after their chief would wail in despair every sunset: "Where the Fuh-kar-wee?" As the Christian "odometer" hits 2000, those in nations using that calendar begin wondering where they are, becoming casual numerologists as if "the inevitable, predictable, clockwork behavior of Arabic numerals locked into the decimal system can, on occasion, give us occult messages we should not ignore". If nothing else, it's an excuse for a party, and the fact that Jesus was born 5-7 years before his own birth is just another miracle. The commercialism that Bernie used to hate will no doubt be featured all through 2000, as another excuse to "go out and buy a lot of crap".

Kilgore Trout, now deceased like Bernie, once wrote a story about aliens visiting Earth who wondered about the obsession with "blow jobs and golf". Trout wrote this story long before the biggest news in the United States was about whether the President received an extra-marital blow job in the Oval Office. In the story, extensive use of antibiotics caused all disease to become incurable, with AIDS being the first sign that the planet's "immune system is trying to get rid of" humanity.

Once in 1932, the 10 year old Vonnegut was in a car with Bernie, their sister Allie, and their father, who was driving and had just closed his architecture office in Indianapolis because there was no work during the Great Depression. All of a sudden his father swerved to the side of the road. The odometer read "99,999.9" and the whole car became excited to see a one and a series of zeroes, "unsoiled by life—so new", but no one more so than his father, who laughed as though his problems had "vanished along with the nines" and the world was full of possibility again. So it is with the year 2000 when "the stinking past will go down the toilet of history" and we will act as if the world were brand new.