If I were President

vonnegut

If I was a big tweeter (I’m not), this could be an echo of so many political stories.

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.

A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (2005)

This applies to all parties. All political offices (not just president, but the crazy scale is higher the higher the office, to me).

Hey, it’s Vonnegut.

Is it just me, or would Vonnegut (RIP) have been a great guest on any of the political shows: FOX, Daily Show and so on. He’d just get stuff and would speak his truth.

I mean, here’s Vonnegut talking about language (and making fun of himself/Hoosiers):

The writing style which is most natural for you is the bound to echo the speech you heard as a child. English was the novelist Joseph Conrad’s third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

— “How to write with style,” an ad for International Paper Co. Appeared in the 9/15/1980 Newsweek