In time, almost all men and women will become worthless as producers of goods, food, services, and more machines, as sources of practical ideas in the areas of economics, engineering, and probably medicine, too. So—if we can’t find reasons and methods for treasuring human beings because they are human beings, then we might as well, as has so often been suggested, rub them out.” The Baby Trap: Anita got Paul to marry her by claiming to be pregnant. Not only was she not pregnant, she actually can't have children at all. The 'Verse: Vonnegut's stories and characters have a tendency to overlap with one another. If it's one of his fictional works, expect at least a cameo from Kilgore Trout and/or the Tralfamadorians.

Vonnegut knew stuff about corporate life that most folk don't. Namely that 1) no one owns the corporation and 2) that the essence of the corporation is the separation of control (dominium in legalese) and benefit (usufructus). The corporation is essentially and magnificently useless. It is an arrangement that would have driven Roman lawyers insane, mainly because they equated control and benefit: if you got the use of something, you owned it. Breaking the link between control and benefit was to them dangerous, not to say impossible.Americans have long been taught to hate all people who will not or cannot work, to hate even themselves for that. We can thank the vanished frontier for that piece of common-sense cruelty. The time is coming, if it isn’t here now, when it will no longer be common sense. It will simply be cruel.” (LoA, p. 332) Lister has thought about the effects and implications of his inherited wealth about as much as most men think about their left big toes. The fortune has never amused, worried, or tempted him. Giving ninety-five per cent of it to the Foundation you now control didn't cause him a twinge. Noah hired a village idiot to fight in his place, converted the saw factory to the manufacture of swords and bayonets, converted the farm to the raising of hogs. Abraham Lincoln declared that no amount of money was too much to pay for the restoration of the Union, so Noah priced his merchandise in scale with the national tragedy. And he made this discovery: Government objections to the price or quality of his wares could be vaporized with bribes that were pitifully small.

Rape as Drama: Quite gruesomely used in "Welcome To The Monkey House". Sex is repressed and discouraged to the point where a vigilante thinks the only way to convince women to try it is to rape them. The women he violates end up being his loyal followers, and eventually help him do it to other women. It may sound unreal, but this happens in a lot of societies and cultural subgroups. In March 2003, Rosewater was performed in concert as part of the CooperArts series at the Cooper Union; the concert featured Jim Walton (Eliot Rosewater), Carolee Carmello (Sylvia Rosewater), and David Pittu (Norman Mushari). [4] Joseph Dewey, In a Dark Time: The Apocalyptic Temper in the American Novel of the Nuclear Age, Purdue University Press, 1990, p.79Bon voyage, dear Cousin or whoever you are. Be generous. Be kind. You can safetly ignore the arts and sciences. They never helped anybody. Be a sincere, attentive friend of the poor. Congratulations on your great good fortune. Have fun. It may increase your perspective to know what sorts of manipulators and custodians your unbelievable wealth has had up to now. Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is an outrageous and savagely funny fantasy about people, their pleasures, pains and perversions, a penetrating satire on insanity – a millionaire's private lunacy. Featuring an infectious score by the Oscar- and Tony-winning team of Alan Menken and Howard Ashman ( Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, Little Shop of Horrors), God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is a legendary collaboration between one of America's greatest novelists and the songwriting team behind some of the greatest hits of all time. Hypocrite: Fred Rosewater's wife is said to despise him for being so poor and dull, while having failed to notice that she's every bit as poor and every bit as dull as he is. note In fairness, since he's the breadwinner of their household, her being as poor as him is pretty much inevitable.

Strawman Political: Senator Rosewater, although he is far more Truth in Television than most people will admit (even to themselves).He was born in Indianapolis, later the setting for many of his novels. He attended Cornell University from 1941 to 1943, where he wrote a column for the student newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun. Vonnegut trained as a chemist and worked as a journalist before joining the U.S. Army and serving in World War II. While that may sound like a very simple story line, there is much more to this book than meets the eye. Of course, you can expect Vonnegut’s trademark weird humor. But he also wants to talk about the dehumanizing potential of wealth and greed and the way such sentiments destroyed the so-called utopic American Dream. After all, can we really call a place a land of unlimited opportunity when the wealth and privilege are hoarded by a handful of people, who work really hard to make it impossible for others to get on the same level as them?

Of course I was scandalized by Vonnegut’s crudeness, but thought I had to make a mature dent in such books - ones my parents’ more mature generation even endorsed - so reading Vonnegut ushered me into an oddly skewed adult world. The Rosewater Foundation has more money than God. When Eliot Rosewater, the current head, starts making people nervous with all his talk of redistributing wealth, Norman Mushari decides to put Eliot's sanity to test in court and reaches out to the Rhode Island branch of the Rosewater family. Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is a 1979 musical that marked the first collaboration of composer Alan Menken and writer Howard Ashman. Based on Kurt Vonnegut's 1965 novel of the same name, the musical tells the story of Eliot Rosewater, a millionaire who develops a social conscience and creates a foundation to improve the lives of the citizens of an impoverished Indiana town. Noah and his brother George inherited from their pioneer father six hundred acrees of farmland, land as dark and rich as chocolate cake, and a small saw factory that was nearly bankrupt. War came.

However, Vonnegut manages to offer some of the best advice EVER for new human beings...and the rest of us, rich and poor, would do well to follow his lesson: Maybe I flatter myself when I think that I have things in common with Hamlet, that I have an important mission, that I’m temporarily mixed up about how it should be done. Hamlet had one big edge on me. His father’s ghost told him exactly what he had to do, while I am operating without instructions. Author Filibuster: Vonnegut's characters (particularly Eliot Rosewater and Kilgore Trout) are often surrogate mouthpieces for his social and political views. Re-reading this for the second (or third) time I am again astounded – YES! astounded is the right word – at Vonnegut’s cool, minimalistic narrative ability.