A Man Without a Country Read Online Free

own admission, was smashed, or tiddley-poo, or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time from when he was sixteen until he was forty. When he was forty-one, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.
    Other drunks have seen pink elephants.
    About my own history of foreign substance abuse, I’ve been a coward about heroin and cocaine, LSD and so on, afraid they might put me over the edge. I did smoke a joint of marijuana one time with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, just to be sociable. It didn’t seem to do anything to me one way or the other, so I never did it again. And by the grace of God, or whatever, I am not an alcoholic, largely a matter of genes. I take a couple of drinks now and then and will do it again tonight. But two is my limit. No problem.
    I am, of course, notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other.
    But I’ll tell you one thing: I once had a high that not even crack cocaine could match. That was when I got my first driver’s license—look out, world, here comes Kurt Vonnegut!
    And my car back then, a Studebaker as I recall, was powered, as are almost all means of transportation and other machinery today, and electric power plants and furnaces, by the most abused, addictive, and destructive drugs of all: fossil fuels.
    When you got here, even when I got here, the industrialized world was already hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there won’t be any left. Cold turkey.
    Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn’t the TV news is it? Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.
     
     
     
    What was the beginning of this end? Some might say Adam and Eve and the apple of knowledge, a clear case of entrapment. I say it was Prometheus, a Titan, a son of gods, who in Greek myth stole fire from Zeus and gave it to human beings. The gods were so mad they chained him naked to a rock with his back exposed, and had eagles eat his liver. “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”
    And it is now plain that the gods were right to do that. Our close cousins the gorillas and orangs and chimps and gibbon apes have gotten along just fine all this time while eating raw vegetable matter, whereas we not only prepare hot meals but have now all but destroyed this once salubrious planet as a life-support system in fewer than two hundred years, mainly by making thermodynamic whoopee with fossil fuels.
    The Englishman Michael Faraday built the first electric generator only a hundred and seventy-two years ago.
    The German Karl Benz built the first automobile powered by an internal combustion engine only a hundred and nineteen years ago.
    The first oil well in the USA, now a dry hole, was drilled in Titusville, Pennsylvania, by Edwin L. Drake only a hundred and forty-five years ago.
    The American Wright brothers, of course, built and flew the first airplane only a hundred and one years ago. It was powered by gasoline.
    You want to talk about irresistible whoopee?
    A booby trap.
    Fossil fuels, so easily set alight! Yes, and we are presently touching off nearly the very last whiffs and drops and chunks of them. All lights are about to go out. No more electricity. All forms of transportation are about to stop, and the planet Earth will soon have a crust of skulls and bones and dead machinery.
    And nobody can do a thing about it. It’s too late in the game.
    Don’t spoil the party, but here’s the truth: We have squandered our planet’s resources, including air and water, as though there were no tomorrow, so now there isn’t going to be one.
    So there goes the Junior Prom, but that’s not the half of it.



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    Okay, now let’s have some fun. Let’s talk about sex. Let’s talk about