A Man Without a Country

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. A Man Without a Country (2005)
I've recently been cutting down on social media, mostly so as to diminish my exposure to the opinions of shitheads. Where once I believed there might be some good in communicating with shitheads, engaging in hope of helping them to understand the extent of their own shitheadedness and by extension making the world a better place, or at least a less shitty place to some miniscule degree, these days I'm not so sure; and I'm not convinced of that which shitheads express being anything you could legitimately call opinion. It's usually something some bigger boys said and they thought it sounded cool so now they're saying it too, for example:

We love President Trump in Alabama. Our UN-employment rate is lower than it has been in 50 years. Which proves people will work if the democrats will stop trying to make the USA a socialist country. The democrats have become the new hate group bc they hate democracy.

See? Is there really any point arguing with such a complete fucking tool? Are these the words of a person who seems likely to respond to reason? Do these seem like the words of a person to whom you would entrust the care of an animal or another human being? This isn't even one of the serious shitheads who blames immigration or liberal values or science or black people, just some numbskull with comprehension issues. Should I choose to engage with this individual, it seems likely that he or she would only become more firmly entrenched within his or her shithead convictions, and I would become unhappy for, as Henry Rollins says, when you engage with an asshole, you become the asshole.

To some this doubtless means I'm one of the sneering liberal metropolitan elite, but I really couldn't give a fuck. When a four-year old child I've never met runs up to me in some park and calls me a pooface, I couldn't give a fuck then either, because the wrath of people who barely understand anything is meaningless and carries no value. Shitheads don't deserve a reasoned response. They deserve to be punched hard over and over and over and over in the face with a clenched fist until bones crack and blood begins to gush so that they shut up, stop, or go away, whichever comes first.

I would guess that Vonnegut understood this, although I don't know where he would have stood on the punching thing. I would guess that Vonnegut understood this because it touches on what most of his novels were about, to one degree or another; and this, his last book, written in his eighties and borrowing from material first published in In These Times magazine, boils down everything he said into one easily digestible helping, very high in fibre, and entirely without illusions regarding the shit we've gotten ourselves into. Either read it and understand, or just fuck the fucking fuck off. Those seem to be the options here.

It's also very funny, somehow.