Monkeys, Christians, & Vonnegut (oh my!)

Alright, so this blog started off as a Mike Ness lovefest (as my L.L. Bro Mark P. stated in a comment), but now it has progressed to a Kurt Vonnegut lovefest. And for anyone who claims I should put a "jr." after his name, you can go ahead and read this, you inferior Vonnegut lovers. I did cite Wikipedia there, but this is a goddamn blog post not a freaking research article.

I've always championed a man's excuse for subscribing to Playboy: "But I only read it for the articles."

I subscribe to Playboy, and you do spend the first 5 mns looking at the naked ladies, but then you move on..............to what? Yes, the articles! Some of the greatest authors have had their short works of fiction published in the classy pages of Playboy magazine, one of which is the fabulous Mr. Kurt Vonnegut.

That story was "Welcome to the Monkey House," which happens to be the title of his collection of short stories. In one of those stories, "Where I Live," he loosely quotes H.L. Mencken: "Nobody ever went broke overestimating the vulgarity of the American people." Now funny thing about H.L. Mencken is he was a columnist for the Baltimore Sun and reported on the Scopes Trial, which was of course the legal duel between Creationism and Evolution. This trial was also referred to as the Monkey Trial. Which brings us back full circle to Vonnegut's "Welcome to the Monkey House" and the funny little bit about how a masturbating zoo monkey resulted in all of the world losing the right to feel sexual pleasure. How a minute incident lead to such a total fuck-up in the governing of the world.

So in the title story (which takes place sometime in the future), there's this drug everyone is required to take called "ethical birth-control pills." As quoted from the book:

"The pills were ethical because they didn't interfere with a person's ability to reproduce, which would have been unnatural and immoral. All the pills did was take every bit of pleasure out of sex. Thus did science and morals go hand in hand."

Now this is funny in many ways (thanks, Vonnegut, for being such a literary god).

But what's funnier is how this ethical birth-control came to be. The drug was originally invented by a guy who was appalled when he witnessed a monkey at the zoo playing with its private parts, so he created a drug that would numb the lower half of the body to prevent such an offense for a "Christian family to see." The original inventor of the pill, J. Edgar Norton, never intended them to be consumed by humans: "His dream was to introduce morality into the monkey house at the Grand Rapids Zoo."

Well the World Government took hold of the drug when overpopulation was getting out of control and enforced it on everyone. Oh, and they also opened up "Suicide Parlors" where a Hostess will "kill you painlessly while you lay on a Barcalounger." These were always located next to a Howard Johnson which provided the last meal for the volunteer suiciders. Brilliant.

But all of this boils down to monkeys and Christians: the eternal battle. What a condensed piece of beautiful humor. And yet so goddamn sad.

I haven't yet read Vonnegut's Galapagos book. But it just made its way into my GoodReads required reading list.