Jailbird

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

imagined that I was a socialist. I believed that socialism would be good for the common man. As a private first class in the infantry, I was surely a common man.

They represented an American ideal: healthy, cheerful citizen soldiers, who went about their ordinary business until their country suddenly needed an awesome display of weapons and discipline.

Kyle Rittenhouse?

I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.

Now he wanted to go to America, he told Ruth, to become a very rich man. He was shipped back to Macedonia, I presume.

We were a disease, she said, which had evolved on one tiny cinder in the universe, but could spread and spread.

He had so opened himself to the consolations of religion that he had become an imbecile.

There was a white Arrow shirt from Garfinckel’s Department Store in Washington.

I made a small mistake we irony collectors often make: I tried to share an irony with a stranger. It can’t be done.

Two top drawers in the dresser easily accepted all I owned, but I looked into all the other drawers anyway. Thus I discovered that the bottom drawer contained seven incomplete clarinets—without cases, mouthpieces, or bells. Life is like that sometimes.

And in the toe of one of her capacious basketball shoes, among other things, were hypocritical love letters from me. Small world!

Spoiler?

And I am now compelled to wonder if wisdom has ever existed or can ever exist. Might wisdom be as impossible in this particular universe as a perpetual-motion machine?

There had always been senseless questions to answer, empty promises to make, meaningless documents to sign.

I had had no self-respect for years and years.

“Are you going deaf, Walter?” she said. “I hear you all right, now,” I said. “On top of everything else,” she said, “am I going to have to yell my last words?”

I can die when I want to now. I can pick the time.”

The economy is a thoughtless

“Hello and good-bye.” What else is there to say? Our language is much larger than it needs to be.