Bluebeard

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

It was an age of Empires. So is this one, not all that well disguised.

During that war we had a word for extreme man-made disorder which was fubar, an acronym for “fucked up beyond all recognition.”

All that has changed, in my opinion, is that, thanks to television, we can hide a Great Depression. We may even be hiding a Third World War.

• • • The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks.

“It’s the emptiest and yet the fullest of all human messages,” I said. “Which is?” he said. “ ‘Good-bye,” ’ I said.

One would soon go mad if one took such coincidences too seriously. One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.

The Contessa was surely way ahead of her time, too, in believing that men were not only useless and idiotic, but downright dangerous. That idea wouldn’t catch on big in her native country until the last three years of the Vietnam War.

I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humor, which she certainly didn’t have when I married her.