Player Piano

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

‘After us the deluge,’

Ever stop to think about that? Everything you think you think because somebody promoted the ideas. Education—nothing but promotion. “Good promotion and bad promotion. Barbers, now, they get a lot of bad promotion on account of cartoons and television comedians, you know? Can’t pick up a magazine or turn on the television without you see a joke about a barber cutting somebody. And sure, maybe that’s good for a little snicker, maybe, and God knows the world can use a few snickers, but I don’t think it’s right to hurt somebody to give somebody else a snicker. I mean that it all kind of cancels out, and nobody’s ahead. And I just wonder if any of those comedians or cartoon people ever stop to think about the thousands of barbers who go from one year to the next without they ever cut a customer, and still these people go around telling everybody that barbers are slashing so many arteries and veins you wonder how the sewers can handle it all. But seems like nobody ever thinks about what’s maybe sacred to somebody, any more.

“Man has survived Armageddon in order to enter the Eden of eternal peace, only to discover that everything he had looked forward to enjoying there, pride, dignity, self-respect, work worth doing, has been condemned as unfit for human consumption.