"Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

Listen:
Trout and Hoover were citizens of the United States of America, a country which was
called America for short.
This was their national anthem, which was pure balderdash, like so much they were
expected to take seriously:

O, say can you see by the dawn's early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's
last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars,
thru the perilous fight
O'er the ramparts we watched were so
gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs
bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our
flag was still there.
 O, say does that star-spangled banner
yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home
of the brave?

There were one quadrillion nations in the Universe, but the nation Dwayne Hoover
and Kilgore Trout belonged to was the only one with a national anthem which was
gibberish sprinkled with question marks.
Here is what their flag looked like:




It was the law of their nation, a law no other nation on the planet had about its flag,
which said this: "The flag shall not be dipped to any person or thing."
Flag-dipping was a form of friendly and respectful salute, which consisted of bringing
the flag on a stick closer to the ground, then raising it up again.


The motto of Dwayne Hoover's and Kilgore Trout's nation was this, which meant in a
language nobody spoke anymore, Out of Many, One: "E pluribus unum."
The undippable flag was a beauty, and the anthem and the vacant motto might not
have mattered much, if it weren't for this: a lot of citizens were so ignored and cheated
and insulted that they thought they might be in the wrong country, or even on the wrong
planet, that some terrible mistake had been made. It might have comforted them some if
their anthem and their motto had mentioned fairness or brotherhood or hope or
happiness, had somehow welcomed them to the society and its real estate.
If they studied their paper money for clues as to what their country was all about, they
found, among a lot of other baroque trash, a picture of a truncated pyramid with a
radiant eye on top of it, like this: