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

Not even the President of the United States knew what that was all about. It was as
though the country were saying to its citizens, "In nonsense is strength"
A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the
founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. The founders were
aristocrats, and they wished to show off their useless education, which consisted of the
study of hocus-pocus from ancient times. They were bum poets as well.
But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crimes. For example,
teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards
again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy:




The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by
human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imag-
inative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates
began to cheat and rob and kill them.
Here was another piece of evil nonsense which children were taught: that the sea
pirates eventually created a government which became a beacon of freedom to human
beings everywhere else. There were pictures and statues of this supposed imaginary
beacon for children to see. It was sort of an ice-cream cone on fire. It looked like this:




Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new
government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, even
after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their
descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines.


The sea pirates were white. The people who were already on the continent when the
pirates arrived were copper-colored. When slavery was introduced onto the continent,
the slaves were black. Color was everything.

Here is how the pirates were able to take whatever they wanted from anybody else:
they had the best boats in the world, and they were meaner than anybody else, and
they had gunpowder, which was a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulphur.
They touched this seemingly listless powder with fire, and it turned violently into gas.
This gas blew projectiles out of metal tubes at terrific velocities. The projectiles cut
through meat and bone very easily, so the pirates could wreck the wiring or the bellows
or the plumbing of a stubborn human being, even when he was far, far away.
The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody
else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were.


When Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout met each other, their country was by far the
richest and most powerful country on the planet. It had most of the food and minerals