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Hocus Pocus is an invigorating novel
Book Review
By Derryll White
Vonnegut, Kurt (1990). Hocus Pocus.
“Hell is other people.” – Jean-Paul Sartre.
One reviewer said Kurt Vonnegut was mad as hell and laughing all the way to the apocalypse. Well, I don’t believe in an apocalypse, unless one considers the State of Florida and Ron DeSantis getting elected as President. Vonnegut’s cynicism is alive and well in many readers.
Kurt Vonnegut focuses here on the Vietnam war and its lasting effects on America. Anyone who grew to maturity in the 1960s, as I did, holds strong views on the Vietnam conflict. Vonnegut lets it all loose in that regard – the craziness, the usury, the greed and the huge number of senseless deaths.
Somebody recently asked me to define the 1960s and I immediately replied “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.” Vonnegut’s ‘Hocus Pocus’ simply proves that description.
This is an invigorating novel. The second decade of the 21st century really needs a reviewer with as much caustic wit and irreverence as Vonnegut brings to the last half of the 20th century.
*******
Excerpts from the novel:
LYING – And during my final year in Vietnam, when I was in Public Information, I found it as natural as breathing to tell the press and replacements fresh off the boats or planes that we were clearly winning, and the folks back home should be proud and happy about all the good things we were doing there.
I learned to lie like that in high school.
BUSINESS – Du Pont, of course, has now been taken over by I.G. Farber of Germany, the same company that manufactured and packaged and labeled and addressed the cyanide gas used to kill civilians of all ages, including babes in arms, during the Holocaust.
What a planet.
VIETNAM – Me? I was in show business, trying to get a big audience for the Government on TV by killing real people with live ammunition, something the other advertisers were not here to do.
The other advertisers had to fake everything.
Oddly enough the actors always turned out to be a lot more believable on the little screen than we were. Real people in real trouble don’t come across, somehow.
HOCUS POCUS – In Vietnam, though, I really was the mastermind. Yes, and that still bothers me. During my last year there, when my ammunition was language instead of bullets, I invented justifications for all the killing and dying we were doing, which impressed even me! I was a genius of lethal hocus pocus!
JAPAN – “They looted your public and corporate treasuries, and turned your industries over to nincompoops,” he said. “Then they had your government borrow so heavily from us that we had no choice but to send over an Army of Occupation in business suits. Never before has the ruling class of a country found a way to stick other countries with all the responsibilities their wealth might imply, and still remain rich beyond the dreams of avarice! No wonder they thought the comatose Ronald Reagan was a great President!”
GOVERNMENT – Unlike my socialist grandfather Ben Wills, who was a nobody, I have no reforms to propose. I think any form of government, not just Capitalism, is whatever the people who have all our money, drunk or sober, sane or not, decide to do.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
