The Periodic Label

Some More Bad Chemicals

More from Kilgore Trout in Breakfast of Champions:

As Trout is hitch-hiking, him and his nameless driver pull up near a sign that reads, “ You are now entering the city of brotherly love”

“As a younger man, Trout would have sneered at the sign about brotherhood - posted on the rim of a bomb crater, as anyone could see.  But his head no longer sheltered ideas of how things could be and should be on the planet, as opposed to how they really were.  There was only one way for the Earth to be, he thought: the way it was.

Everything was necessary.  He saw on old white woman fishing through a garbage can.  That was necessary.  He saw a bathtub toy, a little rubber duck, lying on its side on the grating over a storm sewer.  It had to be there.

And so on.”

At least some of this darkness was tempered with a little humor; one of Trout’s sci-fi stories:

“"The Dancing Fool” was about a tragic failure to communicate.  Here was the plot:  A flying saucer creature named Zog arrived on Earth to explain how wars could be prevented and how cancer could be cured.  He brought the information from Margo, a planet where the natives conversed by means of farts and tap dancing.  Zog landed at night in Connecticut.  He had no sooner touched down that he saw a house on fire.  He rushed into the house, farting and tap dancing, warning the people about the terrible, danger they were in.  The head of the house brained Zog with a golfclub.”

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Actually, this is very similar to the Tralfamadorians in Slaughter House Five.  He always seems to go back and forth between hopelessness and optimism, trying to tell the world how to save itself.  Glad he never gave that up.

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