Communism, bad ideas, science fiction

In which we wonder on a couple of excerpts from the wonderfully wonder-free first chapter of Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, in which we witness Kurt boiling a world of frustration into a bubbly, gelatinous stew of absurdity:

"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 and machinery, and it disciplined other countries by threatening to shoot big rockets and them or to drop things on them from airplanes.

"Most other countries didn't have doodley-squat. Many of them weren't even inhabitable anymore. They had too many people and not enough space. They had sold everything that was any good, and there wasn't anything to eat anymore...

"...A lot of the people on the wrecked planet were Communists. They had a theory that what was left of the planet should be shared more or less equally among all the people, who hadn't asked to come to a wrecked planet in the first place... Meanwhile, more babies were arriving all the time--kicking and screaming, yelling for milk. In some places people would actually try to eat mud or such on gravel while babies were being born just a few feet away. And so on.

"Dwayne Hoover's and Kilgore Trout's country, where there was still plenty of everything, was opposed to Communism. It didn't think that Earthlings who had a lot should share it with others unless they really wanted to, and most of them didn't want to. So they didn't have to."

And then a page later:

"The bad ideas were delivered to Dwayne by Kilgore Trout... Here was the core of the bad ideas which Trout gave to Dwayne: Everybody on Earth was a robot, with one exception--Dwayne Hoover.

"Of all the creatures in the Universe, only Dwayne was thinking and feeling and worrying and planning and so on. Nobody else knew what pain was. Nobody else had any choices to make. Everybody else was fully automatic machine, whose purpose was to stimulate Dwayne. Dwayne was a new type of creature being tested by the Creator of the Universe. Only Dwayne had free will.

"Trout did not expect to be believed. He put the bad ideas into a science-fiction novel, and that was where Dwayne found them. The book wasn't addressed to Dwayne alone. Trout had never heard of Dwayne when he wrote it. It was addressed to anybody who happened to open it up. It said to simply anybody, in effect, "Hey--guess what: You're the only creature with free will. How does that make you feel?" And so on.

"It was a tour de force. It was a jeu d'espirit."