Review: God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian

God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian by Kurt Vonnegut
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I recently re-watched You Don't Know Jack (2010), one of my favorite Al Pacino portrayals. It got me Googling about on Dr. Jack Kevorkian who hear appears as a sort of Virgil-like enabler of 'controlled NDEs' ("Kevorkian has just unstrapped me from the gurney after yet another controlled near-death experience.") allowing Vonnegut to interview dead people of Public Radio station WNYC from the "end of the blue tunnel of the Afterlife." interview with dead historical figures are witty and brief, such as this one about a personage he personally admired:

During what has been almost a year of interviewing completely dead people, while
only half dead myself, I asked Saint Peter again and again if I could meet a particular hero of mine. He is my fellow Hoosier, the late Eugene Victor Debs of Terre Haute, Indiana. He was five times the Socialist Party's candidate for president back when this country still had a strong Socialist Party.

And then, guess what, yesterday afternoon none other than Eugene Victor Debs, organizer and leader of the first successful strike against a major American industry, the railroads, was waiting for me at the far end of the blue tunnel. We hadn't met before. This great American died in 1926 at the age of seventy-one when I was only four years old.

I thanked him for words of his, which I quote again and again in lectures: "As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

He asked me how those words were received here on Earth in America nowadays. I said they were ridiculed. "People snicker and snort," I said. He asked what our fastest growing industry was. "The building of prisons," I said.

"What a shame," he said. And then he asked me how the Sermon on the Mount was going over these days.

And then he spread his wings and flew away.

Also present are historical villains like a trite but remorseful Hitler who Vonnegut suggests deserves a statue and "James Earl Ray, confessed assassin of Martin Luther
King" spewing racism. I wonder how many complaints went into the formidable WNYC about these...

I actually like more -- and due to the longer length it appears he did, too -- the ones on fellow writers like Shakespeare:

We did not hit it off. He said the dialect I spoke was the ugliest English he had ever heard, "fit to split the ears of groundlings."

...I congratulated him on all the Oscars the movie
Shakespeare in Love had won...

He said of the Oscars, and of the movie itself, "A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Also, there is a lauding piece on Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley:

...author, again before she was twenty, of the most prescient and influential science
fiction novel of all times...

and similar praise for Isaac Asimov. Vonnegut uses Kevorkian's then contemporary murder conviction as the excuse to end this series, done about a decode before his own death.

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