Vonnegut -- His `Hocus Pocus' Reflects Pessimism About An America That's Squandering Its Rich Potential

The problem, according to Kurt Vonnegut, is finding human beings who behave with a little restraint. God knows, George Bush doesn't.

``This is extraordinary, that we can send 100,000 guys overseas with no analysis, no restraint at all,'' grumbled the author whose 1969 novel, ``Slaughterhouse-Five'' crystallized the antiwar sentiments of an entire generation.

At his hotel room here yesterday, Vonnegut was having his say, expanding on the list of societal ills predicted so devastatingly in his new novel, his 13th, ``Hocus Pocus'' (Putnam, $21.95).

At 67, Vonnegut's comfortably battered visage retains an elfish quality that seems almost at odds with his lanky frame. His large, silver-threaded mop of curly hair was wreathed in smoke from his ever-present Pall Malls; despite the bleak outlook of ``Hocus Pocus'' - imagine a polluted, bankrupt America in 2001 run by an ``Army of Occupation in business suits'' from Japan - he frequently broke into a wheezy laugh as he contemplated our nation's abundant absurdities.

``The personality types who rise to the top are plausible and they're charming - but they don't really give a damn at all about the rest of us,'' said Vonnegut. ``George Bush is like a viceroy, and to him, we're the `wogs,' part of the tribes down below.''

Vonnegut is a native of Indianapolis who maintains many links of friendship and affection with his home state. But to him, President Bush best demonstrated his ``mediocre mind'' by his choice of a running mate: ``It was simply unbelievable that of all the enterprising Hoosiers'' - and here Vonnegut shakes his head wearily - ``he would pick one of the few authentic imbeciles.''

There's a yearning in that weary head shake, a yearning for the sort of passionate engagement exemplified by another fellow Hoosier, the great American labor leader, pacifist and Socialist party founder, Eugene V. Debs. ``Hocus Pocus'' is dedicated to the memory of Debs, who ran for the presidency five times and polled nearly 1 million votes in 1920, when he was in jail for sedition.

``Hocus Pocus'' manages to be both Vonnegut's ``Vietnam novel'' - it is suffused with the emotional fallout of that disaster - as well as his corrosive prognosis of an America reeling to its knees in the widening wake of Ronald Reagan's eight-year coma.

As always, Vonnegut's touch is light, but his satire weaves a web of black humor that almost startles you by the gathering force of its bleak vision.

The novel chronicles the life and roller-coaster career of one Eugene Debs

Hartke, a West Point grad who spent 14 years as a true believer before the disaster of Vietnam forever altered his outlook. He was just a professional soldier doing his duty, Hartke explains with no self-serving evasiveness: first as

a combat officer, later as a public-information officer dispensing ``lethal hocus pocus'' to a gullible press corps.

``During those 14 years I would have killed Jesus Christ Himself or Herself or Itself or Whatever, if ordered to do so by my commanding officer,'' Hartke admits. But Vietnam - in which he is the last officer to clamber aboard the last helicopter off the roof of the besieged American embassy - was a war ``about nothing else but the ammunition business,'' he concludes.

Saddled with a mad mother-in-law, a soon-mad wife (it runs in the family) and two children who never want to see him again, Hartke builds a comfortably philanderous life as a professor at Tarkington College, a lakeside playground for learning-disabled rich kids in upstate New York.

Hartke's indiscretions later land him a teaching job across the lake, in a maximum-security prison operated for profit by a Japanese firm.

All hell breaks loose one winter night when the inmates break out, charge across the frozen lake and wreak murder and mayhem on the college and town. After order is restored, Hartke is charged with insurrection - he is the only person who shuttles freely between the convicts and their hostages - and ``Hocus Pocus'' becomes his letter from prison.

The novel is also Vonnegut's cunning sermon - ``preachy'' is an adjective he can't disavow - on the near-future of ``a thoroughly looted, bankrupt nation swamped by unchecked plagues and superstition and illiteracy and hypnotic TV, with virtually no health services for the poor.''

Living on the crumbs left by the savings-and-loan scandal, it is an America robbed of its potential by a ``Ruling Class'' that manipulates government ``to protect them from the lower classes, not only in this country but everywhere.''

While that might sound misanthropically sophomoric, Vonnegut's lithe skill lends it a tone that often, surprisingly, veers to the elegiac.

``A compassionate society - that's what this book is all about,'' Vonnegut declared yesterday. ``What's so upsetting is what might have been. We had all this great topsoil and forests and supermarkets filled with groceries, but what we've done with our extraordinary wealth is p--- it away.

``We've still got the Bill of Rights, but it all depends on human beings behaving in a restrained manner,'' he railed, aiming his strongest barbs at the fiduciary trust squandered by our banking system. ``We were damned rich and our banks were full of money, and we could have done anything altruistically. But it's like a poker game - you have to fold when you can't stay in the game any longer.''

Vonnegut paused.

``It's as though a doctor suddenly turned into a cannibal and ate his patient.''