The three writers who have influenced me far more than any others are Hunter Thompson, Elmore Leonard and Kurt Vonnegut--not necessarily in that order.

I admire the 60s and 70s Thompson for his willingness to tell stories that hadn't been told--generally funny ones, at that. The later Thompson was a crank and a bully, though still often funny.

Elmore Leonard is often lionized for his dialogue, but what I like is that he writes his prose the way people talk. His dialogue is generally stylized and can sound dated almost immediately. But his storytelling is transparent and intuitive. Reading a book is like listening to him speak--almost no writer alive has that perceptive an ear.

And then there's Kurt Vonnegut, the first writer I read whose stuff inspired me to buy and read all his work. He doesn't write the way people talk; he writes the way people think (at least, he writes the way I think). His books aren't so much a conversation as brain surgery. Really funny brain surgery.

I had to laugh when I noticed that the big news the week of his death was the resolution of the Duke lacrosse case and the Don Imus affair. And I got to thinking: What would Kurt say?

It's easier to guess his reaction to the dropping of charges against the former Duke players. He would have said something like "The rich just renewed their license to piss on the poor." Sure, it's troubling when anyone is falsely accused of a crime. But the advantage of being rich (and, it must be noted, white) is that you can fight those charges with full vigor. If you're poor (and not white), you're much more likely to get screwed.

There are dozens of people on death row who did not commit the crimes that got them there. I think it's safe to say that everyone on death row has committed a criminal act of some kind, but the number of death sentences and convictions overturned in the past few years is astounding and troubling. Yes, it's nice that three men didn't get convicted of something they didn't do, but that doesn't make them good people. One of the indicted players was convicted in D.C. of assaulting a man just because the man looked gay (turns out he isn't). All three attended numerous notorious parties at the "lacrosse house," a domicile famous in my old Durham stomping grounds as exhibit A for why Duke undergrads shouldn't live off campus. In short, I feel safe in calling these guys assholes. But, of course, it's not a crime to be an asshole. Sometimes it gets you elected president.

I don't think Kurt would have been jumping for joy to see the charges dropped against the Duke three, though he certainly wouldn't have been surprised. His stories often concerned heroes who struggled mightily against inevitable failure, only to fail inevitably. That's kinda funny, you know.

The Imus thing isn't as clear. Vonnegut was as rabid a free speech advocate as anyone, if only in his own self-interest. He wrote things in his books that most people believe shouldn't be thought. I have a memory of a character in one of his books referring to cremated Holocaust victims as "briquets," but I can't find that in any of the books I still have on my shelf (my youngest brother helped himself to my Vonnegut collection when I went to college and foolishly left my books behind). So maybe it was someone else who wrote that, or maybe he referred to someone else (victims of the Dresden bombing, perhaps) as "briquets." Nonetheless, Vonnegut slaughtered more sacred cows in his eighty-four years than some civilizations do over millennia. And while he would probably see Imus's slur as another example of the rich pissing on the poor (or, perhaps more accurately, the powerful pissing on the powerless), I figure he would have also ranted and raved about Imus's right to do so.

Should Imus have lost his job because his latest outrage? I don't know what Kurt might have thought about that. My own answer is yes, on the practical grounds that you can't have a radio show (or a TV show) that doesn't pay for itself one way or another. His advertisers deserted him, so he lost his job. I see nothing evil in that. Of course, Imus has been saying this stuff for years and those advertisers kept paying, so the hypocrisy meter is running a bit hot right now.

Ah, hypocrisy. Vonnegut hated hypocrites and yet constantly acknowledged the hypocrite in all of us. Hypocritical? Ironic? Maybe just truthful.

We're all stupid, and we're all hypocrites. Someday we die. If we're lucky, we get laid every once in a while. Meanwhile, the rich get richer, the powerful get more powerful and the little guy will always get screwed. Vonnegut did voice a few other ideas in his books, but by and large he came back to those. Kurt Vonnegut endured life. He found the human condition intolerable. And yet he didn't quit on life, like his mom did. He struggled until the end came, an end he most certainly wished had come sooner.

I guess that's the real fight against inevitable failure. The important thing is that you fight. Whatever else happens, happens.

So it goes.

Jon Worley presumes to know the minds of all sorts of famous and influential people.