God Bless You, Mr Rosewater

Product Information

a b Dietz, Dan. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater "Casts, Credits, Songs, Critical Reception and Performance Data of More Than 1,800 Shows", McFarland, 2010, ISBN 0-786457317, p.589

The Rosewater Foundation has more money than God. When Eliot Rosewater, the current head, starts making people nervous with all his talk of redistributing wealth, Norman Mushari decides to put Eliot's sanity to test in court and reaches out to the Rhode Island branch of the Rosewater family. Vonnegut is also notable because he was one of the first modern science fiction authors to get serious attention in the literary world. Although your literature professors (and Vonnegut himself) may try to tell you he's not actually a science fiction writer, the aliens and time-travel seem to disagree. Driven to Suicide: Celia Hoover, who commits suicide by eating Drano chips, which does so much damage to her body that her coffin has to be kept closed at her funeral. Why she commits suicide is never explained; it may be a result of her descent into madness due to drug abuse.

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From all reports, the person next in line to be President of the Foundation, a cousin in Rhode Island, was inferior in all respects. When the magic moment came, Mushari would represent him.

Interrupted Suicide: Fred Rosewater is about to hang himself, but he's stopped by a visit from Mushari.Rape as Drama: Quite gruesomely used in "Welcome To The Monkey House". Sex is repressed and discouraged to the point where a vigilante thinks the only way to convince women to try it is to rape them. The women he violates end up being his loyal followers, and eventually help him do it to other women. It may sound unreal, but this happens in a lot of societies and cultural subgroups.

The Baby Trap: Anita got Paul to marry her by claiming to be pregnant. Not only was she not pregnant, she actually can't have children at all. When, in the beginning, the Father created Man and Woman, he took a good look at everything that he had made and declared that, indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning. He then left these hairless talking apes to graze for a time in his luxury garden. But when he realised they were discussing the merits of their naked bodies and eating up his orchard, thus leaving next to nothing for his divine apfelstrudels, he scratched his beard and reconsidered. The hairless apes ended up booted out of Eden, on account of some lizard, and they became henceforth subject to floods, wars, unemployment, decrepitude and global pandemics. Much, later, came the Son. He was trying to be kind to the world, yet the world knew him not. Some found his attitude a bit eccentric, and since mental institutions did not exist at the time and people were a bit more expeditious, he ended up on a cross on a sizzling hot day, with little more than a drink of vinegar. And the Holy Ghost, perched atop the cross and frankly a bit perplexed by the whole situation, sang. “ Poo-tee-weet?” But I digress.In March 2003, Rosewater was performed in concert as part of the CooperArts series at the Cooper Union; the concert featured Jim Walton (Eliot Rosewater), Carolee Carmello (Sylvia Rosewater), and David Pittu (Norman Mushari). [4]

And Samuel bought newspapers, and preachers, too. He gave them this simple lesson to teach, and they taught it well: Anybody who thought that the United States of America was supposed to be a Utopia was a piggy, lazy, God-damned fool. Samuel thundered that no American factory hand was worth more than eighty cents a day. And yet he could be thankful for the opportunity to pay a hundred thousand dollars or more for a painting by an Italian three centuries dead. And he capped this insult by giving paintings to museums for the spiritual elevation of the poor. The museums were closed on Sundays. A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees. The ambitious young poet dreamed to tell the world the truth… And sponsored by the Rosewater Foundation he has written a pornographic novel Get with Child a Mandrake Root… So much for the ultimate truth… Maybe I flatter myself when I think that I have things in common with Hamlet, that I have an important mission, that I’m temporarily mixed up about how it should be done. Hamlet had one big edge on me. His father’s ghost told him exactly what he had to do, while I am operating without instructions.Noah hired a village idiot to fight in his place, converted the saw factory to the manufacture of swords and bayonets, converted the farm to the raising of hogs. Abraham Lincoln declared that no amount of money was too much to pay for the restoration of the Union, so Noah priced his merchandise in scale with the national tragedy. And he made this discovery: Government objections to the price or quality of his wares could be vaporized with bribes that were pitifully small. For this, his peers on the banks of the Money River are ready to declare Eliot insane and a danger to society. He must be pixilated! A satire on American society, capitalism, and religious and sexual hypocrisy, Vonnegut’s ensemble includes Eliot Rosewater (a less unfortunate Jay Gatsby/F. Scott Fitzgerald who lives long enough to be charitable with his family’s trust funds), his father Senator Lister Rosewater (a male incarnation of Ayn Rand, whose "Atlas Shrugged" was published eight years before and "The Virtue of Selfishness" the year before this novel) and science fiction novelist Kilgore Trout (who resembles Jesus Christ in appearance - until he shaves his beard off – and philosophy - "the problem is this: how to love people without any use" and how to embrace "enthusiastic unselfishness").