Word: pontiacs
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Across the U.S. this month, the schools are opening in an atmosphere of apprehensive peace. In both North and South, integration has become a more muted issue than it was. In Pontiac, Mich., where white parents all but rioted against busing two years ago, the buses rolled without opposition. In Chicago, a proposed march at Gage Park High School, which last year was closed because of interracial violence, fizzled out. "It was the quietest opening day in seven years," said one of the city's assistant superintendents...
...plot is simple enough. I am invited to the Midland City Festival of the Arts through the efforts of Eliot Rosewater, an eccentric millionaire with the handwriting of a fourteen-year-old, and incidentally, my only fan. After a rather roundabout trip I arrive, only to drive a Pontiac dealer, Dwayne Hoover, insane with the ideas from one of my books. You can imagine my horror; I had never even driven a Pontiac before, and besides, my books had always influenced people to do only one thing: cut out the dirty pictures my publishers put in them and then burn...
THIS STORY HAS more to it than just my unscrewing the last bolt out of some Pontiac dealer's engine. My creator has silly ideas, which, despite their sometimes tenuous connection to the story, he never fails to explore. Many of his ideas are social criticism derived from the absurdities and idiosyncrasies of American experience. In the past, there were funny. I was funny. But when I'm not bored by Breakfast of Champions, it makes me want to cry. I'm just not funny anymore...
...amazing he lasted as long as he did. Even before I appear in Midland City, Dwayne Hoover is surrounded by quite a cast of characters. Harry LeSabre, his salesman, is a sometime transvestite who expresses his women's clothes fetish during Hawaiian Week at Dwayne Hoover's Exit Eleven Pontiac Village. Francine Pefko, Dwayne's mistress, thinks she is his mother. Bunny is Dwayne's homosexual son. There are more. These three are easily enough to strip the gears of any normally functioning machine...
...Pontiac showroom for the scene of such collisions? "Pontiac is the leading middle-class car," Vonnegut told an interviewer some time ago. "But Pontiac is also the name of an Indian chief. The name is like a survey of American history...