Which part of this excerpt from "The Euphio Question" represents Vonnegut's belief that "We are here on Earth to fart around," which he stated in his autobiography A Man without a Country? But now that word is getting around and coming to your official notice, I might as well tell the story straight and pray to God that I can convince you that America doesn’t want what we discovered. I won't deny that all three of us—Lew Harrison, the radio announcer, Dr. Fred Bockman, the physicist, and myself, a sociology professor—found peace of mind.We did. And I won't say it’s wrong for people to seek peace of mind. But if somebody thinks he wants peace of mind the way we found it, he'd be well advised to seek coronary thrombosis instead. Lew, Fred and I found peace of mind by sitting in easy chairs and turning on a gadget the size of a table-model television set. No herbs, no golden rule, no muscle control, no sticking our noses in other people’s troubles to forget our own; no hobbies, Taoism, push-ups or contemplation of a lotus . . . The gadget is, I think, what a lot of people vaguely foresaw as the crowning achievement of civilization: an electronic something-or-other, cheap, easily mass-produced, that can, at the flick of a switch, provide tranquility. I see you have one here.
