For example, compare this quote from Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle; “There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look” (14) to this quote from the song “Burn Them Prisons” by the Ska-Punk group Left Över Crack,
“Fucking pigs, fucking pigs,
war against the fucking pigs,
stab them with some dirt digs,
bury them under dirt and twigs,
gotta hate them fucking pigs.”
In the first of these two quotes, Vonnegut writes about how it is possible to love every human being. In the second, Left Över Crack assert that the way to defeat “the pigs” or, the oppressors (who are are not named specifically, yet assumed that the listener is aware that “the pigs” consist of the military industrial complex, the government, the military, the police, or any other authority), is by killing them. It’s plain to see that these two philosophies are at odds with another. The second quote creates the idea that “we” (we being the people, the common folks, the rabble, etc.) need to rise up against “them” (happy people, the government, everybody who holds an authority position, etc.), which is the total opposite of Vonnegut’s idea of the world. Vonnegut teaches, through his books, that there is no “us” or “them,” there are only people. This is best shown in Slaughterhouse 5, when Vonnegut writes, “[…] no one was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. Shortly before my father died, he said to me, ‘You know —you never wrote a story with a villain in it.’ I told him that was one of the things I learned in college after the war” (Vonnegut 8).
One can make a series of observations. First, that Vonnegut and many Punks believe very strongly in radical leftism and utopian politics.
Secondly, that Punk music encourages a far more violent and angry stance than that taken by Vonnegut. Thirdly, that it can be seen that Punk and Vonnegut are based primarily in ideals.