Posted on 04/15/2007 4:52:26 PM PDT by SeafoodGumbo
| By Kurt Vonnegut | August 6, 2004 |
I, like probably most of you, have seen Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Its title is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury’s great science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. This temperature 451° Fahrenheit, is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury’s novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.
And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.
So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
And still on the subject of books: Our daily sources of news, papers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books can we find out what is really going on. I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published near the start of this humiliating, shameful blood-soaked year.
In case you haven’t noticed, and as a result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war lovers, with appallingly powerful weaponry and unopposed.
In case you haven’t noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were.
With good reason.
In case you haven’t noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanized millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound and kill ’em and torture ’em and imprison ’em all we want.
Piece of cake.
In case you haven’t noticed, we also dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.
Send ’em anywhere. Make ’em do anything.
Piece of cake.
The O’Reilly Factor.
So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and the Chicago-based magazine you are reading, In These Times.
Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed that there were weapons of mass destruction there.
Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn’t even seen World War I. War is now a form of TV entertainment. And what made WWI so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun. Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don’t you wish you could have something named after you?
Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now am tempted to give up on people too. And, as some of you may know, this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.
My last words? “Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.”
Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas!
Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.
----------- and here's another vulgarity by Vonnegut ----------
But in 2005 he truly went off the deep end. In an interview today with David Nason of the Australian, [Vonnegut] makes the following assertions:
As Nason stringently puts it, "Vonnegut's comments are sharply at odds with his reputation as a peace activist and his distinguished war service. … [They] are likely to make many people wonder if old age has finally caught up with a grand old man of American letters." (November 19, 2005)
The article is actually from 2004. I’m just too used to writing 2007.
i thought adolf hitler was a cultist,
and anti-christian.
It seems to me Vonnegut was doing something too few people do these days and trying to put himself in the shoes of those that oppose us.
While he may not agree with their actions, their motivations were clear to him, and he seems to admire their conviction, if not the resulting actions of those convictions.
/obscure
Don’t you wish you could have something named after you?
like the Nobel Peace prize-—and Nobel invented what? For 200 points and the Puerta Viarta Vacation package...Nobel invented....
Kurty Vonnegut has come unstuck in time....
well, i haven't seen it...
This vile t*rd has left this mortal coil. But his sentiments will still feed a rabid brigade.
We are NOT at war with all muslims. It just may come to that some day as the so called "moderates" have a soft spot for the Islamic supremacy ideal and a weak spine to speak out against human rights injustices in Islamic nations or even against terrorist organizations.
You are with us or with them (them being the terrorists, not "the muslims").
And I don't know what race this is that Kurt spoke of. Persian?
People like him spent way too much time trying to figure out how to be wrong about everything. It is apparently such an exhausting exercise that it leaves one embittered and close-minded.
Kurt Vonnegut lost his moral compass when it came to war during WWII and the US bombed German cities. He really saw no difference between one side or ideology and the other.
He gave up his will to fight a long time ago.
Dynamite
DY-NO-MITE
The guy compared the man willing to take on those “virtuous conviction holders” to Adolf Hitler while misrepresenting Christianity. How intellectual according to you.
Maybe it was his bipolar syndrome showing with that idiotic remark.
The internet!
No?
Chicken Vindaloo?
Gimme some help here.
I remember seeing his name on the Humanist Manifesto’s list supporters.
That pretty much tells you he was a moonbat. That and his rant about the stolen FL election, Hitler was a Christian, and everyone in the world hates us.
Gimme a break. If we’re so hated then why are so many people dying to come here?
FYI-
A point of trivia-
Did you know that Kurt Vonnegut was once Geraldo Rivera’s father-in-law. No joke. Supposedly Vonnegut hated him for cheating on his daughter.
He doesn’t think anything, he no longer exists. That is unless he was instrumental in leading souls away from God, in which case he is on hold until the torment of evil ones begins, then he’ll be reinvigorated to enjoy eternal torment.
and anti-christian.
Leftists never let the truth get in the way of their slick slogans... Plus it's so much more fun to both lie AND slander at the same time!
Mark
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