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)
And so the blatant lies about Bush stole the election through stealing votes by denying Black folks their chance to vote still lives on.
Billy Pilgrim was unstuck in time.
If he was right, nothing. Otherwise, it depends on which direction his soul went. Up or down.
Librarians are perhaps the most overeducated people in history. Why should one need a Master’s degree to be a librarian? People come in.. type on the computer to find a book, and go and get. What does the librarian do? Check them out? Say “Shh” to kids that are running around the library? Why the hell does one need a master’s degree for that?
Expensive, .22 caliber Olympic pistol ammunition? (Dynamit Nobel). Actually, I know the answer. He killed an assistant or two and blew off some of his fingers doing it. His research was eventually confined to a barge in the middle of Lake Geneva.
Vonnegut: God is dead.
God: Vonnegut is dead.
you don’t,
where i live.
you just need to know
spanish.
Cerebral hemorrhage (I had to look it up...)
Vonnegut was such a fellow. In the end it was his turn to watch a German city with many close relatives in Indianapolis and Fort Wayne burned to a cinder, it's people melted into a mass of lard.
He wasn't the only "unhinged" fellow around after that, but he wrote about it.
True, but for the wrong reasons. They're liberal propaganda machines.
In case you haven’t noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were.
Idiot statements like this make me regret that I wasted time read anything this man wrote. What an unabashed fool. If he's this clueless about America, what insights do his written works really offer?
In case you haven’t noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanized millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race.
Dead on. I'm sick to death of being demonized by the MSM, DU, the DailyKos, Chris Matthews, George Soros et al because I'm a white Christian male. That is what he means, right?
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.
Again, completely moronic statement. Even the Democrats, who actually hate the military (remember "I loathe the military"?) pretend to worship them. "I support our troops, but not their mission or their leader". Which is kind of like saying, "I love my dog, but I'm having him put to sleep anyway because he's just too inconvenient to care for any more".
Mailer needs all the blessings he can get. He's a real POS.
Good riddance Kurt.
The only reason to put yourself in your enemy’s shoes is to imagine what they are thinking so you can destroy them — like Patton reading Rommel’s book.
That’s not what Veonnegut did. He loved the enemies who wished to destroy us and our civilization and hated his country, who is trying to defend our our civilization.
It is wrong to excuse this, as you are attempting to do.
Like Duane Hoover, his chemicals were bad. And so it goes.
Vonnegut may have lost his moral compass during WW2, but he took up the marxist cause during much of his adult life.
Glad to see that the SOB is dead. Now if Harold Pinter and Alan Rickman would join him, the literary and entertainment world would be a better place.
And as for librarians, the American Librarians Association has refused to support freedom for Cuban librarians and for freedom of thought in Castro’s paradise. Too many reds have gotten into positions of power in the ALA and have subverted it into a Castro protection racket.
Vonnegut was never know for his intellectual honesty.
I think the devil will like having the author of “Slaughter House Five” as his permanent guest.
That story is why I never figured for him to be a Leftist...was really disappointed when I realized he was.
I was never much of a fan after I found out he was a leftist, and I got pretty PO’d when he became a raving leftie nut.
Prizes.
“Vomitgut offered no viable alternatives to our bombing Germany into submission in WW2. If we had let up our attacks, how many more Jews would have died in concentration camps? How many more would have died in Hitler’s attacks on England? Thankfully, his ilk wasn’t running the war. It’s like the pacifist Left today. Don’t invade Afganistan and overthrow the Taliban. Discuss the issues with them and in the meantime allow them to kill more people.”
Why don’t you go read a book on WW II before you shoot your mouth off? Voggnett, despite his being a left-wing atheist, was in the infantry in WWII, and put his life on the line. He saw the Dresden atrocity first-hand.
We didn’t defeat Hitler and Tojo by killing old women and children at Dresden. BTW, all the gas chambers were outside Germany, in Poland, which was occupied by the Red Army - when Dresden was Bombed.
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