Kurting the Issue

It was sad to learn that Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., the curmudgeonly author of Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, and so many other works and unrepentant Eugene V. Debs school of Socialist, has passed at age 84 due to brain injuries sustained after a fall (I imagine he would have appreciated the irony, but been pissed by the method). I saw him speak at the U of I in 2001 and he was feisty as he could be. I attribute that to him having taught here for a bit.

In an interview in January of 2003 he had this to say about the then impending war in Iraq.

"You have lived through World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Reagan wars, Desert Storm, the Balkan wars and now this coming war in Iraq. What has changed, and what has remained the same?

KV: One thing which has not changed is that none of us, no matter what continent or island or ice cap, asked to be born in the first place, and that even somebody as old as I am, which is 80, only just got here. There were already all these games going on when I got here. … An apt motto for any polity anywhere, to put on its state seal or currency or whatever, might be this quotation from the late baseball manager Casey Stengel, who was addressing a team of losing professional athletes: “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

My daughter Lily, for an example close to home, who has just turned 20, finds herself—as does George W. Bush, himself a kid—an heir to a shockingly recent history of human slavery, to an AIDS epidemic and to nuclear submarines slumbering on the floors of fjords in Iceland and elsewhere, crews prepared at a moment’s notice to turn industrial quantities of men, women and children into radioactive soot and bone meal by means of rockets and H-bomb warheads. And to the choice between liberalism or conservatism and on and on.

What is radically new in 2003 is that my daughter, along with our president and Saddam Hussein and on and on, has inherited technologies whose byproducts, whether in war or peace, are rapidly destroying the whole planet as a breathable, drinkable system for supporting life of any kind. Human beings, past and present, have trashed the joint.

Based on what you’ve read and seen in the media, what is not being said in the mainstream press about President Bush’s policies and the impending war in Iraq?

KV: That they are nonsense."

So it goes

R.I.P.