Verdens eneste Kurt Vonnegut døde i dag. En merksnodig,
bisarr, fantasifull og fantastisk forfatter. En forfatter alle
burde ha lest. En depressiv moromann, som aldri tok spøk kun
for spøk, og ikke alvor for alvorlig.
84 år gammel. Kjederøykende de fleste av dem. Han
skjønte aldri selv hvorfor han ble så gammel, og
prøvde da også å unngå det. Et
selvmordsforsøk i 1984 gikk skeis, noe han gjerne
spøkte med senere. I respekt for sine barn prøvde han
aldri igjen.
Det er ikke nødvendig å skrive et langt minneord for denne kjempen: Han skrev sitt
eget. Det kommer her. Les det – og bøkene hans!
—
I Love You,
Madame Librarian
by Kurt Vonnegut
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.
What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic
personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without
a sense of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the
treasuries of our government and corporations and made it all their
own?