Thursday, April 12, 2007

Kurt Vonnegut

the great humanist who called himself a hack writer.

Here he is on The Daily Show at the age of 82, giving us his List of Liberal Crap I Never Want To Hear Again and a lesson in democracy for the people of Iraq, because, as he says, "we have some experience with it".

"After the first hundred years you have to let your slaves go, then after a hundred and fifty you have to let the women vote, but first there's a lot of genocide and ethnic cleansing."

And so it goes.

Link via Norm Jenson, another great humanist, at onegoodmove

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

They say he had a fall and died from complications but I only imagine him lying on a mountaintop, thumbing his nose at the heavens, and doing a dose of Strontium 9.
The man woke me up in my teens, and I'd revisit his works every 10 years or so and love it all over again. Then in the last 4 desperate years of this world he had become the most strident anti-apologist for anything American. He'd become again, in a word, my hero.
I read of his death at 84 on the BBC website and right beside it was another headline celebrating the 75th birthday of 'Tarzan's' chimpanzee. I think Mr Vonnegut would love my eulogy; as he escaped before his star was eclipsed.

"What are humans really for?"

Anonymous said...

God bless you, Mr Vonnegut.

Anonymous said...

The man had doubt - you can trust a man who has doubt.

Lots of talk of him being a hero to the counterculture.
No, he was a hero to everyone who read him - it's just that some of those readers lost themselves later on.

Anonymous said...

Well said jan. Thank you for that one.

Anonymous said...

Kurt is up in heaven now.

"Being a humanist means that you try to behave as decently, as honourably, as you can without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. When we had a memorial service for Isaac Asimov a few years back, I spoke at it and said at one point, "Isaac is up in Heaven now." It was the funniest thing I could think of to say to an audience of humanists. Believe me, it worked - I rolled them in the aisles.
If I should ever die, God forbid, I hope people will say, "Kurt is up in Heaven now." That's my favourite joke. "
--Kurt Vonnegut

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