Bu-lat-lat (boo-lat-lat) verb: to search, probe, investigate, inquire; to unearth facts Vol. IV, No. 29 August 22 - 28, 2004 Quezon City, Philippines |
I
Love You, Madame Librarian Kurt
Vonnegut gives a biting commentary on the situation in the post-9/11 U.S.
The author is known for combining science fiction, social satire, and
black comedy in his writings. (Reposted from www.rockrap.com) 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? www.rockrap.com/Posted by
Bulatlat We want to know what you think of this article.
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