When I was 13 I spent some time with my Uncle and Aunt in upstate New York. Their daughter had just finished university, and was off to Harvard for law school in the fall. As with most recent graduates, she had left boxes upon boxes piled in her parents basement. I respect my family's privacy, but she had gone to a good school, and had corresponding tastes in literature. Since she was trying to get rid of as many of her books as possible, I spent much of that week rooting through those boxes.
I brought home many books that trip, to add to an already uncontrolled collection that is currently lying in my parents basement. One of those books changed me, in the way only truly meaningful art can. It changed the way I thought about humanity, politics, writing, and profoundly altered my spirituality. The was Hocus Pocus, written by a hero of literature, the now Late Kurt Vonnegut.
I doubt I have to tell anyone in this community how important Kurt was. In recent years his essays have put words to my frustration and anger towards our species. In my opinion, I Love You, Madame Librarian, was the best piece of political writing leading up to the 2004 election.
He was fearless, compassionate, and deeply human. He will be missed. Here are a few quotes I found looking arond the internet. I wouldn't want to dishonour Kurts memory by spending too much time on a tribute, but his words are so much better than mine. Hopefully I get the quotation rules right, if I don;t someone tell me and I'll change it.
Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.
Vonnegut on humanism.
I have wanted to give Iraq a lesson in democracy—because we’re experienced with it, you know. And, in democracy, after a hundred years, you have to let your slaves go. And, after a hundred and fifty years, you have to let your women vote. And, at the beginning of democracy, is that quite a bit of genocide and ethnic cleansing is quite okay. And that’s what’s going on now.
Appearance on The Daily Show (September 2005)
I do feel that evolution is being controlled by some sort of divine engineer. I can't help thinking that. And this engineer knows exactly what he or she is doing and why, and where evolution is headed. That’s why we’ve got giraffes and hippopotami and the clap.
On Evolution vs. Intelligent Design, on The Daily Show (September 2005)
The only difference between [George W.] Bush and [Adolf] Hitler is that Hitler was elected.
From an Article in The Free Press
There are plenty of good reasons for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side.
"You hate America, don't you?" she said.
"That would be as silly as loving it," I said. "It's impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn't interest me. It's no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can't think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can't believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to the human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will."
Mother Night, 1961
Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.
"I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done."
"Nice going, God!"
"Nobody but You could have done it, God! I certainly couldn't have."
"I feel very unimportant compared to You."
"The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around."
Cat's Cradle (1963)
The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
As part of the gun crew, he had helped to fire one shot in anger-from a 57-millimeter antitank gun. The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the zipper on the fly of God Almighty.
You know we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock "My God, my God—" I said to myself. "It's the Children's Crusade."
The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.
But the Gospels actually taught this:
Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes.
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don’t acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.
The arts put man at the center of the universe, whether he belongs there or not. Military science, on the other hand, treats man as garbage— and his children, and his cities, too. Military science is probably right about the contemptibility of man in the vastness of the universe. Still— I deny that contemptibility, and I beg you to deny it, through the creation of appreciation of art.
A great swindle of our time is the assumption that science has made religion obsolete. All science has damaged is the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Jonah and the Whale. Everything else holds up pretty well, particularly lessons about fairness and gentleness. People who find those lessons irrelevant in the twentieth century are simply using science as an excuse for greed and harshness. Science has nothing to do with it, friends.
Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (1974)
I am too lazy to chase down the exact quotation but the British astronomer Fred Hoyle said something to this effect: The believing in Darwin’s theoretical mechanisms of evolution was like believing that a hurricane could blow through a junkyard and build a Boeing 747. No matter what is doing the creating. I have to say that the giraffe and the rhinoceros are ridiculous. And so is the human brain, capable, in cahoots with the more sensitive parts of the body, such as the ding dong, of hating life while pretending to love it, and behaving accordingly: Somebody shoot me while I’m happy!
If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have nerve enough to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.
If there is a god, he sure hates people. That’s all I can say.
I always had trouble ending short stories in ways that would satisfy a general public. In real life, as during a rerun following a timequake, people don’t change, don’t learn anything from their mistakes, and don’t apologize. In a short story they have to do at least two out of three of those things, or you might as well throw it away in the lidless wire trash receptacle chained and padlocked to the fire hydrant in front of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Timequake (1996)
Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.
For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.
"Blessed are the merciful" in a courtroom? "Blessed are the peacemakers" in the Pentagon? Give me a break!
There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.
I have to say this in defense of humankind: No matter in what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got there. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these crazy games going on, which could make you act crazy, even if you weren’t crazy to begin with. Some of the games that were already going on when you got here were love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf and girls’ basketball.
Even crazier than golf, though, is modern American politics, where, thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.
If you want to take my guns away from me, and you’re all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them kitchen appliances at their showers, and you’re for the poor, you’re a liberal. If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you’re a conservative. What could be simpler?
Cold Turkey (2004)
I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, "Isaac is up in heaven now." It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, "Kurt is up in heaven now." That's my favorite joke.
George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography.
During the Vietnam War, Abbie Hoffman announced that the new high was banana peels taken rectally. So then FBI scientists stuffed banana peels up their asses to find out if this was true or not.
If God were alive today, he would have to be an atheist, because the excrement has hit the air-conditioning big time, big time.
A Man Without a Country(2005)
Special thanks to Wikipedia for making sure my heart-felt tribute took no longer than an hour to write.
And so it goes.