Today would have been Kurt Vonnegut's 85th birthday if we didn't lose him about six months ago. This diary will be a short tribute to his memory and to Rememberance Day. (More about that on the flip.)
A few days ago I posted a comment on the thread about Karl Rove's iditiotic commenst re: the blogosphere. I singled out his comment about how the Internet was harmful to political discourse because it allowed people to write opinions anonymously.
My response was this: The biggest problem with Repbulicans is that they never took 7th grade civics. Hasn't he ever heard of The Fedearalist Paper?
I'm pretty sure you can't join the Federalist Society without having read them. But oh well.
Kurt Vonnegut on the other hand explained his liberalism and his pacifism very succintly by attritbuting them to the lessons he was taught in the public schools of Depression Era Indianapolis.
I was taught in the sixth grade that we had a standing army of just over a hundred thousand men and that the generals had nothing to say about what was done in Washington. I was taught to be proud of that and to pity Europe for having more than a million men under arms and spending all their money on airplanes and tanks. I simply never unlearned junior civics. I still believe in it. I got a very good grade.
quoted by James Lundquist in Kurt Vonnegut (1971)
How true. And Kurt went on to hold the Purple Heart for injuries suffered while a POW after the Battle of the Bulge. (He was kept prisoner in an abandone abatoir known as "Slaugherhouse Five", hence the title of his most widely read book.
Kurt was born on the 4th Anniversary of the end of World War I. In his youth that day was called "Rememberence Day" to remember all the people that died in World War one. Eventually that morphed into "Veteran's day", a change that Kurt Vonnegut never approved of. (He wrote scathingly of it "Cat's Cradle".)
For Kurt today is Rememberence Day, and so I shall refer to it that way also. This is the first Rememberence Day that we have to think of Kurt in the past tense. But tell me you don't read that quote above and just wish you could take Rove and Bush and the rest of those nincompoops and sit them down in a good Middle School desk and teach them a thing or two about what this country really is all about.
God Bless you, Kurt Vonnegut. You left us way too soon.