i like butter, don't you?

Such a sad year. First Molly Ivins, now Kurt Vonnegut. I’m gutted. I didn’t even know he was alive! I feel guilty.

The first Vonnegut book I read was Breakfast of Champions. Read it because it’s a picture book, and in the introduction he draws an asshole. It’s a good one, too. Also, in the first chapter he describes the national anthem:

There were one quadrillion nations in the Universe, but the nation Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout belonged to was the only one with a national anthem which was gibberish sprinkled with question marks.

He was born in Indiana, which gives me hope for the heartland. Recently Vonnegut spoke about democracy with Jon Stewart:

I have wanted to give Iraq a lesson in democracy, because we’ve experience with it, you know. And in democracy after 100 years you have to let your slaves go, and after 150 years you have to let your women vote, and at the beginning of democracy there’s quite a bit of genocide and ethnic cleansing, it’s quite okay.

Vonnegut said there are two kinds of writers: swoopers and bashers. Swoopers write a story quickly and bashers go one sentence at a time. In his experience, most bashers are men and most swoopers are women.

I like to swoop, then bash.

I’ve cut and pasted some of my favorite paragraphs from The New York Times’ obituary. What a person. It’s a sad day.

On the firebombing at Dresden:

The defining moment of Mr. Vonnegut’s life was the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces in 1945, an event he witnessed firsthand as a young prisoner of war. Thousands of civilians were killed in the raids, many of them burned to death or asphyxiated.

“The firebombing of Dresden,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote, “was a work of art.” It was, he added, “a tower of smoke and flame to commemorate the rage and heartbreak of so many who had their lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of Germany.”

On kindess (he and I share the same philosophy):

To Mr. Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. The title character in his 1965 novel, “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine,” summed up his philosophy:

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

And finally, the closing lines from his last book:

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”

People did not like it here.