"Wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them." Kurt Vonnegut

[ancianita]

Honor veterans by not making any more of them.

Thought I'd share this dag-blasted beautiful essay of thoughts woven by Wonkette's Doktor Zoom, that puts Veterans Day in heartfelt perspective through Kurt Vonnegut.

... here at home, a substantial portion of the population thinks America can only be put right by a good civil war, or at least by terrorizing school board members and the folks who run our elections. Vonnegut had an especially low opinion of such bullies, and I can't help but think he would have been absolutely astonished that vast numbers of Americans would refuse to get vaccinated against a disease that has now killed three-quarters of a million of us.

But Uncle Kurt would certainly recognize the people who are calling for dirty, anti-American books to be pulled out of the schools, and perhaps even burned. People who think their mission is moral improvement have been at war with Slaughterhouse-Five since it was published fifty-two years ago. No doubt it will eventually get caught up somewhere in the current enthusiasm for cleansing the schools, although it may be spared in some of the early rounds because it's primarily about the cruelty of war, not about America's internal cruelty to Americans or about gay people.

In 1973, Slaughterhouse-Five wasn't merely removed from library shelves in Drake, North Dakota. The school board ordered a custodian at the high school to burn all 32 classroom copies of the novel — and later, others — in the school's furnace, prompting Vonnegut to write to Charles McCarthy, the chair of the Drake School Board, to remind him that Vonnegut was an American, a veteran, a good citizen who had never been arrested, and a human being. The full text of the letter can be found here; to save space, here's a video of the letter being read by actor Benedict Cumberbatch:

We can't resist copy-pasting at least this paragraph, which is every bit as true nearly forty years later:

If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don't damage children much. They didn't damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.

Vonnegut did not receive a reply.

But like his spiritual forbears Mark Twain and George Orwell, Vonnegut definitely did know that people could be better, or he believed it strongly enough to keep from despair, if we would just remember that other people are indeed people...

https://www.wonkette.com/fine-here-is-your-kurt-vonnegut-on-the-first-armistice-day-since-the-latest-war-ended

[Walleye]

1. "Love may fail, but courtesy will prevail"Wouldn't want the children reading anything so radical