Tweedly-Dee

 

            “Any reviewer who expresses rang and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.”

                                      Kurt Vonnegut

 

            I think I’ll be brief and use quite a few less words this week than most if you don’t mind.

            I am in mourning.

            My favorite author died last week and there is nobody to replace him.

            Kurt Vonnegut came in to my life a philosophy at just the right time, during my first year at college. There is no better time for the ripening and growth of a person’s cynicism and hope than the first year of college.

            You leave your home a high school graduate and after a few short weeks at college you return home for a visit and you know absolutely every thing about everything. You are also willing to share it all with your bemused parents.

            Please notice that I used the term “visit” when I wrote about returning home. Once you leave for college you always visit when you return home. You never live there again, no matter how long you stay when you return.

            So – at a time in my life when I discovered that my three new dorm roommates weren’t at all like me and didn’t give a rat’s kidneys about whether or not I was on the yearbook staff in high school – I discovered the book Slaughter House Five by Kurt Vonnegut.

            Not only had Billy Pilgrim come unstuck in time, I had too. There was nothing around me to remind me of my old life and I was beginning a new one where it was okay to smoke in class, disagreeing with the teacher was encouraged, and you could drink all night if you wanted to without worrying about your parents finding out.

            Along with the freedom and the new-found developing sense of irony I felt washing over me I found a stronger like-minded mentor in the words of Vonnegut.

            Do you want to know why so many people of my so-called Vietnam era generation think so highly of him? Because he spoke truth to power and reminded us that our time in this circus we call life is painfully short and sometimes pathetic. That sometimes, such as in the case of Dresden during World War II, that Americans shouldn’t bomb the hell out of something just because we can.

            I wish George W Bush had read Vonnegut, but I doubt he did.

            So it goes.

            I know the funniest speech that Vonnegut could think of for his eulogy would be the same one that Isaac Asimov wanted for his, since they were both humanists and atheists:

            Well, Kurt is happy in Heaven now…

            Tweedly-dee