Appreciating Vonnegut
Rothschild, Matthew
Editor's Note Matthew Rothschild Appreciating Vonnegut We mourn Kurt Vonnegut this month. The mainstream obituaries did not do him-or his humor, or his politics-justice. "We are here on Earth to...
...For it was Bleifuss's wonderful idea to invite Vonnegut to submit whatever he wanted for that magazine over the last four years...
...Tap everybody's telephone...
...Let me recommend a new book to you: Laura Flanders's Blue Grit: True Democrats Take Back Politics from the Politicians...
...Vonnegut collected his In These Times columns in A Man Without a Country...
...Attack Iraq...
...Those now in charge of the federal government are upper crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka 'Christians,' and plus, most frighteningly psychopathic personalities," he wrote...
...And, on the dedication page, he wrote: "All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental...
...Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass...
...His answer...
...Any account of Vonnegut is not complete without a proper bow to Joel Bleifuss, the astute editor of In These Times...
...Privatize the public schools...
...And often they came accompanied by a sketch...
...Simply can't...
...Sometimes they were tirades, sometimes aper?us, sometimes just a throwaway line or two...
...His existentialism, his quirkiness, his pessimism, and his atheism didn't lead him to nihilism but to a democratic socialism and a profound humanism...
...It's perfectly normal to be in favor of fire departments...
...We are here on Earth to fart around," he wrote in Timequake...
...This is a meaty, rewarding book...
...Build a trillion-dollar missile shield...
...Do this...
...I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: C-Students from Yale...
...we don't even need better funding or a bigger media megaphone of our own...
...And please excuse the semicolons in this paragraph...
...We had things in common: the Second World War, bombing, books, the future of the world," Zinn writes wryly...
...He had semicolonitis...
...Disgust for the Bush Administration permeates the pages...
...Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they don't give a fuck what happens next...
...But more than just a good news book-and it's always nice to have good news-Blue Grit presents a smart, provocative argument that rebuts some of the conventional wisdom on the left: We don't need better framing (George Lakoff is overrated...
...Do that...
...What we do need, she says, is to return to the grassroots and respect the work that local activists are doing, including in the much-maligned fields of abortion rights and gay rights...
...It's perfectly ordinary to be a socialist," he told David Barsamian in an interview we ran back in June 2003...
...the Christian right is not winning the fight over morals (Thomas Frank is wrong...
...Cut health care...
...In that same essay, Vonnegut writes about being asked if he has any ideas for a reality TV show...
...Americans are scoring progressive victories, even in some of the most conservative parts of the country," writes the host of Radio-Nation on Air America, who traveled to Utah, Montana, and Colorado to do some of her reporting...
...Cut taxes on the rich...
...After I heard the news, I asked Howard Zinn to write a farewell to Vonnegut for us, figuring that the two knew each other well...
...Mobilize the reserves...
...He truly believed in the Sermon on the Mount...
...Vonnegut would not have approved...
...Turns out they did, but only over the last decade or so...
Vol. 71 • June 2007 • No. 6
