On a warm afternoon, somewhere toward the end of tenth grade, I was sprawled on a couch in the windowless reading room within my high school's library halfway through
this when the vice principal, an ex-Marine with spit-shined shoes poked his head in and said, "What are you reading
that for? That's a pig book. You should read T.S. Eliot."
I don't know why I just remembered that.
(A "pig book"?)
Rising Hegemon
7 comments:
"The Waste Land and Other Poems" is 68 pages, while "Slaughterhouse Five" is 288 pages. Possibly he meant "big book".
BTW, his name wasn't Jack, by any chance?
T.S. Eliot was more, let's say, appealing to the intellectual fashion of the time, while Kurt VG wasn't, except to those who liked his clear headed clear speaking straight to the point stories.
vox
shakespeare is easier w/ dyslexia.
Mr. Vonnegut wasn't, certainly his main character in that book wasn't, shall we say, correctly oriented towards the military.
Damn, did you go to my high school--- Buchtel HS in Akron Ohio? or were there lots of other ex-Marine VPs around just like our dear Mr Jack C---y?
Anyway, Vonnegut was definitely the Mark Twain of the 20th century. Cat's Cradle was my personal favourite; anyone who hasn't read it is in for a treat. It's fairly short read.
But yeah, Slaughterhouse Five was another one of his greatest.
And who can forget his immortal rant, "C- Students From Yale"---?
***************
I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary
reality TV show. I have one reality show that would
really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from Yale."
George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.
To say somebody is a PP is to make perfectly
respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has
appendicitis or athlete's foot. The classic medical
text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey
Cleckley, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the
Medical College of Georgia, published in 1941. Read
it!
Some people are born deaf, some are born blind or
whatever, and this book is about congenitally
defective human beings of a sort that is making this
whole country and many other parts of the planet go
completely haywire nowadays. These were people born without consciences, and suddenly they are taking charge of everything.
PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering
their actions may cause others, but they do not care.
They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a
screw loose!
And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them?
And they are waging a war that is making billionaires
out of millionaires, and trillionaires out of
billionaires, and they own television, and they
bankroll George Bush, and not because he's against gay marriage.
So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in
our federal government, as though they were leaders
instead of sick. They have taken charge. They have
taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.
They might have felt that taking our country into an
endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in
corporations, and now in government, is they are so
decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin' day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with any doubts, for the simple reason that they don't give a fuck what happens next. Simply can't.
Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the
public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap
everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a
trillion-dollar missile shield!
Res - I think your principle was calling Vonnegut a "Communist pig" - a not uncommon epithet at the time.
"Slaughterhouse Five" is genious, but try "The Sirens of Titan" - its an all-but-forgotten gem.
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