VirusHead

So it goes, and he is gone. Good-bye, dear Kurt Vonnegut. I (for one) will miss you.

“When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is ‘So it goes.’” – , Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut

“My parents and grandparents were humanists, what used to be called Free Thinkers. So as humanist I am honoring my ancestors, which the Bible says is a good thing to do. We humanists try to behave as decently, as fairly, and as honorably as we can without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. My brother and sister didn’t think there was one, my parents and grandparents didn’t think there was one. It was enough that they were alive. We humanists serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.

I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, “Isaac is up in heaven now.” It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, “Kurt is up in heaven now.” That’s my favorite joke.

How do humanists feel about Jesus? I say of Jesus, as all humanists do, “If what he said is good, and so much of it is absolutely beautiful, what does it matter if he was God or not?”

But if Christ hadn’t delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn’t want to be a human being.

I’d just as soon be a rattlesnake.”
– From A Man Without a Country (2005) by Kurt Vonnegut

But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America’s becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas. — from “Cold Turkey,” In These Times, May 10, 2004

The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes. I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterwards, and he said, ‘There’s a Chaplain who never visited the front.’ Hocus Pocus, Kurt Vonnegut

• “Vonnegut’s Apocalypse” – “He survived being captured by the Nazis and the suicide of his mother to write some of the funniest, darkest novels of our time, but it took George W. Bush to break him.” Rolling Stone, Douglas Brinkley
• Kurt Vonnegut, Counterculture’s Novelist, Dies, Dinitia Smith, New York Times, April 2 2007
• Novelist Vonnegut Remembered for His Black Humor, by Steve Inskeep and Renee Montagne, Morning Edition, April 12, 2007 (includes links to interviews, book excerpts, etc.)
• New York Times Kurt Vonnegut page
• The Vonnegut Web
• Jon Stewart video interview with Vonnegut, The Daily Show, September 13, 2005
• Kurt Vonnegut Judges Modern Society National Public Radio Interview, January 23, 2006.
• The Paris Review Interview with Kurt Vonnegut
• Vonnegut on Cat’s Cradle
• Kurt Vonnegut Speaks with OSU Students
• 1981 audio interview of Kurt Vonnegut by Don Swaim of CBS Radio