Culture » August 6, 2004

I Love You, Madame Librarian

By Kurt Vonnegut

I, like probably most of you, have seen Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Its title is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury’s great science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. This temperature 451° Fahrenheit, is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury’s novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

And still on the subject of books: Our daily sources of news, papers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books can we find out what is really going on. I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published near the start of this humiliating, shameful blood-soaked year.

In case you haven’t noticed, and as a result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war lovers, with appallingly powerful weaponry and unopposed.

In case you haven’t noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were.

With good reason.

In case you haven’t noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanized millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound and kill ’em and torture ’em and imprison ’em all we want.

Piece of cake.

In case you haven’t noticed, we also dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.

Send ’em anywhere. Make ’em do anything.

Piece of cake.

The O’Reilly Factor.

So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and the Chicago-based magazine you are reading, In These Times.

Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed that there were weapons of mass destruction there.

Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn’t even seen World War I. War is now a form of TV entertainment. And what made WWI so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun. Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don’t you wish you could have something named after you?

Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now am tempted to give up on people too. And, as some of you may know, this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.

My last words? “Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.”

Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas!

Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.

What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without a sense of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and made it all their own?

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• Reader Comments

  This article is a merely a silly diatribe. I am very disappointed with the lack of anything that i can sink my cognitive teeth in.

  The election in Florda rigged? By virtually all recouning methods, Bush won. Time to get over the close call and move on!

  The US feared and hated as the Nazis? Did the Nazis remove brutal dictators and spend billons of marks rebuilding the terrorized country?

  The US dehumanizing millons of people? Where? If this is aimed at Iraq, it misses the mark by a lightyear!

  Linking Bush to Hitler via Christianity? Pure sleaze.

  All the resources (money) has been taken by “psychopathic personalities”?

  Is this really meant to be a serious article?

  (BTW - i am a fan of the wonderful fiction written by KV. Welcome to the Monkey House was terrific. Perhaps he should stick to what he knows best, fiction)

  Posted by ken on Aug 6, 2004 at 3:18 PM

  ken,

  you’re misinformed concerning the FL recount—take a look at <http://mediamatters.org/items/200407200008> under the “O’Reilly Lied” article.

  and you’re ignoring countless U.S. policies around the world which are indeed dehumanizing to native populations, including Iraq.  wouldn’t you call the death of @10,000 (conservative estimate) innocent civilians in Iraq through our use of military force dehumanizing?

  Posted by david on Aug 6, 2004 at 3:58 PM

  Ken,

  We should move on from the Florida elections the same way the rethuglicans should move on from the Clinton administration as the source of all our current problems. 

  And actually there are a lot of connections between Bush & Hitler namely through his grandpappy - look it up.

  Posted by Reed on Aug 6, 2004 at 4:07 PM

  People like Ken above really do believe anything you tell them. Ken was raised in an average household where sports heroes were deified and free thinking villified. In Ken’s house or leaders always have the best of intentions and the only way to be patriotic is to trust what our leaders tell us. In Ken’s house our founding fathers were terribly unpatriotic. Look at the way they dissented and the treason they were guilty of in declaring independence from their own county, England! And all over taxes on tea and stamps, which us patriots would never put up with! We the people are about as represented as our founding fathers ever were in the English government. That said, none of that may be true about Ken’s home, but it might as well be. By flawed recountng methods utilized in Florida, Bsh did win. By common sense and discretion Bush won the state of Florida like Hitler won WWII… he DIDN’T! Uh-oh, another Bush/Hitler refference. If you need more solid reasoning to link Bush to Hitler check out the amount of power that Bush siezed in the passing of the patriot act, which was never even read by congress before it was passed. More power for Bush than Hitler initially took for himself. His grandaddy made money off the holocaust too, look it up. From the nazi’s to the Saudis the Bush family loves to make low friends in high places. Just because your president calls himself a Christian, doesn’t mean that he acts like one. Even God implores you to check the person out that comes saying that he knows him. Even the devil was once thought beautiful in heaven, right? Even the devil can quote scripture for his own purpose. In the long run our occupation of Iraq has aided terorism and given the Islamic world more of a reason to be distrustful of us and hate us. We removed a brutal dictator only to bring civil unrest to peole whose lives, for the most part, had been fairly stable. We removed a dictator and imposed democracy on a country and people who obviously would rather have a theocracy, and now we’re frustrated that they don’t particularly want the ‘gift’ we’ve given them. The completely un-American and undemocratic practices that have been allowed by the American people during Bush’s fradulent presidency are unacceptable. It has gotten to the point where documenting and complaining about the goings-on of this adminstration could keep a million monkeys typing for a million years, and nothing as respectable or beautiful as Shakespeare would ever be produced! So if the respectable Mr. Vonnegut seems frustrated and ready to give up on the human race Ken, you may blame yourself and others like you. You sir, are in the business of sleaze.

  Posted by Ryan Conover on Aug 6, 2004 at 5:08 PM

  Please excuse the typos and misspellings, I sometimes forget to spell-check when I’m outraged.

  Posted by Ryan Conover on Aug 6, 2004 at 5:11 PM

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