Lileks on Vonnegut

As an addendum to my post on Kurt Vonnegut, here are some excerpts from a blog post by James Lileks (although it's not normally advisable to quote Lileks incompletely-because the flow of his prose is often so crucial to the full impact of his writing- I thought these particular points worth sharing) :

“…all it would take is a few book editors in a few magazines to say “to hell with the old coot; I have a cousin serving in Iraq, and I’ll be goddamned if I give this hairy old fool a pass because he wrote a book my brother loved in college. What’s the matter with us? Do we excuse everything because it kicks Bush in the nuts?”

“Vonnegut is an addled old fool whose brain has rusted in the antiestablishment default position for so long he cannot distinguish between suicide bombers and people who stage a sit-in at a Woolworth’s counter.”

“…seems to think that suicide bombings literally happen in a vacuum, an unpopulated space where the bombers just pop like soap bubbles. It may be painless for them – alas – but it is not painless for the victims.”

“Personally, I think it’s a worse thing to deprive someone of their own self-life.” (NOTE: Vonnegut accused the US of depriving the Islamofascist terrorists of their self-respect. Here's his quote: "They are dying for their own self-respect," he said. "It's a terrible thing to deprive someone of their self-respect.")


With tongue firmly-planted in cheek: “It goes without saying he (Vonnegut) will be spending his senior years naked in a cell, fighting rats for a scrap of bread, writing brave quatrains on the wall with a shoelace-tip dipped in rat’s blood, awakened daily at 4 AM with bright lights and the national anthem. Such is life in Chimpsuit McHaillihitler’s America.”

Thanks for the usual stellar wordsmith work, James.

Brad