Kurt Vonnegut is gone.
My epitaph for him follows.
As will we all, eventually.
(So it goes…)
Mistah Kurt wrote:
“…the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of Germany.”
Imagine.
Try to picture the size of that greed, that vanity and cruelty.
Now blow it up hundreds of times larger and give it propaganda capabilities of which Goebbels could only dream and weapons of which NO ONE could conceive at the time.
That’s us, brother.
That’s us.
A successful Nazi Germany.
A Reich that has lasted for 60+ years.
Off and on.
Mostly on.
How many people on the face of this earth have had their lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed, vanity and cruelty of the AMERICAN Reich? (“Reich”. A word that translates from German to English as “richly”. Yup. The Half Century Of Living Richly. At the expense of 90% of the rest of the world’s population. Now about to come to an end.)
A Reich that used economic blitzkriegs backed up by a spy system that made the Gestapo look like amateurs and the eternal threat of a nuclear Armageddon…or at the very least a glass parking lot constructed by nuclear contractors… parked on a sea bottom somewhere right off of whatever coast dared to oppose it.
If every action has an equal and opposite reaction and we have outstripped Hitler’s wildest paranoid fantasies with a cold-blooded Anglo-Saxon Protestant efficiency…what Dresden does the universe have in store for us?
Learn to pray, my friends.
Learn to pray.
Because we are all in this foxhole together.
There WAS a universal draft.
And we all serve in the army of America.
One way or another.
Bet on it.
Mr. Vonnegut…
Rest in peace, good hearted man.
Rest in peace, brother.
So it goes.
Say hello to Sam Clemens for me, if you get the chance.
Ambrose Bierce too, if you run into him.
And Mistah Conrad, too.
See ya soon enough.
See ya somewhere.
Later…
AG