May 18, 2004

• Maybe you’ve already seen this.  The full text is available on
  more than one website.  I first found it through an excerpt quoted
  on one Xanga site, then later found another quote on another Xanga
  site.  I just couldn’t resist picking out more than just a few of
  my own favorite words from it.  The author is Kurt Vonnegut, the
  title:
  Cold Turkey

  Eugene Debs, who
  died back in 1926, when I was only 4, ran 5 times as the Socialist
  Party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, 6 percent of the
  popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to
  say while campaigning:

  As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.
  
  As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it.
  As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

  Doesn’t anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools or health insurance for all?

  How about Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?

  Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.

  Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

  Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. …

  And so on.

  Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney stuff.

  For some reason,
  the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But,
  often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments
  be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I
  haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the
  Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

  “Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

  ————————-
  

  There’s more–a whole lot more.
  

  And what did the
  great British historian Edward Gibbon, 1737-1794 A.D., have to say
  about the human record so far? He said, “History is indeed little more
  than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.”

  The same can be said about this morning’s edition of the New York Times.

  The
  French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, who won a Nobel Prize for
  Literature in 1957, wrote, “There is but one truly serious
  philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”

  So there’s another barrel of laughs from literature. Camus died in an automobile accident. His dates? 1913-1960 A.D.

  Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible and The Charge of the Light Brigade.

  But I have to say
  this in defense of humankind: No matter in what era in history,
  including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got there. And, except for
  the Garden of Eden, there were already all these crazy games going on,
  which could make you act crazy, even if you weren’t crazy to begin
  with. Some of the games that were already going on when you got here
  were love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit
  cards, golf and girls’ basketball.

  Even crazier than
  golf, though, is modern American politics, where, thanks to TV and for
  the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human
  beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

  Actually, this
  same sort of thing happened to the people of England generations ago,
  and Sir William Gilbert, of the radical team of Gilbert and Sullivan,
  wrote these words for a song about it back then:

  I often think it’s comical
  How nature always does contrive
  That every boy and every gal
  That’s born into the world alive
  Is either a little Liberal
  Or else a little Conservative.

  Which one are you
  in this country? It’s practically a law of life that you have to be one
  or the other. If you aren’t one or the other, you might as well be a
  doughnut.

  If some of you still haven’t decided, I’ll make it easy for you.

  If you want to
  take my guns away from me, and you’re all for murdering fetuses, and
  love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them
  kitchen appliances at their showers, and you’re for the poor, you’re a
  liberal.

  If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you’re a conservative.

  What could be simpler?

  ————————-
  

  And all of that’s before he gets into the main point of his rant!
  Cold Turkey
  

  To go with the new campaign slogan, “Bush/Cheney in
  2004.  Why change horsemen in mid-Apocalypse?” there is a deck of
  “52 reasons to re-elect George Bush.”

  If there are three wild cards, I think that would make it 55, but who’s counting?  Here are 2 of the wild cards:

  

  

  • 1:34 pm
  • 7 Comments