I Love You, Madame Librarian
Kurt Vonnegut expresses admiration for one of the last promising places in America for people to feel: libraries and the people who work there.
In These Times Editors
Kurt Vonnegut’s wry perspective turned deeply bleak after the American invasion of Iraq. “In case you haven’t noticed,” he wrote, “we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were. With good reason.” He lamented the undemocratic nature of the 2000 presidential election, warmongering politicians and a media ecosystem disinterested in rigorous coverage.
But Vonnegut found hope in books and heaped praise on librarians, who he described as the true bearers of democracy, dedicated professionals amid anti-democratic bullying and censorship. In Vonnegut’s words: “I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and the Chicago-based magazine you are reading.”
In 2004, Kurt Vonnegut wrote:
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.
The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
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.
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?
