CampusProgress.org | Posts with the tag Kurt Vonnegut

Posts with the tag Kurt Vonnegut

By J. Seago - Apr 12th, 2007 at 4:12 pm EDT

“Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.

Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes.

And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.”

Those words were among the concluding lines of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five,” finished within days of Robert Kennedy’s assassination.

Every college student in the 1960’s and 1970’s was at least familiar with Vonnegut, if not within an arm’s reach of one of his 14 novels at all times.

From the NYT:

Mr. Vonnegut shed the label of science fiction writer with “Slaughterhouse-Five.” It tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, an infantry scout (as Mr. Vonnegut was), who discovers the horror of war. “You know — we’ve had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves,” an English colonel says in the book. “We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. My God, my God — I said to myself, ‘It’s the Children’s Crusade.’

Kurt Vonnegut died Wednesday night in Manhattan at the age of 84.

So it goes.

Mail to a Friend | Link | Comments (0)

Posts By Month

2007

January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December

Posts

Please remember that Campus Progress' terms of use do not allow promoting or endorsing any particular political party or candidate for office. Posts or comments that do this will be deleted.