I Love You, Madame Librarian!

I certainly love my "Madame Librarian"...

--ryan




I Love You, Madame Librarian

By Kurt Vonnegut
August 6, 2004, www.rockrap.com


I, like probably most of you, have seen Michael Moore's
Fahrenheit 9/11. Its title is a parody of the title of Ray
Bradbury's great science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. This
temperature 451' Fahrenheit, is the combustion point,
incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero
of Bradbury's novel is a municipal worker whose job is
burning books.

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate
librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their
powerful political connections or their great wealth, who,
all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-
democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books
from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought
police the names of persons who have checked out those
titles.

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.

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.

The O'Reilly Factor.

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?


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