I Love You, Madame Librarian

[Guest guest]

http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/mobile/article/i_love_you_madame_librarian/

 

I Love You, Madame Librarian

By Kurt Vonnegut

 

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?