Kurt Vonnegut on Armistice Day

[jimboloco]

Kurt Vonnegut, from the foreward of Breakfast of Champions, Or Goodbye Blue Monday! (1973)

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.
So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.
What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.
And all music is.


3858 USDoD Killed in Iraq
Take the opportunity to call your member of Congress toll free:
1-800-828-0498
1-800-862-5530
1-800-833-6354
202-224-3121
(from an email vis Vets fer Paz)

[e_dog]

More War.

vote Republi-can.

[jimboloco]

i might get a speaking op at a local high school
mebby i will use yore motto
i don't think therefore i yam

[e_dog]

was he and Norman Mailer friend or enmies?

[jimboloco]

i wanted you to have the last word
otherwise will have to check it out

[Totenkopf]

I don't think Mailerski admired KV that much. KV while entertaining (at least Breakfast of Champions was, a bit), and quite liberal, was too crackerbarrel for most NY marxist sorts. There was some show where they bickered.