Kurt Vonnegut, R.I.P.

We've lost a stentorian voice for sanity:

I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka “Christians,” and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or “PPs.”

To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. Read it! PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007

(h/t ThinkProgress and In These Times)

His book "Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death" gives contemporary echo to the Children's Crusade, a sad reflection on innocence, and idealism, and their destruction by the darker nature of man. To hear it in music, which Vonnegut would have loved, we have Sting's offering. But the 'men' in Washington have never read it, heard of it, listened to it, or felt it. So much the shame, so much the tragedy.