Monday, November 21, 2005

Screedblog

Lileks is not happy with Kurt Vonnegut's recent comments. Read the whole thing, but this part made me laugh out loud:

"They are dying for their own self-respect," he said. "It's a terrible thing to deprive someone of their self-respect. It's like your culture is nothing, your race is nothing, you're nothing."

Personally, I think it's a worse thing to deprive someone of their own self-life. While I grant that people who go to a wedding party in a Jordon hotel are just asking for it (Insert obligatory come-back about the US mistakenly bombing a northern Iraqi wedding party here) you have to admit that it's better to be alive, even if you have to deal with VOA satellite transmissions telling you your race is nothing -- so worthless, in fact, that it deserves a democracy like Iowans and Britons and Japanese. Oh, we could just nuke your cities and take your oil, but we hate you so much we're going to stay here and bleed and force your warring factions to hold subcommittee meetings on the constitutional process. It's bored our people to tears; now it's your turn.

1 comment:

Stephen said...

You forgot to mention the best lines:
"I should note that Mr. Vonnegut’s comments, reported in the Australian, were made while touring to promote a collection of anti-Bush essays, and as such all attempts to refute them is intended to suppress his freedom of speech. It goes without saying he will be spending his senior years naked in a cell, fighting rats for a scrap of bread, writing brave quatrains on the wall with a shoelace-tip dipped in rat’s blood, awakened daily at 4 AM with bright lights and the national anthem. Such is life in Chimpsuit McHallihitler’s America. But I press on; this dissent isn’t going to suppress itself. "