Kurt Vonnegut got out while the getting out was good. Oh, sure, it wasn’t his choice to go when he did, but you’ve got to hand it to him for not having to see the things he feared most come to term – when Mother Earth just shook us from her pelt like the fleas and ticks we are, when our gas-hungry bellies had finally turned on us to the point of no return, our greediness consumed us like whales taking in their daily allotment of krill, when we’d officially made the biggest mess that could be made of a planet. When he appeared on “Real Time With Bill Maher” in September of 2005, just after his last book A Man Without A Country was released in hardcover, Vonnegut slurred his words slightly, but was adamant about his disdain for what we’d all had a hand in doing to our environment and with the wars. When he passed away in April, it was interesting to read all of the obituaries cling to the phrase, “So it goes.” It puts a nice bow on everything, the line does and it was served up so easily with death coming in and out of his stories so often. It was also interesting to see how little space the biggest news magazines and newspapers gave to a writer who did more important work than he’s given credit for. I sure fear the amount of copy that Nicholas Sparks and Mitch Albom will warrant when they kick the bucket. We’re likely to choke on it all. Vonnegut’s words rolled like conversational marbles. He got off his chest what he needed to with humor and ease. When he came to my college – the University of Iowa, the home of the famed Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where he once taught and where he began work on his classic Slaughterhouse Five, Or The Children’s Crusade, A Duty-Dance With Death — many years ago, the interest was massive. Big rooms were filled with students and residents seated on the floor, with his speech pumping in on public address speakers since not everyone could fit into the gigantic room in which he was standing. He spoke of how sexy it was to lick an envelope, amongst other things that night. It seems appropriate on Memorial Day, when gas prices are at the inexcusably highest level they’ve ever been in the tumultuous and disastrous history of man and when the inexcusable war in Iraq continues to be lost by a man who should one day be tried as a war criminal, to remember Vonnegut in a greater way than with a proper, but shorthand obituary. We should re-read his words (some are provided below). His disappointment should be our own. His rancor should be familiar, but damn if it isn’t. Here’s the best section of text from Slaughterhouse-Five. It is encouraging.

_”Billy was working on his second letter when the first letter was published. The second letter started out like this: The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here in Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When a Tralfamodorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is, ‘So it goes.’”

Kurt Vonnegut on Bill Maher’s Show