Wednesday, November 11, 2009

GET A JOB LIKE VONNEGUT



This is a lecture Kurt Vonnegut gave at Albion Collage where he received an honorary doctorate in 2002. The lecture's title is "How to Get Job Like Mine." What a darkly comic, deadly serious, compassionate, pessimistic, radical, hopeful and hilarious collection of contradictions co-exist in this wise old man. A humanist who jettisoned all platitudes and phoniness, who wasn't afraid to call bullshit on false patriotism and military madness, this writer should have a statue built of him in every town square--but of course that's exactly the crap he detested. Too bad they make such boring people saints or this rumpled soul might have a chance. In this age of plastic infortainment, I miss his sense of wit and humanity. Read his books.

"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before... He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way."

- Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

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