A profoundly South African sign that commuters pass as they shuffle onto Metrorail trains. Kurt Vonnegut (11 November 1922-11 April 2007) would have approved. The American novelist and social commentator contemplated the mess that dangerous weapons make during his involvement in the Second World War. Held as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Vonnegut took shelter in a meat factory during the infamous bombing of the German city in 1945. He emerged to find piles of rubble and death.
Vonnegut later drew on his experience in Germany to create a novel entitled Slaughterhouse-Five. An exploded narrative that skips backwards and forwards in time, the book is laced with science fiction and provides a gloomy picture of war. Published in 1969, it was embraced by readers who were puzzled and drained by America’s Vietnam blundering. Around the time it hit the shelves, polls in the United States indicated that only 33% of the nation supported pursuing a complete military victory.
Vonnegut concocted a distinctive brand of hopeful pessimism in his literary contributions to Planet Earth. His final work, an exhortation of the Bush administration entitled Man Without a Country, sees him soaring the lofty peaks of intelligent insubordination. “What can be said to our young people,” he writes, “now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations, and made it all their own?”
