Life is No Way To Treat An Animal
Today is Friday the 13th. This morning I learnt that Kurt Vonnegut, who came up with the title above, is dead. There is an obituary of sorts in the New York Times. It mentions his most famous novel, Slaughterhouse Five, but glosses over the fact the book is about killing - British and American killing - of human beings, men, women, children, babies. So it goes.
We are probably in for a lot more killing in the near future. It seems only a trickle away before the United States orchestrates an attack on Iran. Will you look from the side?. It seems almost impossible not to, which is, of course, the kind of impotence Blair and Bush and Co are happy with. Surely, if we believe in the notion of war crimes then we should all be making citizen’s arrests now!
Anyway, here is a quote to leave you with:
‘What are you?’ Trout asked the boy scornfully. ‘Some kind of gutless wonder?’This, too was the title of a book by Trout, The Gutless Wonder. It was about a robot who had bad breath, who became popular after his halitosis was cured. But what made the story remarkable, since it was written in 1932, was that it predicted the widespread use of burning jellied gasoline on human beings.It was dropped on them from airplanes. Robots did the dropping. They had no conscience, and no circuits which would allow them to imagine what was happening to the people on the ground.
Trout’s leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on, and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. But then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to the human race.