So it goes
The madness will go on, of course, but the man who described it – and us – so well is no longer here to witness and remark on it.
He would have smiled, I’m sure, if he had read how the mighty Tyrannosaurus Rex was brought low (but he would not have been surprised.)
The man who survived the bombing of Dresden – would he have smiled ruefully if he’d heard some prelate proclaim that the silence of ‘Hitler’s pope’ was not really silence but a policy taken to avoid worsening the situation? Would Vonnegut have dared or even bothered to write, ‘Worsening: how exactly…?’ in the ashes of the Jews and the Roma, the gay and the disabled? Maybe he would just have shrugged and moved on to another tale of ordinary madness.
He would have liked, I think, the idea of thousands of Chinese officials, running through Beijing in a mad rush, trying to rid the city of thousands upon thousands of signs, that were so helpfully and yet so disastrously translated into English.
The man who wrote Welcome to the Monkey House would not have been surprised by anything the me, me, me generation would throw at him, from Vampire Sorority Babes to dysfunctional foxes, let loose in some built-for-TV hen-house.
It would be hard to predict in hindsight, what would have raised one of his hairy eye-brows higher: the news that the West had found yet another bogeyman or the story of the restaurant and the exploding sauce.
We’ll never know – and yes, as he would say, So it goes.
Call me sentimental though but I think I know he would have smiled if he’d read the story about Papa and his little Kraut. In his books, Vonnegut might not have specialized in happy endings but he did approve of lightning candles in the dark – and kindness, always that:
‘“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ “
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