Admittedly I live in a pretty culturally deprived region of the country. Southwest Missouri and The Ozarks are best known as the homeland of the expatriate "Beverly Hillbillies", host to the gallimaufry of corn-pone music theaters, pop culture rip-off, outlet malls, cheesy Christ-o outdoor melodramas and water-parks known as Branson. The World Home of "Precious Moments" is just a ways down Interstate 44. Thank God they located the Creation Museum in Kentucky...that moves the epicenter of schmaltz at least a few leagues to the East.
Since I began blogging people who've read me frequently ask why I don't flee to a bluer region of the country and I usually plead I have family here etc.
But the truth is I like a fight, and this squarehead has me fighting mad today.
The title gives me away but flip the page to find out why.
In an Op-ed piece yesterday morning in the local fishwrap, which I refuse to buy and which shouldn't have given this jerk any ink, he called the Kurt Vonnegut classic "Slaughterhouse Five" and Laurie Halse Anderson's "Speak" pornography.
Read a bit of this sleazeball if you can bear to...
In English, children are also required to read a book called "Slaughterhouse Five." This is a book that contains so much profane language, it would make a sailor blush with shame. The "f word" is plastered on almost every other page. The content ranges from naked men and women in cages together so that others can watch them having sex to God telling people that they better not mess with his loser, bum of a son, named Jesus Christ.
No one can deny Kurt V. has a wide vocabulary (and bagger is severely irony challenged), but when I first read this wonderful book at 15 years old I don't recall being shocked by it. Of ..ahem... coarse by then I'd already conversed with Holden Caulfield and Alexander Portnoy, I'd seen my President and others shot to death on TV in very nearly real time as well as bloody casualties from Vietnam on the evening news... so maybe I'm not the best judge of what is obscene and what is not; but like the man said I know it when I see it and am pretty sure that it swirled all around me at that time...
...but Kurt, Billy Pilgrim, Kilgore Trout and the all seeing and long suffering Tralfamadorians were, for the five or six days it probably took me to read the book, my friends and comforters. They taught me that tragedy was but to be expected and that grief could be endured. So it goes.
And Billy bequeathed to me two of the most beautiful paragraphs in letters, a monument to Vonnegut's stunning imagination... erected on rag paper:
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored nearly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the rack and shipped back to the United States, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous content into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anyone ever again.
The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.
I have not read Ms. Anderson's "Speak" but several (read many) of the women and educators that responded online had and I take it that that particular book is held in as much love and respect by them as I have for "Slaughterhouse". They took the idiot to task for this assessment of the novel:
One such book is called "Speak." They also watch the movie. This is a book about a very dysfunctional family. Schoolteachers are losers, adults are losers and the cheer-leading squad scores more than the football team. They have sex on Saturday night and then are goddesses at church on Sunday morning. The cheer squad also gets their group-rate abortions at prom time. As the main character in the book is alone with a boy who is touching her female parts, she makes the statement that this is what high school is supposed to feel like. The boy then rapes her on the next page. Actually, the book and movie both contain two rape scenes.
Follow the link on top if you can stomach reading more.
This knucklehead bagger managed to get "Slaughterhouse banned from the curriculum at a local High School. And the scary thing is the asshole teaches at our local publicly funded state college and home schools his own kids. So he mostly interested in what other peoples' kids can't be taught.
This guy represents the future if we don't raise hell against the baggers in the booth, in the media and on the streets.
A world where Billy Pilgrim is obscene and teen-age sex education is compared to Hustler Magazine is not a world I wish to live in. What say you?