I’d Just As Soon Be A Rattlesnake

pfiore8 writes this morning in her essay God loves you and, btw, sex is filthy… about the dangerous disease-like spread of religious fundamentalist fanaticism through evangelical christianity (uncapitalized purposely, btw) in the body politic, the government and the military since the wackjobs installed George Bush in the WH.

…the crises we face in this country and the world are symptoms of a power structure gone wrong. Way wrong.



Theocrats are foot soldiers of the corporatists, a relationship that delivers a one-two punch. Social control satiates theocrats, while corporatists run everything else. And they all want it run brutally. Until the only thing left for us is the desperate hope that God will save us in the next life… as long as we subscribe to certain behaviors in this one. What a fucking set up.

But this is a problem that has been growing for much longer. Last April 2007, one of the most prolific and insightful social commentators I’ve ever had the pleasure to read passed away, and the world lost one of it’s great literary masters and treasures, in my opinion.

Kurt Vonnegut had much to say about religious fanaticism and it’s power to corrupt and pervert in his writings.

Up in the sky with Philip K. Dick, another of my favorite authors, the two of them – Vonnegut and Dick – have all eternity now to come up with the ultimate novel. The one that explains everything. It’ll be nice to have some good books waiting when I get there.

I’ve only read Slaughterhouse Five. Time to read the rest.

Rest in peace, Mr. Vonnegut. Thanks for being you.

“I know of very few people,” Vonnegut writes, “who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren.” Later he writes this epitaph for the Earth: “The good Earth – we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.”

       “How do humanists feel about Jesus? I say of Jesus, as all humanists do, ‘If what he said is good, and so much of it is absolutely beautiful, what does it matter if he was God or not?’

       “But if Christ hadn’t delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn’t want to be a human being.

       “I’d just as soon be a rattlesnake.”

       “…I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened instead is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable.”

   Kurt blames many of our problems on a drug:

       “Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn’t the TV news is it? Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.”

(Hat tip to David Swanson)



   

Rosewater was on the next bed, reading, and Billy drew him into the conversation, asked him what he was reading this time.

   So Rosewater told him. It was The Gospel from Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space, shaped very much like a Tralfamadorian, by the way. The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.

   But the Gospels actually taught this:

   Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected. So it goes.

   The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn’t look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again:

   Oh boy – they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!

   And that thought had a brother: “There are right people to lynch.” Who? People not well connected. So it goes.

   The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels.

   So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn’t possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that, too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.

   And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!

   Billy’s fiancee had finished her Three Musketeers candy bar. Now she was eating a Milky Way.

   “Forget books,” said Rosewater, throwing that particular book under his bed. “The hell with ’em.”

   “That sounded like an interesting one,” said Valencia.

   “Jesus-if Kilgore Trout could only write!” Rosewater exclaimed. He had a point: Kilgore Trout’s unpopularity was deserved. His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good.

Via Atrios (Hat tip to Squeaky)

77 comments

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    • Edger on March 9, 2008 at 17:59
      Author

    Though they would dispute that… I’m sure.

  1. or anything, but one of the breakthroughs came for me when I gave up on the whole idea of a transcendent “god” out there in the first place. Its with that belief that we start the whole “dominance over” hierarchical set-up that winds up putting certain people (or certain kinds of people) in a position to tell others what to do.  

  2. Snakes have great sex, by the way (if you like it in groups!) . . . and they don’t pay for it, furtively, in cheap motel rooms.

  3. My Country Awake

    Where the mind is without fear and the head held high;

    Where knowledge is free;

    Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

    Where words come out from the depth of truth;

    Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

    Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

    Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening thought and action;

    Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

    by Rabindranath Tagore

  4. We are preparing to lament the death of the 4,000th American in Iraq, while largely ignoring the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

    WWKD?

    What would Kilgore do?

  5. http://www.scl.cc/home.php

    I have been passing that one around the net for some time now.  Today I find testimony from a expert who has studied US government media manipulation starting during WWI.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v

    How come then, why is the Buddist Bible huge by comparison to the Christian Bible.

    • Edger on March 9, 2008 at 23:36
      Author

    for all your comments here today. Sorry to be so unresponsive lately. My wireless connection is s-l-o-w-e-r than molasses in January, and I’m w-a-i-t-i-n-g for a faster connection to be installed.

    Arrrgghh… Somebody try to wake me up when the page loads, will you please?

    😉

    • kj on March 10, 2008 at 02:55

    here, but i put a link on NL’s essay about therapy for ex-jidadists from Mishma’s blog today… sorta fascinating in an almost creepy but maybe not but probably is very creepy but it has art therapy! sort of way…

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/worl

    • Edger on March 10, 2008 at 03:31
      Author

    last year, after Kurt Vonnegut passed away….

    As a tribute to Kurt Vonnegut, the literary icon who passed away April 11, 2007, NOW proudly shares one of his last broadcast television interviews. On our October 7, 2005 program, NOW Host David Brancaccio interviews Vonnegut about his life and the current state of American democracy. With his classic wit, the legendary author of CAT’S CRADLE and SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE delivers some choice words for our parties, our system, and our president.

    For more information about this episode of NOW, and to see the entire interview visit http://www.pbs.org/now/arts/vonnegut…. .



    • kj on March 10, 2008 at 03:34

    back to the root.  back to the ceremonies. back to having a hand in creation.

    • kj on March 10, 2008 at 03:38

    colorful dreams

  6. Up close & personal with a Diamondback,

    I had knowledge of this snake for 10years. I had relocated it down to our woodpile. My wife almost picked it up thinking it was one of my hats the dog carried down to the field. She came back & got me so I could shoot it with my cam.

    Taken inside strike range. I`ve dealt with many rattlers & know their phenomenal speed, but also when they will & might not strike. I took about 50 shots

  7. After a stupid neighbor killed it & was strutting around like a drunk hero, I made this image for the loss of one of my teachers.

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