Vonnegut Dead at 84
And so it goes. The old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls is gone.
An honest voice in an absurd world.
In his final years, Kurt Vonnegut's prognosis for humanity became even bleaker than the dark observations in his novels.
Here's a quotation from an article in Rolling Stone this past summer:
"Vonnegut's Apocalypse" by Douglas Brinkley
"I'm Jeremiah, and I'm not talking about God being mad at us," novelist Kurt Vonnegut says with a straight face, gazing out the parlor windows of his Manhattan brownstone. "I'm talking about us killing the planet as a life-support system with gasoline. What's going to happen is, very soon, we're going to run out of petroleum, and everything depends on petroleum. And there go the school buses. There go the fire engines. The food trucks will come to a halt. This is the end of the world. We've become far too dependent on hydrocarbons, and it's going to suddenly dry up. You talk about the gluttonous Roaring Twenties. That was nothing. We're crazy, going crazy, about petroleum. It's a drug like crack cocaine. Of course, the lunatic fringe of Christianity is welcoming the end of the world as the rapture. So I'm Jeremiah. It's going to have to stop. I'm sorry."
...
Later, remembering his hyperagitation about global warming, I telephoned him at his Long Island summer cottage, curious about whether he saw Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth. "I know what it's all about," he scoffed. "I don't need any more persuasion." Not satisfied with his answer, I pressed him to expand, wondering if he had any advice for young people who want to join the increasingly vocal environmental movement. "There is nothing they can do," he bleakly answered. "It's over, my friend. The game is lost."
Rest in Peace? Not quite appropriate for Vonnegut, a clear-headed atheist. Perhaps just Ciao, Aloha, Adios, Goodbye! Congratulations on getting out of here.