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Atrios has another excerpt from Slaughterhouse-Five:

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!

Amen.

Yesterday, I might have written what I believed — “Kurt Vonnegut is the greatest living American novelist” — and I don’t think I would have faced much of an argument. Oh, there might have been feeble peeps from here or there for Norman Mailer or Philip Roth or Gore Vidal, but nothing resembling a serious challenge.

Today, I don’t have the faintest idea who the greatest living American novelist is. “Kurt is up in heaven now.”

Today, I will write what I believe — “Kurt Vonnegut was the greatest American novelist of the 20th Century” — but that won’t go unchallenged. His books blow the doors off Hemingway’s, I’ll say that. His best work stands toe to toe and nose to nose with Steinbeck’s best, and his weaker stuff is a lot better than Steinbeck’s weaker stuff. But I guess you compare best to best, so I can only say this with complete confidence: “Vonnegut was one of the greatest American novelists of the 20th Century.”

This is silly, you know — comparing and ranking very different writers, trying to pick the one winner and champion, turning everything into a horse race. I feel stupid and pathetic, because what I really want to do is write something with just one percent of the grace and power of a single sentence in a Kurt Vonnegut book.

In the previous blog post, I said, “So it goes.” I look around on other blogs. Lots of people are saying “So it goes.” Those who have read Slaughterhouse-Five understand. To everyone else, it looks like a kind of secret handshake. I can’t explain it to you, either. Every sentence in a Vonnegut novel is part of a carefully woven fabric, gaining power and meaning from every other sentence. Not one word is wasted.

I avoided Vonnegut for years. I had heard that his writing was… well, different. At that time, there were some authors noted for their verbal stunt work and determination to boggle the reader’s mind and leave him feeling stupid. But Kurt Vonnegut wrote to communicate. He had something to say. He said it so well it boggled the mind. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Tralfamadorians were aliens who lived in the fourth dimension, who could see past, present and future all at once:

Billy Pilgrim says that the Universe does not look like a lot of bright little dots to the creatures from Tralfamadore. The creatures can see where each star has been and where it is going, so the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti. And Tralfamadorians don’t see human beings as two-legged creatures, either. They see them as great millipedes == “with babies’ legs at one end and old people’s legs at the other,” says Billy Pilgrim.

On a trip to distant Tralfamadore, Billy Pilgrim looks at some Tralfamadorian novels:

Billy couldn’t read Tralfamadorian, of course, but he could at least see how the books were laid out — in brief clumps of symbols separated by stars. Billy commented that the clumps might be telegrams.

“Exactly,” said the voice.

“They are telegrams?”

“There are no telegrams on Tralfamadore. But you’re right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message — describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”

Kurt Vonnegut is gone, and he is still here. The many marvelous moments remain.

Read the books.

Kurt Vonnegut has died.:

Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan.

So it goes.

He was the great American novelist.

I will try to say something appropriate later.

God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut.

Sometimes the only thing you can do is howl:

I’m sitting here trying to find the words I need to describe these emotions that I feel because I know how I feel. I know I’m not the only one who feels that way. And I know that the man — the person — the allegedly human being — responsible doesn’t have a single damn clue about what he’s doing to real people.

And I don’t think he’d care if he did.

He’s an active voice decider in the first person, but things only go wrong for him in the third person passive. He’s the one who’s right and anyone who disagrees is wrong, and he knows that’s the way it really is way deep down in his twisted little truthy gut. He’s right, the rest of us are wrong, so it’s fine to sneer at opponents and blame them for the things that he’s doing now.

And that’s why I read this morning that 15000 troops will be extended in Iraq. That’s why I read this morning that 13000 troops in National Guard and Reserve units that have deployed once already are being told that they’re going back into the box. And that’s why I read this morning that President George W. Bush said today that if Congress doesn’t do what he — George Bush — wants Congress to do, “some of our military families could wait longer for their loved ones to return from the front lines” and other military families “could see their loved ones headed back to war sooner than anticipated” and that “this is unacceptable.”

Yes, he really said that.

…

And this is where words leave me, and where emotions overwhelm me. People I know, people I love, are caught up in this madness, but this twisted little freak is acting like it’s a game. He’s standing up there, he’s ignoring his mistakes that got us there, he’s demanding that we ignore his mistakes and let him keep doing whatever the hell he wants because he’s the Decider-in-Chief, and real people, real families, are left twisting in the wind because we’re the leverage that he hopes will force Congress to bow to his royal will.

The writer’s wife is serving in Iraq now.

When I was a little kid, I loved all animated cartoons. It didn’t much matter whether they were any good. When advertisers started pushing Popeye macaroni — green spinach-flavored macaroni in the shape of Popeye characters — I pestered my mom until we got some.

Oh, it was terrible!

Maybe that’s why I stopped loving Popeye cartoons. Or maybe it was the crude rubber-limbed early animation, Olive Oyl’s grating whine, Popeye and Bluto’s inarticulate mutters and grunts, or the dim-witted, predictable stories. As I grew older, I still loved cartoons, but Popeye fell by the wayside.

Then, many years later, I saw three long color cartoons: Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor, Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves, and Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp. They were good — good enough that I’m having trouble now deciding whether to buy this forthcoming DVD of the first sixty Popeye cartoons.

Could it be that Popeye just went over my head? Were Popeye cartoons making serious points about the human condition, and I was just too immature to get them? Roy Zimmerman found something:

Nixon looks rational, Reagan looks fiscally responsible. Dan Quayle looks like a genius.

If it turns out Woody Woodpecker is deep, I’m in serious trouble.

Via Boing Boing, computer scientists are developing software to spot fake photos:

Hany Farid, a computer scientist at Dartmouth College … has created mathematical tools to determine whether a digital photograph was altered after being taken. His methods work so well that the Associated Press now asks him to scrutinize any photo that seems fishy.

“We’ve developed a bag of tricks,” Farid says. “Every time somebody tampers with a photograph, we try to understand what they did and how to detect it.”

…

[One] way to doctor an image is to piece together two separate photographs. For example, during the 2004 presidential campaign, an image surfaced on the Web showing John Kerry speaking with Jane Fonda at an anti-war demonstration in the 1960s, complete with an Associated Press insignia. Some veterans of the Vietnam War reacted with rage at seeing the presidential candidate sharing a stage with the controversial actress and anti-war activist. But the picture, it turned out, was a fake.

With computer software exposing faked photos, how will dishonest politicians stand a chance in future elections?

“Even after it was determined that it was a fake, people were still talking about Kerry at a war rally,” says Farid. “The power of the images stays with us.”

Oh. Guess the important thing is to get the image out there, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s real or fake. You can hear the Swift Boat crowd breathing a sigh of relief.

You can never get enough of what you don’t really need. — Harold Ramis, quoting “a very wise person” in an interview on the newly-released DVD of the 1967 movie, Bedazzled, with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.

Hillary doesn’t have a lock:

Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign announced Wednesday that it raised at least $25 million in the first quarter of 2007.

The total comes close to the $26 million raised by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign in the same time period and calls into question the New York Democrat’s status as her party’s front-runner in 2008.

Mystic prediction time: Hillary is out of the race before the first primaries.

There are plenty of Democrats who would prefer almost anybody but Hillary, for good reasons or bad.

Clinton was able to raise $26 million largely because she seemed like the inevitable candidate. But if Obama, who was just an Illinois state legislator a little over two years ago, can almost equal Clinton’s fundraising juggernaut, Hillary no longer looks inevitable. Those supporters who only want to be on-board with a winner — a substantial part of the Clinton constituency at this early stage of the game — are going to start looking at the other candidates. Watch for Clinton’s poll numbers to drop fairly significantly over the next few months.

Second mystic prediction: John Edwards will surge in the polls as supporters drift away from Hillary. This will be the first clear manifestation of the race issue in Obama’s candidacy — as Clinton’s fortunes fade, “pragmatists” will be looking for a credible alternative to Obama, fearing that the country isn’t ready for a black president.

I expect Edwards to be ahead of Clinton in the polls by the fourth of July. I make no prediction about Obama’s poll numbers.

If these predictions come true, remember you heard it here first.

If these predictions don’t come true, heh heh, it’s all a joke, see, about idiot pundits who make grand predictions based on the teeniest scraps of evidence. Boy, are those guys dumb, or what?

Cartoonist Don Asmussen may have explained why John McCain’s still running for president.

Tom Tomorrow shows who secretly runs America.

Ward Sutton considers past behavior to predict several right-wing reactions to Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer. (Warning: offensive language — but that’s the point.)

Mark Fiore on greenhouse gases: “Whatever you do, don’t do anything!“

Just when you think you’ve got a handle on the breadth and depth of stupidity in politicians, some politicians will step forward with a bold new idea and surprise you:

With little fanfare, the Canadian government recently introduced legislation that breaks with conventional trademark law and would grant the Vancouver [Olympic] organizing committee rights to “winter” and a long list of other common words, among them: “gold,” “silver,” “medals,” “sponsor,” “games,” “21st,” “2010,” as well as the name of the host city itself. The legislation would also give the committee special enforcement powers.

…

The law would also allow the organizing committee, a private group, to act like a government agency when it comes to enforcement. That means it would be able to obtain a court injunction without proving that an infringement of its trademark for, say, “winter games,” has caused it “undue harm.”

When some U.S. legislators demanded that french fries and french toast be called “freedom fries” and “freedom toast” after France wouldn’t support the invasion of Iraq, I believed they were setting a record for stupidity that would stand the test of time. But it’s very competitive out there in the world of political stupidity. I’d say this is an Olympic-class example, but I can’t afford the lawsuit.

My God — life! Who can understand even one little bit of it? — Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

Some folks at Harvard, apparently.

Warning: the following video may be educational. It’s an eight-minute animation of the inner workings of a cell, down to the molecular level. Unless this is your field, you might not understand it all. I didn’t, anyway.

Some people believe the intricacy and complexity of the internal mechanics of life force us to one inescapable conclusion: that life was formed by an intelligent designer. That leads to an inescapable question: where did the designer come from?

There’s a hoax email going around about an atheist who files a discrimination suit because religious people have all sorts of cool holidays and atheists don’t have any. The fictional judge says that atheists have April Fool’s Day, quoting Psalms: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.'”

John Wilkins thinks we may be onto something here:

Though this is legally and constitutionally false, and the judge would immediately be censured by a higher court, I actually think it has a germ of a good idea.

Let’s celebrate the foolishness of religious beliefs on April Fool’s Day. If you happen to be religious, celebrate the foolishness of all other religions that day. If you are agnostic, celebrate the foolishness of definite opinions about Gods. If you are Catholic, celebrate the foolishness of Protestants. If Protestant, of Catholics. Sunnis can celebrate the foolishness of Shiites, and vice versa. Mormons can celebrate the foolishness of all Christian religions, and everybody (I mean everybody) can celebrate the inane gawking train wreck stupidity of Scientology.

What a great idea! I know what I believe, and I’m certain that my beliefs are correct. For one day, each of us could revel shamelessly in our certainty, knowing that anyone who believes differently is some kind of idiot, at best.

Every other day of the year, while still feeling secure in our own beliefs, we’d have to accept other people and their right to their beliefs.

That could change everything.

As always, Bob Geiger has collected another good batch of political cartoons. The second cartoon, comparing Newt Gingrich and John Edwards on family values, is particularly illuminating.

Interesting comic on belief vs. reality.

A million people can call the mountains a fiction, yet it need not trouble you as you stand atop them.

But there are exceptions.

The Scientific Indian paid a visit to the Albert Einstein Memorial in Washington, D.C..

The quotes engraved on the bench on which Einstein sits:

As long as I have any choice in the matter, I shall live only in a country where civil liberty, tolerance, and equality of all citizens before the law prevail.

Joy and amazement of the beauty and grandeur of this world of which man can just form a faint notion …

The right to search for truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true.

Einstein knew that the world is not pure. The United States he lived in was deeply flawed, but he knew there were places in the world far worse than this place. He knew he might not be free to choose where to live.

How do you suppose he would feel about today’s America?