An Echoed Reflection Moving On

Over the past couple days i have read 2 Kurt Vonnegut books, ‘Breakfast of Champions’ and ‘Slaughter House Five’. I first read ‘Breakfast of Champions’ which i found a bit vulgar. Then something in the news brought a word to my attention that i had forgotten about, even though i have been living it all my life; satiric. That event in the news that brought the satire back to my attention was that infamous cover of the New Yorker magazine. If you don’t know what was on the cover the news media called “tacky”, the cover featured Barack Obama and his wife as anti-american flag burning Muslims.

Excuse me if i am an off topic writer, but i have had a lot of caffeine and my television is always on.

I have grown interest in this way of thinking, perceiving the world as if we are all the same, that we are all machines. It is very possible that i do not completely understand Vonnegut’s writing. I have recently seen a movie that i felt more connected with than Vonnegut’s ‘Breakfast of Champions’. A movie that i felt was more American than ‘Breakfast of Champions’. This movie was ‘Gummo’ by Harmony Korine. ‘Gummo’ was truly wonderful because even though it was disturbing and disgusting, it was beautiful. For that reason i was really convinced that the way things were, was the way that everything was supposed to be.

Onto ‘Slaughter House Five’, the book is mainly based around the fire bombing on Dresden by the British and US air forces. I got the same numb feeling from this book as i did from ‘Breakfast of Champions’. That everything that happened in the war, just happened. Again, maybe i have misconstrued or misunderstood the book.

There were incidents in World War II that were much worse than Dresden. The Germans had claimed that Dresden was simply a cultural city. We now believe, whether true or not, that there was war production going on in Dresden. Then again, perhaps it was just a cultural city and that the allies felt that civilians were a arm of war worthy of killing. The numbers of how many died greatly very from when they first reported at 250,0000 to present day of 25,000- 40,000. We all know about the atrocities committed against the jews. Not many westerners know about the Raping of Nanking. Where the Japanese Raped around 20,000 Chinese infants, elderly women, and then the young women were sometimes forced into military prostitution or mutilated then killed after being gang raped. The Japanese have estimated the non-combative death toll in Nanking was around 300,000.

In the case of the atrocities against the Jews, Russians, Poles, Chinese, Indos and even the bombings on German cities and Japanese cities these things are simply as they are, atrocities. Nothing is justified in war, nothing will ever be. Killing is horrible, but we are killing machines.