Veterans, Remembrance, Armistice Day and the Opium Wars. aka Happy Birthday Kurt Vonnegut!
Yesterday was Veterans Day in the US, Remembrance Day in the UK and once, a very long time ago, was Armistice Day all over the world. Oh, and it was Kurt Vonnegut’s birthday.
I’m in England these days and they a make a big deal about poppies, poppies being a symbol of death, specifically in war. They get very indignant about these symbols of theirs, putting up signs and wearing buttons that say things like, “if you are offended by my poppy get the fuck out of my country!” How similar they are to Americans, confusing symbols for reality and the map for the terrain. As a veteran myself, I’m not a big fan of these symbols. I leave the symbols to the symbol minded, ‘cause all the pretty slogans and icons can’t wipe the reality from my mind. When I see the poppies I’m just reminded of the Opium Wars, when the UK and US were the biggest drug dealers on the block and wiped out anyone who tried to get clean. Rehab is for quitters, and in that case quitters were gonna die.
So, tonight I’ll be celebrating Kurt Vonnegut’s birthday by discussing war, peace, poppies, veterans and music. Music is the best things that humans have come up with (sex, after all isn’t our invention, no matter what each new generation may think), so let’s lose ourselves in it for a while.
Tune in at 11pm GMT (6pm Eastern in the USA, Midnight in Western Europe) to KMRL Mojo Radio Live, and if I offend you (...then maybe you need to be offended...), if you agree, or just want to say hello come into the chat room and let me know.
“I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day.
When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War
were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another.
I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was
the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.
So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.
What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.
And all music is.”
Kurt Vonnegut
Breakfast of Champions (1973)
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