By Staff
Every Dogwood Fine Arts Festival since the first one in 1993 has been anti-climactic.
That's because the first visiting author happened to be humanist Kurt Vonnegut Jr., my literary John Lennon.
Some others worthy of chiseling on my Mount Writemore followed – John Updike, Joseph Heller and Norman Mailer – but I only succumbed to blatant hero worship with Vonnegut.
He autographed "Slaughterhouse-Five," his 1969 science fiction anti-war novel inspired by his capture by the Nazis and Feb. 13, 1945, survival of the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, which rendered him a Purple-Hearted pacifist.
"If it weren't for World War II, I'd now be the garden editor of The Indianapolis Star," he says.
There was a sense of urgency in bringing him to Dowagiac because how long could he last coughing from smoking constantly? "A fire at one end and a fool at the other."
He'll be 84 in November and he's still smoking, according to the piece about him splashed across the pages of the Aug. 24 Rolling Stone.
When I interviewed him, Vonnegut was writing "Timequake," which did not exactly become the book we discussed.
And so it goes, he might say.
I remember that phone exchange for him lecturing me against cynicism.
Eager for college life, I devoted the summer of 1975 to reading a Chicago Tribune list of essential campus books, including "Slaughterhouse-Five" and 1973's "Breakfast of Champions," his self-indulgent, plotless 50th birthday present to himself.
I was hooked.
Being the youngest child in his family made him funny because a joke is the only way a child can enter into adult conversation.
The thrust of Douglas Brinkley's article is that the son and grandson of Indianapolis architects survived his mother's 1944 suicide to write some of the funniest, darkest novels of our time, like the apocalyptic Ice-Nine of the futuristic "Cat's Cradle" in 1963, has finally been broken by the second Bush administration.
Cat's Cradle gave us Vonnegut's invented religion, Bokononism, and the great line, "All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies."
He is often categorized as a black humorist mocking the absurdity of modern life or, in 1952's Player Piano, the "nostalgic future" in which his target is always the society around him as he wrote.
"I'm talking about us killing the planet as a life-support system with gasoline … very soon, we're going to run out of 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."
"A Man Without a Country," a slight, but powerful volume of essays, proved a surprise bestseller last year, spending more than eight weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and selling more than 250,000 copies.
"Vonnegut is that rare literary figure who never stopped being cool," Brinkley says of the man who has puffed Pall Mall cancer sticks since he was 12 and threatens to sue the manufacturer because it promised on the package to kill him and hasn't delivered.
Vonnegut "longs for the days of impassioned voices for the downtrodden like FDR, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr."
"Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by honest research and excellent scholarship and investigative reporting. They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard," says Vonnegut, who studied chemistry at Cornell University.
Vonnegut says, "I wish Nixon were president," and regards President Bush as a "phony Christian," quoting Shakespeare: "The devil can cite Scripture for his (own) purpose."
Music affords him some solace.
Music "makes practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without it. Even military bands, although I am a pacifist, always cheer me up … The function of the artist is to make people like life better than they have before. When I've been asked if I've ever seen that done, I say, 'Yes, the Beatles did it.' "
Quips, quotes and qulunkers: "Compare what (Gov. Jennifer Granholm) inherited (from the Engler administration) to what Dick DeVos inherited."
– U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., in Niles Aug. 18
"(The Daily Show and The Colbert Report) get a lot more (top political guests) than I do – which I wear as a badge of honor. I think my show is a more threatening one, for politicians … Not to be conceited about it, but the audience wants to hear what I have to say. They kind of know what Al Gore's going to say … If it comes to choosing between doing what people always tell me they love about the show, which is pulling no punches, or pulling punches so I can have Al Gore or Bill Clinton on, I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing. And those guys can go places where they won't be asked a difficult question."
– Bill Maher
Married in real life: "The Daily Show" correspondents Samantha Bee and Jason Jones.
They welcomed daughter Piper in January.
Western Michigan University's board of trustees fired Judith I. Bailey as president Aug. 15 for allegedly failing to adequately address enrollment declines and rising costs.
Enrollment fell 15 percent during her term, which began July 1, 2003. Eight months ago the board extended her contract through June 30, 2009. Her annual salary was $269,100.
The government tried to reassure airline travelers Aug. 15 that X-raying shoes at security checkpoints is a reliable way to detect improvised bombs – a claim contradicted by a Department of Homeland Security study.
Sept. 7: A congressional committee schedules a hearing to scrutinize BP management of the nation's largest oil field.
Warrantless spying unconstitutional: A federal judge in Detroit, U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, in a 43-page opinion, ruled Aug. 17 that the Bush administration's warrantless eavesdropping program is unconstitutional and should be shut down.
"There are no hereditary kings in America and no power not created by the Constitution," she wrote.
Taylor said the program, which President Bush secretly approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, violates the rights of free speech and privacy and far exceeds his authority.
The administration says the surveillance program targets telephone calls and e-mails between the United States and suspected terrorists overseas.
The Justice Department immediately appealed the ruling.
The Bush administration is free to keep eavesdropping without warrants pending the Sept. 7 appeals court hearing.
Anniversary, the birth of television inventor Philo T. Farnsworth, 100. On Sept. 7, 1927, the 21-year-old, self-taught genius from Idaho transmitted the image of a horizontal line to a receiver in the next room of his San Francisco lab.
Obit: Bob Thaves, creator of the comic strip "Frank and Ernest," died Aug. 1 of respiratory failure at Little Company of Mary Hospital in Torrance, Calif. He was 81. More than 3,100 newspapers, including the Daily News, carry "Frank and Ernest worldwide, meaning more than 25 million people read it a day.
Thaves spent decades as an industrial psychology consultant before becoming a nationally syndicated cartoonist in 1972.
I interviewed him one time.