More evidence that BDS is a real mental disorder

It's not enough any more to merely hate President Bush.  I mean, that's just so yesterday.  And it's never been enough—not even nearly—to merely dissent from his policies as Civilized Human Beings Who Think They Have a Better Idea (which idea rarely seems to surface, or even matter) might do.  No, in order to be counted among the nouveau élite nowadays one must befriend—no, praise, almost worship—anyone whom the president calls an enemy.  And, of course, it's neither unfashionable nor uncommon to completely lose your mind in the process. 

The truth, actually, is that losing your mind is a prerequisite.  Kinda helps you to deal with that pesky cognitive dissonance that normally gives people with healthy minds pause to reconsider.

Lastango at Daily Pundit (via LGF) points us to a Weekend Australian article by David Nason in which Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. is first called "one of the greatest living US writers," then is indulged to wax eloquent anent the virtues of being a terrorist, especially a suicide bomber.

Now, I think it's a safe assumption, though an assumption nonetheless, that Vonnegut's mind may once have been capable of rational, critical, even moral thinking.  He served in the 106th Infantry Division in WWII.  His short story "Harrison Bergeron" made quite an impact on me as a teenager, and still today is a valuable allegory illustrating the dangers and evils of forced egalitarianism.  This does seem genuinely odd coming from someone who was "deeply influenced by early socialist labor leaders" (cf. his Wikipedia link), but I can't claim that cognitive dissonance might not have been a lifelong handicap for him.

A few gems from the Weekend Australian story:

Vonnegut said it was "sweet and honourable" to die for what you believe in, and rejected the idea that terrorists were motivated by twisted religious beliefs.

That is, unless you're dying for America, in which case you're a baby-killing, torture-loving stormtrooper.  And the religious beliefs that motivate terrorists are hardly twisted—they're perfectly straightforward and easily understood by anyone, right?  Kill the infidels!

"They are dying for their own self-respect," he said. "It's a terrible thing to deprive someone of their self-respect. It's like your culture is nothing, your race is nothing, you're nothing."

Riiiiight.

If our enemies are "nothing," it's hardly us who made them so.  Their own culture has done a commendable job of doing that.  (Yes, I am making the shocking claim that some cultures are indeed better than others.)  Self-respect can neither be given nor taken away by others;  it must be earned, by oneself, for oneself, and no one can deprive you of it without your consent.  Not even us.

Asked if he thought of terrorists as soldiers, Vonnegut, a decorated World War II veteran, said: "I regard them as very brave people, yes."

As one DP commenter mentions, there were very brave soldiers in the Nazi and Imperial Japanese armies, too.

He equated the actions of suicide bombers with US president Harry Truman's 1945 decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

That one truly baffles me.

On the Iraq war, he said: "What George Bush and his gang did not realise was that people fight back."

He got that one exactly backwards;  it was bin Laden and his gang who didn't realize that we would fight back.

Vonnegut suggested suicide bombers must feel an "amazing high". He said: "You would know death is going to be painless, so the anticipation - it must be an amazing high."

He was a darling of the intellectual left since writing Slaughterhouse Five in 1969, so why do I associate BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) with him, you ask?

[S]ince Mr Bush was elected, Vonnegut's criticisms of US policy have become more and more impassioned.

In 2002, he was widely criticised for saying there was too much talk about the 9/11 attacks and not enough about "the crooks on Wall Street and in big corporations", whose conduct had been more destructive.

The following year he wrote that the US was hated around the world "because our corporations have been the principal deliverers and imposers of new technologies and economic schemes that have wrecked the self-respect, the cultures of men, women and children in so many other societies".

But Vonnegut's latest comments are likely to make many people wonder if old age has finally caught up with a grand old man of American letters.

The reasons for our hatred "around the world" are, of course, much simpler than Elite Intellectuals can generally comprehend, namely 1) base envy and 2) simply being non-Muslims.  But such reasons, easily supported by knowledge of human nature and the words and actions of Islamists themselves, must be discarded in favor of "our corporations," which "have been the principal deliverers and imposers of new technologies and economic schemes that have wrecked the self-respect, the cultures of men, women and children in so many other societies".

You know, that actually sounds a lot like plain old envy to me.

Comments

[DaveG]

He got that one exactly backwards; it was bin Laden and his gang who didn't realize that we would fight back.
Nailed it!