Vonnegut

"My goal as a writer is to catch people before they become generals and senators and presidents and poison their minds with humanity. Encourage them to make a better world."

Kurt Vonnegut, this century's Mark Twain, has passed away. It would be impossible to underestimate the influence of Vonnegut on youth culture since the publication of Cats Cradle in 1963, and though he was held up by the Baby Boomers, he came from an earlier generation. His war was not Vietnam but World War II.

Captured by the Germans and interred in Dresden in 1944 he witnessed first hand the Allied firebombing of the city and watched helpless as 30,000 people burned to death in the targeted city centre as the Allies ignored the industrial hinterland of Dresden, bent on exacting revenge for the London blitz on the civilian population.

He did not need Vietnam to see that the strong terrorize the weak, his view of war changed irrevocably on those fateful three days in February 1945 as the stench of thirty thousand burning corpses ravaged his prison cell.

But those dark days and his expansive imagination gave Vonnegut a darkly satirical writing style that perfectly captured the mood in the 1960's when student unrest and the Left sought to bring an end to the Vietnam conflict.

His books were read by students and the establishment alike, for he advocated humanity and his world weary gentleness was a result of first hand knowledge of the horrors of war. Whether blond-haired, blue-eyed, all-American boy, or black-haired, brown-eyed Vietnam boy - dead is dead and a hole in the ground is a hole in the ground.

Vonnegut, being a humanist, didn't believe in an afterlife. But people believed in him. And the reverberations of his death will be felt across the globe even in places like Tralee, where I came across a memorial to the greatest writer of the past half century. It was nice to see.

"When I think about my own death, I don't console myself with the idea that my descendants and my books and all that will live on. Anybody with any sense knows that the whole solar system will go up like a celluloid collar, by and by. I honestly believe, though, that we are wrong to think that moments go away, never to be seen again. This moment and every moment lasts forever."

Mr. Vonnegut died on a recent Wednesday, at the grand old age of 84. He made a better world. But people die. And so it goes.