I’m still listening, Kurt. Still moved. (Photo from Wikipedia.)
When I write about something I’ve learned from the Baha’i system of knowledge and practice – or rather, in trying to understand it better – it sometimes appears at the Baha’i Teachings website. I also go there for small doses of perspective, wisdom and hope, and find them. David Langness is one of my favourite writers at BT, not least because on what Canucks call Remembrance Day, he posted a piece called “Veterans’ Day: Let’s Call It Armistice Day Again”. Although short, it was weighty, since Langness is himself a veteran of what the Vietnamese people don’t call the Vietnam War. Yes, and he also led off with a passage from Kurt Vonnegut’s 1973 Breakfast of Champions. Vonnegut is a hero to me.
I just re-read KV’s preface to that famous American novel. My vision blurred and I commenced breathing like a beat-up old machine. (This often happens when I read Vonnegut. He murders me, when I’m apparently supposed to laughing like a loon at his satire. ) He calls Breakfast a 50th-birthday present to himself, a mid-life attempt “to clear my head of all the junk in there….I think I am trying to make my head as empty as it was when I was born onto this damaged planet….I suspect that this is something most white Americans, and non-white Americans who imitate white Americans, should do…” (Sheesh. 1973!)
David Langness, in his argument for re-naming Veterans’ Day, goes on to cite his reasons: the growth of jingoism, hero-worship and militarism associated with November 11 in his country. “Perversely, we’ve turned the day into a recruiting tool for further war instead of a celebration of peace.” It’s well worth a read. But thanks to Mr. Langness, I’m pleasantly obsessing today over the incredible Kurt Vonnegut (how I miss him!) and these closing words of his preface to Breakfast of Champions. He explains why Armistice Day – from the Latin for “a cessation of arms” – is a holy concept that he will hang on to:
Never knew this. Thanks!
Thank you. I have thought for years that we spend that sacred day of peace glamourizing war and heroes. TV becomes filled with old heroic war movies. I was in the Canadian military under a mountain in North Bay, watching people try to figure out how to have a third world war so that a few people survive. We were never all that successful. I still get night terrors about those times knowing that people are still doing the same job somewhere. But the nature of war around the world has changed. There is no one enemy anymore. Nor one side good or the other bad. And while I watch school children indoctrinated into the glory of war, yet my Vietnam buddies told me they looked hard for that glory but never could find it. And many of them don’t partake of the rituals that encourage another generation to think about signing up — generally because they live hopeless lives in poverty. There was an amazing poster that came out in the 60’s that said: “What if they gave a war but nobody came?” It was on my wall for years, the idea being that people don’t sign up to the military simply because leaders don’t have the brains to find their way to peace. So yes, let’s teach the nature of peace and recall the stupidity of war.