God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian
Kurt Vonnegut
Foreword by Neil Gaiman

Most Likely to be Shoplifted – Eight or nine years ago a clerk in the Book Cellar told me Kurt Vonnegut’s books were kept behind the counter because they’re the books most likely to be shoplifted. I hope that remains true today. I recently re-read this gem on a flight back home from San Francisco – and it so makes me want to visit the new Vonnegut museum in Indianapolis. Such vision, such talent, such clarity. A few examples:

“As I have used it here, ‘humanist’ is nothing more supernatural than a handy synonym for ‘good citizenship and common decency.’”

“I myself say that out loud at times of easy, natural bliss: ‘If this isn’t nice, what is?’ Perhaps others can also make use of that heirloom from Uncle Alex. I find it really cheers me up to keep score out loud that way.”

“I congratulated him [John Brown] on what he’d said on his way to be hanged before a gleeful, jeering throng of white folks. I quote: ‘This is a beautiful country.’ In only five words, he had somehow encapsulated the full horror of the most hideous legal atrocities committed by a civilized nation until the Holocaust.”

Quoting an imagined encounter in Heaven with Clarence Darrow: “’The presence of those cameras finally acknowledges,’ he said to me, ‘that justice systems anywhere, anytime, have never cared whether justice was achieved or not. Like Roman games, justice systems are ways for unjust governments – and there is no other sort of government – to be enormously entertaining with real lives at stake.’”

Quoting an imagined encounter in Heaven with Eugene Victor Debs: “’I thanked him for words of his, which I quote again and again in lectures: ‘As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.’ He asked me how those words were received here on Earth in America nowadays. I said they were ridiculed. ‘People snicker and snort,’ I said. He asked what our fastest growing industry was. ‘The building of prisons,” I said.”