Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.Īnd what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like “ Poo-tee-weet?” (Kurt Vonnegut, “One,” Slaughterhouse-Five, 19) Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Same, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. “And I say to Sam now: “Same- here’s the book.” “I tell you what,” I said, “I’ll call it “The Children’s Crusade.’”” (Kurt Vonnegut, “One,” Slaughterhouse-Five, 14) And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.”… And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. “You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. “But you’re not going to write it that way, are you.” This wasn’t a question. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood. “”You were just babies in the war- like the ones upstairs!” I told him that was one of the things I learning in college after the war.” (Kurt Vonnegut, “One,” Slaughterhouse-Five, 8) Shortly before my father died, he said to me, “You know- you never wrote a story with a villain in it.” They may be teaching that still.Īnother thing they taught was that nobody was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no different between anybody. I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. I went to the University of Chicago for a while after the Second World War. The people I meet when I walk down the street,Īnd so on to infinity.” (Kurt Vonnegut, “One,” Slaughterhouse-Five, 2-3) Admitting and describing our collective bafflement-our unstuckness-might be the most humane response.“I think of how useless the Dresden part of my memory has been, and yet how tempting Dresden has been to write about, and I am reminded of the famous limerick:Īnd I’m reminded, too, of the song that goes: But its characters, and the rest of us by extension, are still stunted and limping as a result. The play, like the novel, doesn't try to decide whether the violence it describes was ultimately virtuous or cannibalistic or both. Vonnegut, played by Jim Gall with a little more bombast than is strictly necessary, promises to dedicate the book to her and call it The Children's Crusade. "You were just babies in the war," Moseley says with restrained anger. When the wife of Vonnegut's old war buddy, played with stately indignation by Moseley, sees the writer come to visit, she's quietly outraged. But the tragedy-within-the-tragedy of Slaughterhouse-Five is that not even they, the ostensible lords of that era, had the slightest idea what they were doing. The story is about Euro American men stumbling their way through the 20th century, a moment when they ruled (and perhaps ruined) the world. Though women are ostensibly marginal to the plot-its bit parts include a daughter, some wives, and the porn star-actors Jocelyn Maher, Sydney Tucker, and Eleanor Moseley fill out the ensemble with a bewildered honesty that gives Slaughterhouse-Five its real ballast. Cobey Mandarino plays the high-school-teacher-turned-soldier Edgar Derby with a sense of gravitas and responsibility for his fellow soldiers that makes his execution all the more tragic after the frivolous theft of a teapot in the smoking ruins of Dresden. The 14-member cast performs with the same plainspoken, almost naive grace. ![]() It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. ![]() Touchingly, it was mainly the women who did this work. the steel cylinders were taken from their racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of their planes. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames.
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