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• Sunday, May 11, 2008 06:38 PM

  Oh, come on, say it --

  Rowan Berkeley --

  1) Orwell : absolutely cynical and sinister, and self-brainwashed, and brainwashed by others, and, to make it worse, he knew it. This is as good a description of living in hell as any, psychologically speaking, but then again, some of us choose this life. I mean, you are aware, aren't you, that he worked for british wartime broadcasting, and I shall leave that phrase a little vague.

  Orwell was an expert on propaganda because he was a propagandist.

  'Nuff said.

  (4) Vonnegut, well, look, the man is a comic novelist, a buffoon. His highly public spasms of disgust at mansinhumanitytoman are just spasms. US novelists nowadays do not inspire respect, generally, for intellectual rigor, integrity, or anything else - at last not the ones who get lionised. What that says about US pop lit is obvious, and it is not intended to imply anything about novelists outside th epop lionised circuits, since I don't claim to know about them, or to have much time to find out.

  Vonnegut was a satirist -- which means one cannot be certain he was saying what he actually believed. In addition, he was an elitist in that he believed his views superior to opposing views. And he disparaged the human race -- hardly a new motif or conceit -- because it was a fashionably elitist position to take in order to impress such as the rebellious teen seeking negative identity-forming affirmations.

  He was, to put it mildly, no Mark Twain -- who was genuinely humane and humble. And who, in disparaging the human race, and unlike Vonnegut, included himself.

  —JNagarya Read JNagarya's other letters
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