I tried to read "Player Piano" early in high school, when my really smart friends said it was brilliant. I couldn't get through it (although it is one of his most liner stories). But in 1974 I read "Breakfast of Champions", a fictional story that was an autobiography of a (fictional) Science Fiction writer who was turning 50, by Kurt Vonnegut who wrote Science Fiction and was also turning 50.
Kurt Vonnegut taught me that seeing the absurd side of things was sometimes necessary in order to escape 'conventional wisdom' (for example, what if Sadam Hussein is keeping out inspectors just to piss people off, not because he has weapons of mass destruction) but that seeing the absurd side was not, in and of itself, any better or worse than seeing the normal side of things. It only provides a different perspective, not a different reality.
Kurt V also taught me that sometimes the only possible response to the heaping piles of lies and bile that authorities spoon-feed us (and I include all stripes of authorities here, this isn't a diatribe against Bush) is to laugh at it. Nothing pisses off the powers that be than to take them non-seriously. It is a lesson that he had to will himself to re-learn over and over through the years.
You know, ladies and germs, there was a time, not so long ago, that lasted years and years where my favorite authors were people that commented on the social and political landscape of the day - but refused to check out of that landscape. They soldiered on for what they felt right, in the only way they could. And they were the V's. Vonnegut, Vidal and Varley.
Well, Vidal has worked himself into such a lather about the latest Republican administrations that he can no longer follow his own advice and make quiet changes. He now prefers the outrageous and ineffective rants. John Varley has moved from allegorical Science Fiction as real life has become more absurd and scary than anything he could write.
And now Kurt Vonnegut has died.
I am comforted by the though that he often wrote of living "unstuck" in time. Where yesterday, tomorrow and today come in no particular order. And so perhaps he died years ago, and will play ball tomorrow as a 12 year old in his beloved Ohio.
God Bless You Mr. Rosewater.