{"id":200,"date":"2010-06-19T11:45:28","date_gmt":"2010-06-19T15:45:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bloggingsam.com\/?p=200"},"modified":"2016-01-23T19:21:27","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T23:21:27","slug":"if-we-could-make-war-backwards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bloggingsam.com\/?p=200","title":{"rendered":"If We Could Make War Backwards"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am currently reading Slaughterhouse-Five<\/strong> by Kurt Vonnegut.\u00a0 This passage was so good I’m going to post the whole thing:<\/p>\n

Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove.\u00a0 He had an hour to kill before the saucer [flying] came.\u00a0 He went into the living room, swinging the bottle [champagne] like a dinner bell, turned on the television.\u00a0 He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again.\u00a0 It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them.\u00a0 Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:<\/p>\n

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England.\u00a0 Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen.\u00a0 They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.<\/p>\n

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames.\u00a0 The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted them into the bellies of the planes.\u00a0 The containers were stored neatly in racks.\u00a0 The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes.\u00a0 They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes.\u00a0 But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair.\u00a0 Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.<\/p>\n

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the 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.\u00a0 Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work.\u00a0 the minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas.\u00a0 It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.<\/p>\n

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids.\u00a0 And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed.\u00a0 That wasn’t in the movie.\u00a0 Billy was extrapolating.\u00a0 Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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I am currently reading Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut.\u00a0 This passage was so good I’m going to post the whole thing: Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove.\u00a0 He had an hour to kill before the saucer [flying] came.\u00a0 He went into the living room, swinging the bottle [champagne] like a dinner bell, turned […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[83,24],"tags":[28],"class_list":["post-200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-social-commentary","tag-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloggingsam.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloggingsam.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloggingsam.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloggingsam.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloggingsam.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=200"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/bloggingsam.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3902,"href":"https:\/\/bloggingsam.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200\/revisions\/3902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloggingsam.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloggingsam.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloggingsam.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}