A Man Without a Country is by far one of the best, short-reads I've ever placed my eyes on. Kurt Vonnegut was such a masterful writer, it is too bad he is not here with us today to make blood shoot out of the eyes of people like Rush Limbaugh and Jeff Katz.
Literary criticism is not my strongest point, and I'm trying to improve. Below is a short essay I wrote a few weeks ago on the contrasting views of freedom found in two very different authors. It's not strictly related to the current fights, but it could make a nice jumping off point for beginning a conversation about what balance of freedom and equality we would like to see.
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Ever read Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5, then you're probably familiar with, "so it goes." It is something the Tralfamadorians say when someone dies. They have a fatalistic, almost determinist outlook on life. That there is no freewill, that we are bound by the constraints of time and history, and it is always the same.
