Like any decent American, I am ashamed and embarrassed by my country.I spent decades thinking we were the good guys until Bush and crew came and ruined us, turned us into a bunch of heavy-handed fratboys with no consciences or consequences.

Except maybe not. I wasn’t around for Vietnam, but Kurt Vonngut, Jr. sure was, and his words on American torture in Vietnam are as true and heartbreaking today as they were when he wrote them 36 years ago. I first read the following piece in “Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons,” a marvelous collection of Vonnegut’s essays and speeches.

Originally published in the New York Times in 1971, “Torture and Blubber” mirrors my disgust with our country and a sadness for the entire human race — a disappointment I thought was new and mildly fashionable.

The piece is short and well worth your time — in its entirety after the jump …

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This is from my notebook, written on the subway this morning:

There is a man standing next to me reading a paperback. One of his hands is gripping a pole and the other is holding the book with the cover and pages folded back, the front and back covers mashed together in a horrific forced kiss.

This constitutes abuse in my book. It’s the book equivalent of a mother yanking a child’s arm outside a bus station bathroom.

It is all that I can do not to snatch the book out of this guy’s hands and show him the correct way to hold it: With one cover and chunk of pages per hand, the subway pole crooked in an elbow. Alternately, he could hold the book with ring, middle and index fingers along the spine for support, his thumb and pinkie holding the pages open.

But instead he does neither. He is a fat man riding a gasping sway-backed pony towards a great Golden Corral on the horizon, blindly bending the tool that takes him where he wants to be and screw the consequences.

Now he’s sitting next to me, this intellectual barbarian, still bending his book without even needing a free hand for the pole. What an asshole. This is a man who wipes his hands on the curtains, who hawks and spits into empty lockers and plucks roses made of frosting off uncut wedding cakes with his bare and grubby fingers.

Books are not to be treated this way. It’s an abuse. Some of you out there may be closet book-benders — and you may be thinking “Simmer down, Simmermon, paperbacks are meant to be folded. They can take it.”

You people better stay in your grotty little closet around me, is all I have to say. Is it right throw a cat across the room repeatedly just because he’ll probably land on his feet? Is it right to repeatedly tie an octopus’s arms in knots just because they’re soft and flexible?

A book is more than a content delivery mechanism. It’s not a single-use syringe that you just uncork, squeeze once and ditch. It’s more than a CD, more than the plastic fork that carries your lunch to your mouth. Maybe it’s just me, but I have fixations on certain editions, certain printings of my favorite books. And while I’m far from a book collector — I’m really, really hard on physical objects, actually — I think that books ought to be treated with a little dignity, regardless of how many hands you have free.

SF Bay Guardian Screencap
Originally uploaded by chinese_fashion.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian has covered the Virginia Tech shooting with minimal thought and maximum bullshit in a move that is making me re-think my whole situation as a knee-jerk liberal.

This post by Tim Redmond blames the massacre on the availability of handguns in the USA, particularly Virginia. It goes on to say that George Bush is partially responsible — quite a deductive leap. I’m from Virginia, and I’m no Bush fan. And it’s true that Virginia has no real gun laws of note. They’re really more like implied rules of thumb. Many of my good friends in Richmond own enough weaponry to stave off a zombie uprising. I’m morally opposed to that and will be until the first zombie bite makes the news.

Another hard-hitting post relates the killing to Virginia gun laws (again), then pirouettes like a hippo on roller skates to reveal the real shocker: Virginia’s pretty ass-backward when it come to gay rights, too! Next, Redmond might reveal that Virginia openly condoned slavery less than 200 years ago.

If you read between the lines here, you’d think that Virginia itself ordered Cho Seung Hui to shoot those kids. Thompson’s points are essentially: Bush sucks and Virginia has its priorities backwards when it comes to guns and civil rights. While this is all true, it’s hardly news. The Weekly freaking Reader shows more insight.

If a Bizarro George Bush had outlawed the sale of all handguns when he was first elected, there would still be enough in homes, barns and attics all over the country to cause some serious problems. This country is full of people who think that they have a God-given right to own weaponry. Like it or not, most Americans associate available weaponry with freedom. I think those people are wrong, but I am outnumbered in my home state … and my opponents are armed.

And even if there were no guns, the killer could have built a fertilizer bomb, driven his car over folks on the way to class or used an ax. Affordable, available guns are a big problem in America, but they’re far from the only factor in this week’s shooting. Timothy McVeigh didn’t use guns, and neither did Lizzie Borden. The Unabomber hand-made his bomb parts. Something about our culture breeds people sick enough to kill at random, and when Americans are that desperate and driven, we’ll figure something out. Always have and always will. I daresay that’s the real problem here.

Jack Thompson and Dr. Phil have already blamed video games for this massacre, and some assmouthed blogger is using the situation to bash Richard Dawkins.. Just because I agree politically with the SFBG doesnt mean they get a free pass: using our nations’ latest tragedy to score cheap political points less than 24 hours later is just wrong.

It’s gross enough watching TV pundits ask shellshocked students “why do you think this happened?” or “who do you blame,” desperately fanning any spark of emotion into something good for the camera. And don’t even get me started on that maggot-filled gasbag Nancy Grace.

Adequacy.org summarizes the rapid politicizing of tragedy pretty well:

Many people will use this terrible tragedy as an excuse to put through a political agenda other than my own. This tawdry abuse of human suffering for political gain sickens me to the core of my being. Those people who have different political views from me ought to be ashamed of themselves for thinking of cheap partisan point-scoring at a time like this. In any case, what this tragedy really shows us is that, so far from putting into practice political views other than my own, it is precisely my political agenda which ought to be advanced.

Blogging is hard — even if you’re not good at it. If it’s easy, it’s not worth doing. It can be a grind, just grunting posts out to stay relevant and keep your audience. Every blogger knows how important it is to jump on a story and be a part of the conversation — but in this case, the Guardian’s serving up some pretty thin gruel. There’s no news here on either side, no insight - just the same old song.

For now, this situation isn’t about politics. It’s about compassion, understanding, support and regret. Any media that is not expressly news-related that comments on this situation should show gravity, depth, and copious emotional intelligence … or enough sense to shut the fuck up. We’re close enough to a major election and the spin will come soon enough, followed by the lawsuits. Right now, we’re all shocked and stunned and hurt. The only thing we can do as media and human beings is to tell the stories and let the tears flow.