Kurt Vonnegut: Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler

[Guest guest]

From democraticunderground.com:

 

" Do unto others what you would have them do unto you. "

A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is

so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it

was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher,

five hundred years before there was that greatest and

most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.

 

<snip>

 

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us

never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in

their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be

posted in public buildings. And of course that's

Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand

that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be

posted anywhere.

 

" Blessed are the merciful " in a courtroom? " Blessed

are the peacemakers " in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

 

But I myself feel that our country, for whose

Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well

have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers.

Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened

instead is that it was taken over by means of the

sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'état

imaginable.

 

<snip>

 

was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary

reality TV show. I have one reality show that would

really make your hair stand on end: " C-Students from

Yale " .

 

George W Bush has gathered around him upper-crust

C-students who know no history or geography, plus

not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians,

and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic

personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart,

personable people who have no consciences.

 

To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly

respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has

appendicitis or athlete's foot. The classic medical

text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr Hervey

Cleckley, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the

Medical College of Georgia, published in 1941. Read

it!

 

<snip>

 

And what syndrome better describes so many executives

at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched

themselves while ruining their employees and investors

and country and who still feel as pure as the driven

snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them?

And they are waging a war that is making billionaires

out of millionaires, and trillionaires out of

billionaires, and they own television, and they

bankroll George Bush, and not because he's against gay

marriage.

 

So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in

our federal government, as though they were leaders

instead of sick. They have taken charge. They have

taken charge of communications and the schools, so we

might as well be Poland under occupation.

 

<snip>

 

Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.

What can be said to our young people, now that

psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons

without consciences, without senses of pity or shame,

have taken all the money in the treasuries of our

government and corporations, and made it all their

own?

 

http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,,1691370,00.html