Chamblee54

A facebook friend announced that Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born ninety years ago today. This would be four years after the end of the war to end all wars. Many of you know the rest of that story.
When you mention Kurt Vonnegut, someone will say “and so it goes”. Lately, PG has gotten into debunking famous sayings. There is a simple test involving wikiquote. You copy a persons entry into a word document, and do a search.
When you do this search for “and so it goes”, the little window says “search key not found”. When you narrow the search to “goes”, you get several results. “If I’d been born in Germany, I suppose I would have been a Nazi, bopping Jews and gypsies and Poles around, leaving boots sticking out of snowbanks, warming myself with my secretly virtuous insides. So it goes.”
“When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “So it goes.”
“Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles away from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes. And everyday my government gives me a count of corpses created by the military service in Vietnam. So it goes. My father died many years ago now–of natural causes. So it goes. He was a sweet man. He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust.”
And is a coordinating conjunction. It joins things in a sentence, whether they want to be joined or not. Tralfamadorians do not see the need to waste and on a dead person.
I Write Like says that this text is written like Kurt Vonnegut. This is not surprising, considering that half of it is quotes from Mr. Vonnegut. Pictures are from The Library of Congress.