Many people feel that the anti-war movement on Viet was a serious part in 
getting the US power to admit defeat; Kurt I agree with everything you say 
except that that anit-war was a cream pie.

At 11:47 AM 1/29/03 -0500, you wrote:
>http://inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=38_0_4_0
>
>Kurt Vonnegut vs. the !&#*!@
>
>By Joel Bleifuss
>
>In November, Kurt Vonnegut turned 80. He published his first novel,
>Player Piano, in 1952 at the age of 29. Since then he has written 13
>others, including Slaughterhouse Five, which stands as one of the pre-
>eminent anti-war novels of the 20th century.
>As war against Iraq looms, I asked Vonnegut, a reader and supporter of
>this magazine, to weigh in. Vonnegut is an American socialist in the
>tradition of Eugene Victor Debs, a fellow Hoosier whom he likes to
>quote: “As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there
>is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in
>prison, I am not free.”
>
>—Joel Bleifuss
>
>Q: You have lived through World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Reagan wars,
>Desert Storm, the Balkan wars and now this coming war in Iraq. What has
>changed, and what has remained the same?
>
>A: One thing which has not changed is that none of us, no matter what
>continent or island or ice cap, asked to be born in the first place,
>and that even somebody as old as I am, which is 80, only just got here.
>There were already all these games going on when I got here. … An apt
>motto for any polity anywhere, to put on its state seal or currency or
>whatever, might be this quotation from the late baseball manager Casey
>Stengel, who was addressing a team of losing professional
>athletes: “Can’t anybody here play this game?”
>
>My daughter Lily, for an example close to home, who has just turned 20,
>finds herself—as does George W. Bush, himself a kid—an heir to a
>shockingly recent history of human slavery, to an AIDS epidemic and to
>nuclear submarines slumbering on the floors of fjords in Iceland and
>elsewhere, crews prepared at a moment’s notice to turn industrial
>quantities of men, women and children into radioactive soot and bone
>meal by means of rockets and H-bomb warheads. And to the choice between
>liberalism or conservatism and on and on.
>
>What is radically new in 2003 is that my daughter, along with our
>president and Saddam Hussein and on and on, has inherited technologies
>whose byproducts, whether in war or peace, are rapidly destroying the
>whole planet as a breathable, drinkable system for supporting life of
>any kind. Human beings, past and present, have trashed the joint.
>
>Q: Based on what you’ve read and seen in the media, what is not being
>said in the mainstream press about President Bush’s policies and the
>impending war in Iraq?
>
>A: That they are nonsense.
>
>Q: My feeling from talking to readers and friends is that many people
>are beginning to despair. Do you think that we’ve lost reason to hope?
>
>A: 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, though, is
>that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy,
>Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of
>the federal government are 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.”
>
>To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical
>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. Read it! PPs are presentable, they know full well the
>suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They
>cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!
>
>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 so many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal
>government, as though they were leaders instead of sick.
>
>What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now
>in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they
>are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot
>care what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the
>reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care!
>Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-
>dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In
>These Times, and kiss my ass!
>
>Q: How have you gotten involved in the anti-war movement? And how would
>you compare the movement against a war in Iraq with the anti-war
>movement of the Vietnam era?
>
>A: When it became obvious what a dumb and cruel and spiritually and
>financially and militarily ruinous mistake our war in Vietnam was,
>every artist worth a damn in this country, every serious writer,
>painter, stand-up comedian, musician, actor and actress, you name it,
>came out against the thing. We formed what might be described as a
>laser beam of protest, with everybody aimed in the same direction,
>focused and intense. This weapon proved to have the power of a banana-
>cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-
>feet high.
>
>And so it is with anti-war protests in the present day. Then as now, TV
>did not like anti-war protesters, nor any other sort of protesters,
>unless they rioted. Now, as then, on account of TV, the right of
>citizens to peaceably assemble, and petition their government for a
>redress of grievances, “ain’t worth a pitcher of warm spit,” as the
>saying goes.
>
>Q: As a writer and artist, have you noticed any difference between how
>the cultural leaders of the past and the cultural leaders of today view
>their responsibility to society?
>
>A: Responsibility to which society? To Nazi Germany? To the Stalinist
>Soviet Union? What about responsibility to humanity in general? And
>leaders in what particular cultural activity? I guess you mean the fine
>arts. I hope you mean the fine arts. ... Anybody practicing the fine
>art of composing music, no matter how cynical or greedy or scared,
>still can’t help serving all humanity. Music makes practically
>everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without it. Even
>military bands, although I am a pacifist, always cheer me up.
>
>But that is the power of ear candy. The creation of such a universal
>confection for the eye, by means of printed poetry or fiction or
>history or essays or memoirs and so on, isn’t possible. Literature is
>by definition opinionated. It is bound to provoke the arguments in many
>quarters, not excluding the hometown or even the family of the author.
>Any ink-on-paper author can only hope at best to seem responsible to
>small groups or like-minded people somewhere. He or she might as well
>have given an interview to the editor of a small-circulation
>publication.
>
>Maybe we can talk about the responsibilities to their societies of
>architects and sculptors and painters another time. And I will say
>this: TV drama, although not yet classified as fine art, has on
>occasion performed marvelous services for Americans who want us to be
>less paranoid, to be fairer and more merciful. M.A.S.H. and Law and
>Order, to name only two shows, have been stunning masterpieces in that
>regard.
>
>Q: That said, do you have any ideas for a really scary reality TV show?
>
>A: "C students from Yale." It would stand your hair on end.
>
>Q: What targets would you consider fair game for a satirist today?
>
>A: Assholes.
>
>
>Joel Bleifuss is the editor of In These Times, where he has worked as a
>investigative reporter, columnist and editor since 1986. Bleifuss has
>had more stories on Project Censored's annual list of the “10 Most
>Censored Stories” than any other journalist.
>
>http://vonnegut.com