So It Goes

Your humble scribe learned with sadness today of the death of author Kurt Vonnegut, an eloquent, original, irreverent giant of modern literature. Of the many literary inventions that pepper his work, some of my favourites I think come from the tenets of Bokononism as described in Cat's Cradle.

Specifically, the notions of the karass (a group of people who, often unknowingly, are working together to do God's will) and the granfalloon (a false karass, or a group of people who think they have a connection that doesn't exist - Vonnegut used the example of "hoosiers") seem almost prescient in the age of blogging, YouTube, and Facebook, but in reality they represent a testament into Vonnegut's insight into the human condition. As long as we've been around we've simultaneously sought to define our individual places in the world, and regularly misunderstood our individual roles in the grand scheme of things.

Take, for instance, the difference between a group of people who join a Simpsons Facebook group, or follow the same hockey team, versus an invisible network of bloggers who might help effect a sweeping political or social change on the other side of the world.

Makes you think.

In other sad news, veteran character actor Roscoe Lee Browne died today as well. I liked him best in The Cowboys with John Wayne. He played a cattle trail cook named Jebediah Nightlinger. Just before the climactic gunfight, he is about to be lynched by Bruce Dern and his gang. With the rope around his neck, he asks for a moment to make his peace, and offers this prayer in his inimitable baritone voice:

"I regret trifling with married women, I'm thoroughly ashamed at cheating at cards, I deplore my occasional departures from the truth, Forgive me for taking your name in vain, my Saturday drunkenness, my Sunday Sloth. Above all, forgive me for the men I've killed in anger, and those I am about to... "