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.
Writer Kurt Vonnegut, after 80 years, still has the capacity to wonder about mundane matters.