How Very Odd

Tonight I sat down and read Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night, which I picked up off of one of those wonderful used book tables you see on the street in New York. About halfway through, there's a bit where the protagonist, Howard Campbell, receives letters of support from various American Neo-Nazis after a popular white supremacist rag reports him living in destitute conditions. The odd part, and it's probably only odd to me, is that one of the letters is stated to have come from my hometown:

A man in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, asked me why I didn't get out of Jew York and come live in God's country.

It's not odd to me that someone living in Bartlesville would think that, in 1961 or now. Nothing human beings think surprises me anymore, really. But it is odd that I, a former Bartian (that's really what they call themselves) living in New York City, should find such a sentence in a book written twenty years before I was born. Especially a book that, for all its half-century of existence, is still so relevant to life in America today.

So it goes...