It’s somewhat surprising how little segue is deemed necessary, in America’s letters to the editor sections, to bash the president or the pope. On the death of Kurt Vonnegut, Ivan Wolfson from Riverside explained:

Vonnegut’s novels explored, often with humor, the inexhaustible ability of humans, as individuals, governments and corporations, through their greed, thoughtlessness, stupidity and plain cruelty, to cause misery and destruction.

What could follow more naturally from the annunciation of humans’ greed, thoughtlessness, stupidity, and plain cruelty than the following?

I imagine his reaction would have been the same, as was mine, had he read the only other headline on the page with his obituary: “Pope says evolution not proven.”

I suppose it would be fruitless to note that the Pope Benedict’s statement appears to have been more that the broad historical claims of evolution can’t be proven, in the laboratory sense, within the context of his larger argument that:

The question is not to either make a decision for a creationism that fundamentally excludes science, or for an evolutionary theory that covers over its own gaps and does not want to see the questions that reach beyond the methodological possibilities of natural science … I find it important to underline that the theory of evolution implies questions that must be assigned to philosophy and which themselves lead beyond the realms of science.

Although, it might be surmisable that Mr. Vonnegut would have found fodder in the notion that we ought to trust the global media to properly handle such a subtle thing as context when it comes to matters of religion.