Some of my friends on Facebook know that I have recently
embarked on a mission to reread the early-to-mid-career fiction of Kurt Vonnegut.
They may also know that I am currently reading his first novel, Player Piano, which was published more
than sixty years ago, in 1952. For those of you not familiar with the novel, I
provide a link to a brief Wikipedia synopsis here.
The basic premise of this futuristic piece of fiction is
that society has emerged, following “the War,” as so highly mechanized that
there is no longer any work for most citizens to do. Society is divided into an
elite class of managers and engineers, and everybody else. Those in the latter
category are employed, if at all, by the government -- either in the Army, or
in the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps, the workers for which are
derisively referred to as the “reeks and wrecks.” To my way of thinking, this
trend, recognized by Vonnegut 60-plus years ago, is a trend by which we are ever
more rapidly being swept along now. All you need do is consider our perpetual war, employing hundreds of thousands, and Obama's call for "shovel-ready" infrastructure reclamation jobs, designed to employ hundreds of thousands more.
If you have read the synopsis linked above, you will already know
who the character, the Reverend James J. Lasher is (if you have not read the
synopsis, please do so now.) Below, I want to quote some of the speeches -- delivered to the novel’s central character, Dr. Paul Proteus (a rising manager)
and Edward Finnerty (a disgruntled one) -- by which Vonnegut introduces Lasher to
the reader:
“When I had a congregation before the war, I used to tell
them that the life of their spirit in relation to God was the biggest thing in
their lives, and that their part in the economy was nothing by comparison. Now,
you people have engineered them out of their part in the economy, in the market
place, and they’re finding out--most of them--that what’s left is just about
zero.
[…] “For generations they’ve been built up to worship
competition and the market, productivity and economic usefulness, and the envy
of their fellow men--and boom!--it’s all yanked out from under them. They can’t
participate, can’t be useful any more.
[…] “You know--those ads about the American system, meaning
managers and engineers, that made America
great. When you finished one, you’d think the managers and engineers had given America
everything: forests, rivers, minerals, mountains, oil--the works.
[…] "This crusading spirit of the managers and engineers,
the idea of designing and manufacturing and distributing being sort of a holy
war: all that folklore was cooked up by public relations and advertising men
hired by managers and engineers to make big business popular in the old days,
which it certainly wasn’t in the beginning. Now, the engineers and managers
believe with all their hearts the glorious things their forebears hired people
to say about them. Yesterday’s snow job becomes today’s sermon.”
I have to credit Kurt Vonnegut with remarkable
foresight. The one thing he got wrong --
at least to this point in the novel -- is leaving out any consideration of the
banksters. In Vonnegut’s vision, there is no citizen who is not provided for by
the wealth created by the engineers and the managers. The "reeks and wrecks" may be
dispirited by feelings of uselessness, but they are not desperate due to cold
or hunger.
As things are currently shaking down, however, this is not
the case. Vonnegut -- most likely due to his extraordinarily good heart --
overestimated the goodness of American society; he didn’t foresee an America
where the overriding lust for profit by any means necessary would leave the
people not only useless, but also homeless and hungry -- if not incarcerated or
worse.
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