Readings: Kurt Vonnegut's Deadeye Dick

Just now, I read the last page of Kurt Vonnegut’s strange and depressing novel, Deadeye Dick. The characters are all very real, in that not one of them has at his or her core any essentially redeeming quality. Unless, that is, one is able to see a futile and ephemeral existence, in itself, as a redeeming quality. This morning, anyway, I cannot.

I characterize the novel as depressing largely because I recognize myself in it. I am depressing—to me anyway. I noted a couple of passages from the novel which illustrate what I’m talking about here:

p. 208  We all see our lives as stories, it seems to me, and I am convinced that psychologists and sociologists and historians and so on would find it useful to acknowledge that. If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended, and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.

            […]

p. 209  This could be true of nations, too. Nations might think of themselves as stories, and the stories end, but life goes on. Maybe my own country’s life as a story ended after the Second World War, when it was the richest and most powerful nation on earth, when it was going to ensure peace and justice everywhere, since it alone had the atom bomb.

Deadeye Dick was published in 1982.  And, like Vonnegut’s earlier novels, it treats of shadowy evils that give rise to various national paranoias, which, seemingly, only small clusters of Americans seem to notice or fret about at any given time.

A plot element in Deadeye Dick is that the narrator’s hometown is mysteriously destroyed by a neutron bomb. The official story is that this was an accident that occurred when a bomb being trucked from some unknown Point A to an unnamed Point B was somehow triggered as it passed through the fictional Midland City, Ohio.

This official version of the total destruction of the citizens of Midland City is accepted as gospel by almost everybody. There is a small organization of activist farmers from Southwestern Ohio, who aren’t buying the government’s explanation of the tragedy. This group is passing out leaflets near the perimeter of the blast zone, the gist of the message of which is: 

p. 231  …that the United States of America was now ruled, evidently, by a small clique of power brokers who believed that most Americans were so boring and ungifted and small time that they could be slain by the tens of thousands without inspiring any long-term regrets on the part of anyone.

And there you have Vonnegut’s prescient description of the paranoiac musings of the “Truthers” with regard to the destruction of the World Trade Center and the lives of several thousand Americans working in the buildings that fell.

And there is more: Midland City, the buildings of which are all still standing, for that is how the neutron bomb is designed to work, is now surrounded by barbed wire, mine fields, and fences—a stockade patrolled by the military and off-limits to all citizens, unless accompanied by soldiers. The rumor is that the city will be used as a dwelling place for refugees from Haiti and other such depressed nations. One of the pamphlet-distributing farmers expresses this opinion:

p. 233-234   “They aim to bring slavery back… They never gave up on it… These slaves aren’t going to be Americans. They’re going to come by the boatload from Haiti and Jamaica and places like that… Do you honestly believe that fence is ever coming down?”

These passages immediately brought to my mind currently circulating speculations about the fenced and very hush-hush “FEMA Camps” supposedly being constructed across the U.S.  What also comes to mind is the very obvious militarization of the municipal police forces (think Watertown, MA during the dragnet following the Boston Marathon incident) and the huge amounts of ammunition being bought up by federal authorities, but not being sent to the war zones.

The farmer, when questioned about just who these people are, says that they have no name:

“They don’t want us to know their name, so they don’t have a name. You can’t fight back against something that don’t have a name.”

And so it goes.

Readings: from Breakfast of Champions - a meta-strategy of fiction

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On page 209 (a little more than 2/3 of the way through) of the first hardback edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Breakfast of Champions, he reveals, while speaking as the author--presumably as Kurt Vonnegut--via the ongoing meta-narrative threaded amongst the various subplots, his vision of the connections between fiction, social culture, and history:

            As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.

            Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.

            And so on.

            Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.

            If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.

            It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.

It is hard to determine just how embedded was the authorial tongue in the narrative cheek when “the writer” (Vonnegut?) chose those words to describe the technique used in the composition of Breakfast of Champions. It is easier today to see the effects of story-telling on actual behavior through the media of TV, film, and now, especially, in video games. But these are all the offspring of the story book, so Vonnegut’s subjective viewpoint, even if over-simplified, has a certain plausibility, I think.  

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Readings: from Slaughterhouse-Five

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Howard W. Campbell, Jr., the central character of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Mother Night, is an American, raised in Germany, who during WWII worked for the Nazis as a propagandist, delivering radio messages which also contained coded messages (undetected by the Germans)  which gave valuable information to the allied forces. Below is an excerpt from a Campbell monograph, quoted in Vonnegut’s subsequent WWII novel, Slaughterhouse-Five:

            “America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, “It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.” It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand—glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

            “Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.

            “Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves. Once this is understood, the disagreeable behavior of American enlisted men in German [prisoner of war] prisons ceases to be a mystery.”

Vonnegut presents Howard W. Campbell, Jr. as a highly intelligent man. We might do well, therefore, to consider the plausibility of his words.

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Readings: from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

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The following is an excerpt from a letter, written by Eliot Rosewater, President, Rosewater Foundation, and meant for his successor in that privileged position. The letter was triple-sealed and locked in a safe. Eliot is the novel's protagonist, and the Rosewater named in the title:

     "When the United State of America, which was meant to be a Utopia for all, was less than a century old, Noah Rosewater and a few men like him demonstrated the folly of the Founding Fathers in one respect: those sadly recent ancestors had not made it the law of the Utopia that the wealth of each citizen should be limited. This oversight was engendered by a weak-kneed sympathy for those who love expensive things, and by the feeling that the continent was so vast and valuable, and the population so thin and enterprising, that no thief, no matter how fast he stole, could more than mildly inconvenience anyone.
     "Noah and a few like perceived that the continent was in fact finite, and that venal office-holders, legislators in particular, could be persuaded to toss up great hunks of it for grabs, and to toss them in such a way as to have them land where Noah and his kind were standing.
     Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America.  Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, and bang in the noonday sun.
     "E pluribus unum is surely an ironic motto to inscribe on the currency of this Utopia gone bust, for every grotesquely rich American represents property, privileges, and pleasures that have been denied the many. An even more instructive motto, in the light of history made by the Noah Rosewaters, might be: Grab much too much, or you'll get nothing at all."

So we see, dear readers, that Kurt Vonnegut understood America, and that he was warning us, decades ago, about what many of us are only now coming to realize as our sordid fate. 
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Readings: Vonnegut's Overly Optimistic Dystopia

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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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Readings: Kurt Vonnegut Revisited

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Having decided that a good project for the New Year would be to reread the major works of one of the formative authors of my youth, Kurt Vonnegut, I have made an early start this morning by picking up his short-story* collection, Welcome to the Monkey House. The title story of that collection dates from 1968. The excerpt below shows how precisely Vonnegut had his finger to the pulse of the trends that have brought us to the sad place that we are in today:

There was a Howard Johnson's next door to every Ethical Suicide Parlor, and vice versa. The Howard Johnson's had an orange roof and the Suicide Parlor had a purple roof, but they were both Government. Practically everything was Government.

Practically everything was automated, too. Nancy and Mary and the sheriff were lucky to have jobs. Most people didn't. The average citizen moped around home and watched television, which was the Government. Every fifteen minutes his television would urge him to vote intelligently or consume intelligently, or worship in the church of his choice, or love his fellowman, or obey the laws--or pay a call to the nearest Ethical Suicide Parlor and find out how friendly and understanding a Hostess could be.

Although we don't yet have Ethical Suicide Parlors, and a larger percentage of the population still has jobs than Vonnegut predicts will be the case when world population is at 17 billion, practically everything is already the Government.

Vonnegut's protagonist in Welcome to the Monkey House, the underground revolutionary, Billy the Poet, towards the end of the story speaks some prophetic lines to Nancy, the Hostess whom he has kidnapped in order to forcibly detox her from the Government mandated drug that renders every citizen numb from the waist down, and to then deflower.  Nancy says to him: "The world can't afford sex anymore." Billy the Poet replies:

"Of course it can afford sex, ...All it can't afford anymore is reproduction. ...If you go back through history, you'll find that the people who have been most eager to rule, to make the laws, to enforce the laws and to tell everybody exactly how God Almighty wants things here on Earth--those people have forgiven themselves and their friends for anything and everything. But they have been absolutely disgusted and terrified by the natural sexuality of common men and women."

Tea Party, anyone?  This project is going to be fun!
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*Actually, there are some short prose pieces other than stories in the book.

Readings: Fun Stuff from Kurt Vonnegut

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Here is an interesting satire of numerology that Kurt Vonnegut employs in his prophetic novel, Hocus Pocus:

The context is that the novel's protagonist is working as a teacher in a prison. Vonnegut has this character explain his teaching methods at one point in the book. Part of that method is described by the character this way:

"I showed them a chart a fundamentalist preacher from downtown Scipio has passed out... I asked them to examine it for examples of facts tailored to fit a thesis.
xxxx"Across the top the chart named the leaders of warring nations during the Finale Rack, during World War II. Then, under each name was the leader's birthdate and how many years he lived and when he took office and how many years he served, and then the total of all those numbers, which in each case turned out to be 3,888.
xxxx"It looked like this:

	Churchill	Hitler	Roosevelt	Il Duce	Stalin	Tojo
Born	1874	1889	1882	1883	1879	1884
Age	70	55	62	61	65	60
Took Office	1940	1933	1933	1922	1924	1941
Years in Office	4	11	11	22	20	3
	3,888	3,888	3,888	3,888	3,888	3,888

xxxx"As I say, every column adds up to 3,888.
xxxx"Whoever invented the chart then pointed out that half that number was 1944, the year the war ended, and that the first letters of the names of the war's leaders spelled the name of the Supreme Ruler of the Universe."

Okay. So Vonnegut's character has pointed out that the first letters of the names above = C,H,R,I,S,T

And here’s something Vonnegut's protagonist didn’t point out:

1+9+4+4 adds up to 18, which is three sixes (666) = the number of the Beast.

Isn't that interesting?

Vonnegut's character never tells us if any of the convict students found any "facts tailored to fit a thesis."

Readings: The Paris Review Interviews #6

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Scrolling down the index of posts, I see that it has been more than a month since I last posted a pithy quote from one of The Paris Review Interviews. As fate would have it, my benefactor in the acquisition of this set of amazing volumes (and lifelong friend) Jim, called me yesterday morning just to pose a general wtf? Happily, I was able to report to him, during the course of our brief conversation, that I was three-quarters of the way through the interview with Kurt Vonnegut and would have a quote up on Rodak Riffs in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. I elaborated on that proud pronouncement by declaring that the quote had already been chosen. It would, I declared, be only slightly more wordy than “Jesus wept,” consisting of a single sentence.

But, predictably, the final quarter of the interview has since laid a quote on me that I just cannot leave lying there in good conscience. I will therefore use them both. Rules are made to be broken. Here is the first:

My relatives say that they are glad I’m rich, but that they simply cannot read me.

To the extent that I can call myself a writer, I’ve certainly been there (except, of course, that I’m not rich.)

The final quote was generated within the context of Vonnegut discussing himself as a humorist. His novels, he said, were constructed by stringing together series of jokes. The interviewer asks Vonnegut if it’s true that he prefers Laurel and Hardy to Charlie Chaplin. In response, Vonnegut provides my second chosen pithy quote:

I’m crazy about Chaplin, but there’s too much distance between him and his audience. He is too obviously a genius. In this own way, he’s as brilliant as Picasso, and this is intimidating to me.

That is a new idea to me, and strikes me as precisely spot-on.
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Consider also this timely UPDATE
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