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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Riffs: Your Tax Dollars at Work

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This just in: The results of a decades-long field study, conducted by sociologists from UC Berkeley, Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Haplesston VoTech, show that ordinary human beings in all walks of life fuck up with alarming frequency.
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Rodak's Writings: Ancestral January

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The posting of this old poem has become an annual event. So, here we start off a new year and, hopefully, a brave new world:

ANCESTRAL JANUARY

blue cold

            cold white

                        full moon

                                    false light

stark, hibernal oaks

which scream at the wind

with the rage of old Lear

that all nature has sinned

cold witch in her hut

that white magic can’t warm

nor the storm’s force be tamed

by the pentagram’s form

clouds freeze to the mountain

that north winds strain to stir

frozen spikes of swift crystal

tear the forest’s stiff fur

starved wolf

            white hare

                        red snow

                                    iron air

icy blade of the lake

bleeds the stone of the shore

fetch rags, my love, quickly

to chink fast the door

what footprints are these

what Eskimo this

who trudges toward spring

with purpling lips

woman, play on your harp

thaw the flames with your song

we’ll wrap us in skins

and drink mead until dawn

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Rodak's Writings: a New Year's Haiku

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A few minutes ago, a Facebook friend posted the story of how her grape crop, having fermented on the vine before it could be harvested, was consumed in its entirety by a herd of deer. In telling the story, she composed the phrase, "drunk deer dancing in the moonlight." I noted that it was a great line. Another friend responded, "The first line of a poem?" 

I thought about it briefly and decided that not a poem, but a haiku, could best contain the image:

xxxxxgrape arbor stripped clean
drunk deer dance in the moonlight
xxxxxno jelly this year

And that's how 2013 the Year in Verse, comes to an end.
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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.

Reflections: a Synchronicity?

I belong to a group on Facebook where members share their dreams. This morning I posted the following on that page:

I slept long and well last night--over eight hours, unusual for me. I remember only a snatch of the many vivid and busy dreams I was having: I was in the basement of my house and found that there were foreign students living in at least two different rooms down there. I went into the room of one student, who was Chinese. He was very friendly, but not very fluent in English. We shook hands. He was able to make me understand that he could hearing me pounding on the keyboard of my computer through the ceiling of his room at night.
A couple of hours after getting up this morning, I decided to find a book in my personal library that I had been meaning to reread for a long time, but had never gotten around to reading--"Jesus and Lao Tzu, the Parallel Sayings" edited by Martin Aronson. Once I held the book in my hands, I decided that I would write a blog post on it later today. Having made that decision, I suddenly connected that inspiration to my dream. Forever Jung.

The first section of the book is titled “Simplicity,” which seems to be a thing that I need more of -- in my soul, if not in my life in the external environment. I have simplified my daily actions to a great degree, but my inner life has remained overly complicated. I have suffered great losses over the past two years. Right at the time of each of these crises there is much pain to be dealt with. But each event also entails many necessary activities, the very busyness of which is a firewall against the onset of despair. Only when the last crisis is past and is not immediately followed up by another can each loss be felt in its fullness, and the real pain begin. As I write this today, I think I am as close to despair as I have ever been in this life.  Therefore, simplicity:

Jesus:

Martha, Martha, you are busy and bothered about many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which shall not be taken from her. ~ Luke 10:41

Lao Tzu:

If you keep your mouth shut

and guard the senses

life is free of toil.

Open your mouth

always be busy and life is beyond hope. ~ Tao Te Ching 52

Jesus:

Unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. ~ Matthew 18:3

Lao Tzu:

Being the stream of the universe,

ever true and unswerving,

become as a little child once more. ~ Tao Te Ching 28

Jesus:

Blessed are the pure of heart, for they will see God. ~ Matthew 5:8

Lao Tzu:

Reveal your simple self,

embrace your original nature. ~ Tao Te Ching 19

This seems as good a place as any to stop. This, too, could become too busy. To quench despair, let go of the circumstances causing the pain--embrace your original nature--become as a little child once more: trusting.

Jesus:

Your Father knows what you need before you ask him. ~ Matthew 6:8

Lao Tzu:

The Tao of heaven does not ask,

yet is supplied with all its needs. ~ Tao Te Ching 73

Reflections: Christmas 2013

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I mourn in lonely exile here.
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