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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Rodak's Writings: Black Light Blues

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Black Light Blues

Willingness edges

into the room

sideways through

a door that never

fully opens

shies away

like a feral cat

when I tentatively

extend my hand

So I sit and wait

And missing

that which made me

suicidal makes me

suicidal

We are being fried

by our cell phones

ubiquitous wifi

slowly roasted

inside-out

by Nipponized

hard rain

But we worry

about premature

hair loss sagging

breasts erectile

dysfunction

our team’s loss

to their team

quarterly reports

As the world burns

down to dust

in a redacted holocaust

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Readings: A New Poetry Enthusiasm

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Below is the final section of a four-part poem entitled "Night Unfixes the World" by my new Facebook friend and latest poetry enthusiasm, Aliki Barnstone:

INK

Drawing without a lamp as Twin Peaks darkens.
The cat coughs on its own hair.
You take pleasure in ink blots
leaking through the page like a thunderstorm
flashing over torn paper mountains. Ink tells you nothing,
is only other nights when traffic ticked
in your insomniac ear while your lover slept.
In another period of argument.
And here you hiss the cat off the table,
shape this apartment, your face, headlight eyes
outside the window. Here traffic goes by
casting lights while blots of ink angels
silently travel the walls.

***
 This piece is from a collection entitled Madly in Love.  Give it a look, poetry lovers.
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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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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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