Kurt Vonnegut has given up. He has relinquished all hope for the future of the United States, if it can even be said to have a future. In his eighties now, he's certain that life on earth will not long survive him. He's decided the human race is no damn good.
And he's in good company. Einstein, Gandhi, and Mark Twain all reached similar conclusions before they died.
"Why are you so deeply opposed to the disappearance of the human race?" Einstein asked himself in 1949, just a few years before his death. He answered the question with great difficulty.
"I have admitted my mistake," Gandhi grumbled bitterly in 1948, shortly before his assassination. "I thought our struggle was based on non-violence, whereas in reality it was no more than passive resistance, which essentially is a weapon of the weak."
Twain's take on the human condition was even bleaker. In 1898 when he was 63, he wrote "The Mysterious Stranger," a long short story whose premise is that the world and mankind were created by Satan rather than God.
"Strange, indeed," says the Devil to the lone human to whom he has revealed himself, "that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane -- like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short..."
In our own time Twain's cynicism seems prescient. If there is a God behind creation, why are there nuclear weapons, people burning one another with white phosphorus, and the apparent likelihood of environmental destruction snuffing out all life in his or her or its world? What kind of a God would make such a world?
Vonnegut has enthusiastically joined the chorus of cynical and pessemistic curmudgeons with his new book, A Man Without A Country. It's a book only because it consists of a few (135) printed pages between two hard covers; it's more accurately a very loosely connected melange of short essays, random thoughts, and aphorisms, guaranteed to leave any reader who's not a masochist depressed, angry, and forlorn.
On the subject of the oncoming energy catastrophe and the related topic of environmental destruction, Vonnegut is even gloomier that that Jeremiah of future energy shock, James Kunstler. "You want to talk about irresistible whoopee?" he asks in his characteristic high tone. "A booby trap."
"Fossil fuels, so easily set alight! Yes, and we are presently touching off narly the very last whiffs and drops and chunks of them. All lights are about to go out. No more electricity. All forms of transportation are about to stop, and the planet earth will soon have a crust of skulls and bones and dead machinery.
"And nobody can do a thing about it. It's too late in the game.
"Don't spoil the party, but here's the truth: We have squandered our planet's resources, including air and water, as though there were no tomorrow, and now there isn't going to be one."
Describing Americans as "proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war lovers with appallingly powerful weaponry," Vonnegut concludes, "So I am a man without a country...
(snip)
"...I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas."
I can't disagree with any of Vonnegut's conclusions, but I have problems with his attitude toward them. If it's true that there's no hope for America, and that planet earth has only a few days left, I'd rather enjoy what little sunshine remains and run up the bear flag to show I'm a patriotic Californian than give way to despair.
The problem is, people who are hopeless are also generally mean and depressed. I don't know whether Vonnegut is mean, but I know I would be if I gave up, gave in, and surrendered to hopelessness.
Anyway, Vonnegut, Twain, Gandhi, and Dr. Einstein notwithstanding, there are still a few people of advanced age and great knowledge who hold out at least some guarded hope for the future. Two that I know of are the old socialist and historian Howard Zinn, who claims that "The abolition of war is not to be dismissed as utopian," and the indefatigable crusader Doris Haddock, who still maintains, even in the face of an imperialistic and repressive neocon regime, that the real Americans "are resolved to help each other. We are resolved to represent love in the world and to follow our national dream."
In a way I find Kurt Vonnegut's pessemism and cynicism strange. If God smites atheists, he, she, or it would certainly not have omitted smiting one like Vonnegut who has been courting the undertaker, chain smoking unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes for 70 years. Something like Providence, if not a deity, seems to be keeping this octogenarian curmudgeon around for the fulfillment of some mysterious and wonderful purpose, of which he is thus far uninformed.
When he finds out what it is he'll cop a new attitude.
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