On Reading Kurt Vonnegut's A Man Without A Country (Part Three) 3-11-2013

[ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars.

Continued from On Reading Kurt Vonnegut's A Man Without A Country (Part Two) sch 7/23/2025] 

I cannot call Kurt Vonnegut Jr's A Man Without A Country great Vonnegut. For great Vonnegut: Cat's Cradle; Wampeters, Fomas, and Granfalloons; and Slaughterhouse-Five. Ideas from his past return, and so do themes. Any Vonnegut surpasses none.

But I know now that there is not a chance of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that 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.

Chapter 7 

***

Do you know what a humanist is?

My parents and grandparents were humanists, what used to be called Free Thinkers. So as a humanist I am honoring my ancestors, which the Bible says is a good thing to do. We humanists try to behave as decently, as fairly, and as honorably as we can without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife... It was enough that we were alive, we humanists serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.

Chapter 9

 We no longer have anyone capable of disinterested common sense. The only hope I place in Obama is he is sane, but the more I read and hear about drones, the more I think he enjoys his power. I gave up on a sane, reasonable America the more I see of its criminal justice system on display at Fort Dix Federal Correctional Institution.

The second paragraph reminds me how deranged I got in 2009. I urge you to think hard on that second paragraph. Forget the gaudiness of spectacle we think ought to be our lives, and focus instead on decency and honor. I think Ross Lockridge Jr chose the "The Old Stone Face" as the root myth of his Raintree County with great deliberation. It fits the Hoosier mentality.

sch 

[7/23/2025:

One thing missing from prison is information. No Google. I would have liked to see what others thought about the books I noted above. Well, I got that chance now, and you can decide if I am a moron or not. You may also want to follow the links provided in the text.

The Aroostook Review, Art & Photograpy (Adriana DeCastro)

Vonnegut’s message is ultimately hopeful in Cat’s Cradle: thoughtfulness about how our actions impact others and constant questioning and reevaluation of the world around us and its institutions will perhaps lead to more productive and ethical scientific practices, as well as improve the real effectiveness of religion and our ability to truly love one another. Just as the targets of the San Lorenzan Air Force to fire upon are “cardboard cutouts shaped like men” (Vonnegut 154), so are the satirical targets of Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. After all, what are we but cardboard cutouts of those who have come before us if we choose not to employ our distinctly human qualities of reason and thoughtfulness to evaluate and rework ideas that have come before us? Vonnegut does not suggest that life is meaningless; nor can he necessarily offer us the meaning of life. That would undermine what he does do—he invites us to create and understand meaning through our own thought processes, as opposed to blindly accepting what others offer us as meaningful.

***

As Peter J. Reed points out in his book Writers for the Seventies: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., there are three writers in Cat’s Cradle: Vonnegut, Jonah and Bokonon. “Each of these three writers,” Reed explains, “is concerned with truth, using the word repeatedly, and appears to feel great need to declare the truth of the human condition. Yet each also warns of the writer’s willingness to lie in behalf of his truths, and cautions that the truths that he sees may themselves be lies” (125). This, of course, is Vonnegut’s point. We create meaning in our lives by thinking about the world in which we live. What may be truths for Vonnegut (or for Jonah or Bokonon) may not be quite the same for his readers. Each of us must evaluate the value of these writers’ statements for ourselves. Some may ring true, while others do not. Our tendency, though, as is evident in the title, Cat’s Cradle, is to accept the “truths” passed on from one generation to another. 

 And this is wisdom we continue to ignore.

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut (S.B. Howell)

The idea that you can achieve whatever you want if only you try hard enough is fiction, but accepting personal limitations is painful. We often set high expectations at the outset because we hope to go as far as possible and don’t know where our limitations are yet, but sometimes aiming too high can make us fall short of our goals. It’s like shooting an arrow: you want to aim a little higher than the target, but if you aim too high you can expend too much energy on height and not get enough distance.

We want to believe that everyone has the same capabilities, but some people’s limitations are more rigid than others. Height is one aspect of ourselves that we can’t really change, so it’s better to accept it and move on than to keep standing on one’s tiptoes. There are a lot of instances where people expect too much from those with limitations or expect too much from themselves despite limitations and end up causing harm. It’s good to be ambitious, but it’s also important to be aware of limitations.

Kurt Vonnegut has expressed in interviews how badly American POWs did in European camps during WWII in terms of getting depressed and not taking care of themselves physically and how it was partially due to an American inability to recognize and accept failure. American culture is built on prosperity gospel, we believe in a type of magic where we attract more of what we focus on (aka “law of attraction” or The Secret). The shadow side of that is we believe that if we refuse to acknowledge something negative it will go away. The problem with this is that it doesn’t work and it can delay addressing the problem.

Vonnegut was critical of the American tendency to look away from problems. When his mother died of suicide the coroner’s report said it was an accident and everybody in his midwestern hometown of Indianapolis, Illinois kept saying it was an accident, but Vonnegut himself was interested in talking about it (according to PBS It’s Lit video).

Wisdom to Tell: Why ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ Still Matters (Miller's Book Reviews)

Near the end of the novel, Billy sees the prayer again, this time engraved on a locket worn by his companion, the actress, in the Tralfamadorian zoo. “The wisdom always to tell the difference.” Vonnegut is putting us in Billy’s seat, something he says he’s going to do at the beginning of the story, where he says with what words the story will end: that bird’s question, “Poo-tee-weet?”

Vonnegut’s telling us readers there’s a quiz at the end of his “beautiful and surprising and deep” novel. The question still matters. So do our answers. 

What Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” Tells Us Now (The New Yorker)

It is also deeply ironic. Beneath the apparent resignation is a sadness for which there are no words. This is the manner of the entire novel, and it has led to the novel being, in many cases, misunderstood. I am not suggesting that “Slaughterhouse-Five” has been poorly treated. Its reception was largely positive, it has sold an enormous number of copies, the Modern Library ranked it eighteenth on its list of the hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century, and it is also on a similar list issued by Time magazine. However, there are those who have accused it of the sin of “quietism,” of a resigned acceptance, even, according to Anthony Burgess, an “evasion” of the worst things in the world. One of the reasons for this is the phrase “So it goes,” and it is clear to me from these critiques that the British novelist Julian Barnes was right when he wrote in his book “A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters” that “Irony may be defined as what people miss.”

Kurt Vonnegut is a deeply ironic writer who has sometimes been read as if he were not. The misreading goes beyond “So it goes,” and has a good deal to do with the inhabitants of the planet of Tralfamadore. As it happens, I am a great fan of Tralfamadorians, who look like toilet plungers, beginning with their mechanical emissary Salo, who, in an earlier Vonnegut novel, “The Sirens of Titan,” was marooned on Titan, a moon of the planet Saturn, needing a replacement part for his spaceship. And now comes the classic Vonnegut subject of free will, expressed as a comic science-fiction device. We learn in “The Sirens of Titan” that human history has been manipulated by Tralfamadorians to persuade the human race to build large messages to Salo, and to get our primitive ancestors to develop a civilization capable of doing so. Stonehenge and the Great Wall of China were some of the messages from Tralfamadore. Stonehenge read, “Replacement part being rushed with all possible speed.” The Great Wall of China said, “Be patient. We haven’t forgotten about you.” The Kremlin meant “You will be on your way before you know it.” And the Palace of the League of Nations, in Geneva, meant “Pack up your things and be ready to leave on short notice.” 

For kicks: Is Kurt Vonnegut a genius or just plain insane? (Science Fiction & Fantasy forum), and Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons by Kurt Vonnegut (Library Thing).

I thought I had read all that was available about Raintree County, and then today I found: The Death of Ross Lockridge, Jr.: Fear and Loathing in Raintree County (Book and Paper Arts)

Continued in On Reading Kurt Vonnegut's A Man Without A Country (Part Four) 3-11-2013. sch.]