What Kurt has to Say

 

Is there a more clear-sighted observer of our modern American experience than Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.?  That is a rhetorical question.

I couldn’t tolerate his stories when I was younger because I was trapped in the warm delusional embrace of the insulated American Midwest.  When it came to our historical and national consciousness it was all a Ra Ra self-congratulatory affair with flags flapping from poles and porches throughout my town.   It didn’t help that the Soviet Union was such a monstrous system as a point of comparison on the other side of the world.  We were pretty darn good in that light, right?  But we were human beings just like everyone else on the planet with similar foibles and outright repugnant behaviors mixed in with moments of selflessness and virtue.  

Our black and white way of seeing things outwardly had a tendency to turn inwardly creating a bind.  If we personally were either black or white, who can tolerate thinking of themselves as black?  So that left being white and therefore in a state of self-delusion and denial as a way to square that circle.  I’ll leave the implications for racism to your imagination as just one aspect of that phenomenon.

And KVJ ruthlessly destroyed all of this in his short stories and novels in the most humorous of ways.  He was honest enough about his approach to quote a British critic “who said that I put bitter coatings on sugar pills, and I consider that fair”.  His witnessing of the utter destruction and decimation of Dresden by the Allied Powers was the purifying event that opened his eyes, traumatic as it was, like a huge slap in the face.  Wake up!  

I was probably in my thirties before I had an “ear to hear” what KVJ was telling me.  It took at least a decade post-high school with stints in the Army, living overseas, medical school, and changing my childhood religion to open my eyes to what he had to show me.  Suffering was a key teacher in that regard.  I had to get past myself and the need for self-justification.  

And now I must circle back to the idea of "love of country".  I love my friends, family, and community as concrete points of interaction.  This is my “USA”.  What I don’t love so much are the abstractions created by the powers that be to manipulate me for their own purposes.  

And Kurt, God bless him, asserted in Breakfast of Champions that “at the core of each person who reads this book is a band of unwavering light.”  I believe it is a light that dispels the darkness of hatred and ignorance if we let it.

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