Goodbye Mr. Rosewater


... and thanks for all the fish ...

The passing of Kurt Vonnegut leaves a hole in the fabric of American life, a keyhole, through which the larger political scene can be viewed in its fractals. My first memory of Vonnegut was reading "Cat's Cradle" on an airplane. I was at least 17 or 18 because I wasn't ever on an airplane until I was in the Navy.

There were few books that made me laugh out loud on airplanes, but this was one of them, along with "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," by Douglas Adams, "A Confederacy of Dunces, " by John Kennedy Toole, and the incomparable dark humor of Castaneda and Burroughs.

Today I'm just musing while looking over the introduction to "Jailbird," which I haven't yet read. I think I'll indulge in some tenuously related ramblings ...

The introduction focuses on Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron company, the largest employer in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1894, when founder and owner Daniel McCone informed his employees they would have to take a ten percent pay cut. There were no unions, but many of them tried a strike. But their homes and the store were company owned for the most part, and the workers had no power. They were starved out.

In the introduction to this novel, Vonnegut details how there was a peaceful gathering of workers, including women and children, to protest their treatment, and how these unarmed people, most all native born whites, were randomly shot on Christmas morning that year. Fourteen people were killed and twenty-three seriously wounded. But it was not the soldiers, the National Guard, who opened fire. It was the private army of Pinkerton "sharpshooters." One of the people killed was a soldier. Another was an infant girl.

Vonnegut describes the National Guard troops: "... farm boys from the southern part of the state, selected because they had no friends or relatives among the strikers, no reason to see them as anything but unreasonable disturbers of the peace. They represented the American ideal: healthy, cheerful citizen soldiers, who went about their ordinary business until their country suddenly needed an awesome display of weapons and discipline. They were supposed to appear as though from nowhere, to the consternation of America's enemies. When the trouble was over, they would vanish again."

These men who appeared from among the people didn't harm anybody that day. That was done by the private cops, though nobody ever admitted giving them the order to fire. That information was the intellectual property of the company, and classified, perhaps.

The reason this book resonates right now is that this country has moved so far to the right that the people who fought the labor wars are rejected by their heirs, now the affluent middle class. Their blood is washed out of the factory yards and town squares, and the Pinkerton agents have morphed into Blackwater troops carrying enough firepower to quell any dissent. Their orders come from those who believe power comes down onto the people, instead of up from them.

Now our National Guard has been conscripted for overseas use. There are two points of view on this, one of which is that they know they can be called to active duty in an emergency situation, so it's part of the job description. The other is that there is a right to bear arms amendment which guarantees a well regulated militia, local and armed, to be held in reserve in case of emergency.

This right to maintain a local militia for local use is being systematically eroded by keeping the attention riveted on the issue of individual gun ownership or licensing policies. The real protection is not the gun in your closet; but the connection of the military to the community, so that the soldiers supplied to the local militia belong to their geography and serve it as keepers of the peace. Nationalizing them should be done only in a dire emergency. Occupying somebody else's country doesn't qualify. It makes them do to others exactly what they are created to prevent others doing to their own community: effecting military occupation and rule.




Vonnegut was a man who could see right through the absurdities of life on earth, as opposed to those people who order it into a neat package of moral choices leading to predictable consequences. He was a man of the people, and he could see the tyranny over the weaker by the stronger. He recalls Nicola Sacco, who along with Bartolo Vanzetti were electrocuted August 21st, 1927. The witnesses were coached by Pinkerton agents, but the bottom line was these guys were Italian immigrants and they were anarchists, which sounds a bit like anti-christs. This was among a citizenry who would vote against somebody accused of being an avowed monogamist. Meaning is not so important as the implication of a foreign ideology.

Sacco and Vanzetti have been pretty much forgotten. Also forgotten is Celestino Madeiros, who confessed to the crime of which they were convicted while his conviction on another murder was on appeal.

Vonnegut begins the novel itself with a quote from a letter Nicola Sacco wrote to his thirteen-year-old son, Dante, three days before his execution in a retrofitted dentist's chair for the pleasure of those who opposed his politics:

"Help the weak ones that cry out for help, help the prosecuted and the victim, because they are your better friends; they are the comrades that fight and fall as your father and Bartolo fought and fell yesterday for the conquest of the joy of freedom for all the poor workers. In this struggle of life you will find more love and you will be loved."

To my mind, Vonnegut understood the truth in what the anarchist wrote to his son.

Vonnegut was one of the good guys. He was a Bohemian in the sense that Herb Gold described one: somebody who identifies with the class just below instead of aspiring toward the class just above. In other words, he was turned toward those who were weaker, lending a hand, instead of standing on them to try and reach the next ledge of social exclusivity. And he was a master at seeing behind the ordinary, into the dreaming world.

The dreaming world is more connected to Shakespeare than to a book of prophesy and law. There are consequences to everything in the form of completion of the energy field. It's like karma, except that the consequences are not punishment, or even consequences for that matter. It is simpler than that. What appears to be a linear process of cause and effect is more accurately an energy field where opposing polarities always come up simultaneously. That's why in Chinese philosophy there is always a reminder, "No blame."

One of the reasons we can't understand the Iraqis is that they think in terms of pride and shame, focused downward on their family and friends and the impact of the information on them. If they lie, that isn't as wrong as bringing shame on their family. When the only function of a lie is to retain one's pride and avoid shame, it is a noble thing in one culture, but an impeachable offense in another.

"Your honor the public offender has learned that the accused has secretly taped his assignations with the young woman in question, assignations in poor taste indeed, your honor, as it is rumored he was wearing black socks during the entire sordid episode. What are we, Cubans?"

The cultural truths change like the weather, but the human heart has an objectivity that knows what is right and wrong by leaving half the space available, and empty, to be occupied by the other person's position. For example, one cannot fail to notice that while using an electric drill on another person's head might provide, at one polarity, the experience of torturer, there is a simultaneous and unconscious experience of the entire energy field. So the ego identity limits the scene, and divides it, but the larger field is the scene, with those polarities simultaneously energized. You can't have the one without the other, and the only way the torturer can avoid experiencing the other side of it is by shoring up the ego with more and more elaborate defenses. This requires energy, so that the completion of the whole experience waits outside the walls, like a countryside ...

Vonnegut was a writer who knew the human heart, and who saw the direction of the psyche into the abstract, preparing to cut itself loose from materiality altogether. And he saw the irony in this being the most feared enemy of those who believe somebody once cut himself loose from materiality and moved his existence into the abstract. They take a fundamentalist approach to higher consciousness:

"Lock your fingers together and push your hands palm up far as you can," he instructs, and when you do this he reaches underneath them (you are seated) and lifts.

"Arghhhh!"

"Notice how your consciousness instantly moved upward and into your fingers, and how at that moment your were completely unaware of your feet. Now come fire walk with me."

So goodbye, and god bless you, Mr. Rosewater. You were one of our best and brightest.

Posted: Thu - May 10, 2007 at 10:45 AM