Kurt Vonnegut.

This is only my second day back from my Okinawa trip, but it feels like one long, continuous day since I left, and the trip itself feels like it happened months ago. I am not on island time anymore, but I am not yet on LA time. I drank island awamori with Jeff tonight, but even that could not convince me to go to bed, and here it is 6:30am.

Being in the islands was fantastic, but I think my greatest sadness hit me as I left Yonaguni, the first and furthest small island that I visited. I did not expect the kindness that I received there and I felt terribly lonely to be leaving friendly people behind me indefinately. There were good times ahead of me though, and it it felt great to be unaware of the world for that short two weeks.

Coming back to the US, I was greeted with many unfortunate news stories that had transpired while I was away, oblivious to US current events. The first was of course the VA Tech shootings. While in Yonaguni, a week before the massacre ocurred, Naomi had asked me whether I'd ever used a gun. It seems like an unusual question, but reflecting back on what people know of LA and the US, maybe it is totally logical. Anyway, I have used one, so perhaps my surprise at the question is more unusual than the question itself.

In the wake of that news, there has been the following story of the NASA Space Center contractor who killed himself and a female hostage in Houston. There have also been a flurry of small, local alarms and building closures now that the media coverage of these events has everyone on edge and in fear of their safety. A local high school was closed today after a teen went missing with two of his parents' handguns. Does this kind of thing happen everyday and go unreported? Is it suddenly news because it is a convenient tie-in to the VA Tech story? When that story finally dies, will these smaller ones go away too? Or was that large-scale massacre like a full moon, upsetting the equilibrium of people teetering on the edge of their sanity? Is our society so pathological? Does our way of living make that many people sick, or is it by sheer power of numbers that we see more evidence of murderous rampages than in other countries? Or is it our citizens' convenient access to handguns that differentiates their outbursts from those of their crazy counterparts abroad? Will we ever develop the will, as a society, to limit our free access to guns in exchange for a reduction in wanton murder sprees? Gun activists say that people, not guns, are to blame for killing. Which people are to blame for Seung-Hui Cho's ability to purchase handguns off the internet?

Today I also learned that one of my favorite writers passed away on April 11. Kurt Vonnegut was 84 years old and survived the firebombing of Dresden Germany during WWII, a scene he later depicted famously in his novel Slaughterhouse-5.
What is there to say? Vonnegut was a writer who was often erroneously classified as a science-fiction novelist, although he was more succesful at transcending the genre ghetto than other great American writers of the late 20th century, such as Philip K. Dick (although the two have little in common). He was a satirist, a social critic, he used very simple prose and had very sharp wit. His accessibility and acerbity attracted me at a young age and I quickly dissolved most of his major novels and short story collections.

Although opposite in writing style, his sensibilities are more in line with his equally luminous contemporary, Thomas Pynchon I think. They both have a kind of gleefully goofy irreverent humor, concern for the fate of humanity, contempt for authority, cautious attitudes towards technology, disregard for narrative chronology and they have both written books featuring robots, talking animals and end-of-the-world scenarios.

Vonnegut always seemed to me like the cool old crotchety grandfather of American writing; the kind whose complaints you would love to sit and listen to. After buying and reading more than 13 used paperbacks when I was a teenager and only had $4 to spare for a book, I eventually eased out of my Vonnegut phase, but like a great relationship, the memories lasted long after it ran out of gas. I think having such a literary gradfather in my early teens was formative and contributed to the brand of cynical idealism that is my current philosophy. Vonnegut was someone who was humorously cynical, but not without hope that his work as an artist-observer and cultural critic could prevent us from causing our own absurd decline.

In recent times, Vonnegut retired from writing fiction and turned his attentions to magazine articles, wherein he often gave the Bush Administration the much-needed ass-ripping that so many other writers have been unable to muster the balls for. Vonnegut, a man in his 80s, a distinguished man of letters, highly regarded and recognized, did not have any fear of offering his opinion when something struck him as absurd - it is what his entire career was founded on - and the recent Bush years provided him with ample fodder for magazine articles, but sadly, seemed to diminish his optimism for the fate of humanity.
LA Weekly columnist Dave Shulman, in his obituary to Vonnegut, quotes a passage from his recently-published non-fiction collection "A Man Without a Country:"

"Many years ago I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for the dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.
But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable."

Sadly I missed an opportunity to see Vonnegut several years ago when he read at LA's Armand Hammer museum. I normally try to see the people I consider the cultural heavyweights of my own time. I felt that Vonnegut's passing might be soon in coming, due to his age, and there was an incident several years ago, when his house caught fire, which I thought might have been his last call. I'm glad he lived long enough to get a few more jabs in at deserving targets, but I hope that the above quote was not representative of how he felt at the end. I suspect that it was not his final verdict on humanity, even if the pessimism towards the US culture, state of education and political system was genuine. People like Vonnegut are part of why I can accept the unwieldy American identity as my own, because in the end, all such arbitrary identities become irrelevant and the only thing that bonds people together is their ability to comprehend one another. For every unreasonable, ignorant, fearful, greedy, or weak force in the world, and for the mindless collectivism feeding around those forces, let their be a Vonnegut who can gently or scaldingly, with humor or frustration, provide a counterweight of independent thought to inspire people to question any seemingly obvious logic.

I wonder whether in this post-modern era, in which people seem to be unable to create anything that is not a direct reference to some pre-existing idea, when we will produce another like Vonnegut. Is such a person already at work and I am just unaware of it, or has our culture become so stagnant? He was that old grandfather, but for all of us who grew up at his knee, has no one yet stepped forward to resume in his place? Will we create another Vonnegut who is not merely "another Vonnegut," self-consciously referencing his predecessor's style and voice? How will our generation write our own stories and histories, how are we reacting to our own times? We do not have the grand historical furnaces of the Great Depression, or a Great War in which to fire our collective generational identity, but are the significant events of our own histories simply not registering on a generational scale the way they did in the 30s and 40s? Are we not at war now? Are we not in economic decline? Are the events of our lives grand enough to call attention to themselves, or must we continue to have the volume turned up with each succeeding generation? Can the events in our time compress each of our loose carbon bodies into critical diamond minds? Do we not love? Do we not die? Can our generation not also be great if we choose to be? Will we grasp the materials at hand, the events which unfold like historical threads around us, and make it so?

There is one last quote, again from an article that was collected in "Man Without A Country:"

"The Army kept me on because I could type, so I was typing other people's discharges and stuff. And my feeling was, 'Please, I've done everything I was supposed to do. Can I go home now?' That's what I feel right now. I've written books. Lots of them. Please, I've done everything I'm supposed to do. Can I go home now?"