In mid-July, I checked the e-mail for Reading@SideTrack.org
and found a wonderful June 22nd message from someone named Frederic
Dennis Williams. He's a teacher at Korean Minjok Leadership Academy, an
English language prep school that prepares some of Korea's best and
brightest for university study in the USA and Europe. As you can see from
his note, he was teaching about these two books not long after I had
reread them and mentioned them on the web pages that accompany these
paper pages. Here's what he had to say:
| "In Catch-22, the bureaucracy is out to get us, and it is our job to protect ourselves by being clever enough to innocently escape from its clutches. The bureaucracy isn't out to get us personally -- it doesn't really know we are alive -- but that really doesn't matter. It is a powerful, clumsy machine that will roll over us if we don't have the sense to get out of the way. We must see through the nonsense which its successful Scheisskopfs present to us as important and sensible. Scheisskopf doesn't want to hurt anyone, he is simply trying to do what is rewarded. The system leads to our doom -- unless we can escape to Sweden. "In Cat's Cradle, the nature of things leads to our inevitable doom. Scientists will solve problems, including those problems which are caused by human beings. Not that they have any real interest in human beings, they really never think about the future of human life. They think about splitting tiny little atoms and making a lot of energy. Of course, they might see the danger, but even if they do, things happen. These really neat inventions are harmless -- unless they fall into the wrong hands. And, unfortunately, they will fall into the wrong hands. "Heller thinks it is all pretty funny; we are in the middle of a kind of insanity, and if we are really sane, by the standards of the crazy society, we are insane. To succeed we have to go along with the craziness, taking advantage of the society's craziness and blending in so we can escape without appearing to escape (since we would be recaptured if we seemed to be trying to escape). That's Catch-22: we can escape with our lives only if we seem to be too stupid and clumsy to try to escape with our lives. "Vonnegut thinks it is not funny at all, but our response to what is not funny is funny. Heller thinks we can escape, if we figure it out and prepare a convincing lie to tell others we can get away from the insane bureaucracy that would kill us just so an official might look good. Vonnegut, on the other hand, thinks we can't escape, the system is everywhere and has the power to destroy everything, so our only escape is through lying to ourselves. We will die anyway -- that can't be avoided -- but we can pretend to see the order and sense in it all, even if it is really no more than a bunch of strings -- sequences of events that have no meaning or purpose. "Catch-22 is a happy book. They are trying to kill us, but we can escape to Sweden! "Cat's Cradle is an unhappy book. They aren't trying to kill us, but we will be killed anyway -- not by the Russians or the Americans, but by a series of perfectly reasonable actions that lead to the destruction of all life. The little country of San Lorenzo strives for utopia, but achieves doomsday. There is no safe place. "As for global warming and the War in Iraq, if mankind is causing global warming, it is the natural outcome of perfectly reasonable actions. Vonnegut is right. The War in Iraq is bureaucracy at work -- if there are foreign terrorists, bomb foreigners. If there are evil dictators, bomb them and create a wonderful democracy in which everyone is happy and prosperous. It seems sensible (close enough for government work) -- and if thousands of people are killed and cities destroyed to make things look good, by golly, that's life. Iraqis, Palestinians, Israelis, Afghans, New Yorkers, and others who don't get what is going on and get out of the way . . . well, shucks, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, and we have plenty of people anyway, a few thousand more or less won't make much difference to the system. Heller is right -- you can fight the system and complain about its leaders, but if you want to survive, stop bitching and slip out the back door. There is a safe place if we are willing to go there. "My students just finished reading these two books -- so I thought I might prepare for class, ran across your website (#1 in the Google search), and thought I'd pass along my thoughts." |
Wow! The joys of unsolicited contributions. Is it your turn?
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By Ken Wedding. 08.19.02 Updated 08.16.04.
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