New 09.07.03

I've mentioned it before, but I still have the tattered first paperback edition of Catch-22 I bought when I was in high school. It's a book about trying to make sense out of life. It fit very well into my quest at the time. It certainly prepared me for the Nixon years. I'm having problems today trying to figure out today's world of George II that are similar to the problems I had figuring out the Nixon years. When we headed off for a Bowman family reunion in Cleveland, Ohio, I wanted a small, pocket-sized book for the plane ride. (One publisher used to all them "Pocket Books.") I picked up Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. It too had been "unearthed" in the furniture moving process. It turns out that the kind of absurdist view of Vonnegut and Catch-22 author Joseph Heller may be the way to understanding our times just as it was in the crazy '60s and '70s. It is, after all, our president who forswore "nation building" as a national goal. And yet, here we are in the midst of building two nations. And, given the comments coming from the powers that be in Washington, DC, "we" may have designs on building a few more nations. And does it strike anyone else as ironic that the US military is basically in charge of creating democracy in these nations we're building? Of course Cat's Cradle is about the end of the world, and we're nowhere near the end of the world -- unless the literalists who read Revelations are right. Cat's Cradle is also about society that mistakes "granfaloons" (meaningless groups like nations) for "karasses" (groups whose existence will determine the fate of humankind). It's also about a world where people put faith in "foma" (bits of deception described by advertising and wishful thinking, otherwise known as lies) with truth. Given our devotion to markets and self-sufficiency, Vonnegut couldn't be writing about us, could he? The end of the world in Cat's Cradle is brought about as an unintended consequence of society's technical/industrial competence. Since this book was written 40 years ago, Vonnegut couldn't be talking about something like global warming, the Kyoto Treaty, and the American granfaloon's rejection of the notion of human-caused climate change, could he? Can there be any real insights in such nonsense? One of the characters in the book tried to explain how parents drove their children crazy. "'No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look at all those X's... No damn cat, and no damn cradle.'" I guess I'm just an old curmudgeon who was brainwashed in his early years by absurdists like Vonnegut, LBJ, Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger. Maybe that's why the foma coming out of the granfaloon we call the White House doesn't register with me. Where is the cat? Where is the cradle? Contrary opinions welcome.