November 18: National Prayer Week, Modern Authors, Radical

These fictitious people in the zoo had a big board supposedly showing stock market quotations and commodity prices along one wall of their habitat, and a news ticker, and a telephone that was supposedly connected to a brokerage on Earth.  The creatures on Zircon-212 told their captives that they had invested a million dollars for them back on Earth, and that it was up to the captives to manage it so that they would be fabulously wealthy when they were returned to Earth.

The telephone and the big board and the ticker were all fakes, of course.  They were simply stimulants to make the Earthlings perform vividly for the crowds at the zoo--to make them jump up and down and cheer, or gloat, or sulk, or tear their hair, to be scared shitless or to feel as contented as babies in their mothers' arms.   

The Earthlings did very well on paper.  That was part of the rigging, of course.  And religion got mixed up in it, too.  The news ticker reminded them that the President of the United States had declared National Prayer Week, and that everybody should pray.  The Earthlings had had a bad week on the market before that.  They had lost a small fortune in olive oil futures.  So they gave praying a whirl.

It worked.  Olive oil went up.

Religion is an experiment in this passage.  The aliens on Zircon-212 are seeing how humans respond to one of the most basic human stimuli--materialism.  The humans believe they are fabulously wealthy, and they jump up and down and cheer.  They think that they have lost all of their money, and they turn to God and prayer.

It's a fairly cynical view of the human condition, but Vonnegut was a survivor of the Dresden bombing.  He probably suffered from post traumatic stress disorder for most of his life.  That certainly would explain Billy Pilgrim's time traveling episodes in Slaughterhouse.  I guess what I'm trying to say is that Vonnegut saw the very worst of humanity in his life, and that translates into his views of human motivation and love and spirituality.  Slaughterhouse can be described as a lot of things, but I don't think that I would ever call it a hopeful book.

Of course, I have a very different attitude toward spirituality than Vonnegut's.  I prefer hope over cynicism, as my one Constant Reader knows.  Sure, I can lapse into periods of darkness, even despair.  But, on the whole, I prefer light and joy.

That makes me a little different from a lot of poets and writers.  There is a tendency among modern authors to eschew possibility in favor of impossibility.  A brand of Vonnegut cynicism runs through much contemporary literature.  Now, I'm not saying that's a bad thing.  Great writing is great writing, no matter what.  Most times, however, I choose to embrace what's good in humankind, and that includes the Christian ethic of helping the poor, feeding the hungry, and clothing the naked.

I don't think that's an old-fashioned way of viewing the world.  In fact, I think it's pretty radical, flying in the face of capitalism and materialism.  Joseph McCarthy would have probably had me imprisoned as a communist during the 1950s.  J. Edgar Hoover would probably have had a case file on me.  But I think McCarthy would also have thought Jesus Christ was a communist.

So, Saint Marty is a radical for love.  That's not a bad thing to be.