Friday, April 13, 2007

Surviving the Epilogue: A Farewell to Vonnegut

The world remembers Kurt Vonnegut whose passing this week is a painful reminder that the world my generation tried to create may have been stillborn with the dawning of this new millennium. Even as a rabid, paranoid GOP tried to impeach the best President in a generation, there were, amid progress in Palestine, real hopes for lasting peace.

It was a time when Bush had not yet stolen the American presidency. Paul Gigot of the Wall St. Journal had not yet gloated of a GOP coup d'etat. Where are those hopes now? Did my generation fail its ideals? Do those hopes lie bleached on the deserts of Iraq -or awash in Gigot's amoral cynicism and his utter lack of intellectual integrity. As Vonnegut himself asks in the following video - is the story over?

Harvey Wasserman of the Free Press wrote "...lets not forget one of the great engines driving this wonderful man - he hated war." Most recently, Vonnegut hated the war in Iraq and the men who planned it and started it. Those men survive to threaten our future, to start another war. Meanwhile, a lonely voice of sanity is gone. Vonnegut is already missed.


This plot has a long back-story - some 1000 years. In 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, crossed the English Channel, conquered the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Harold, and asserted his claim to the English throne. Though he ruled by force and forts, William stayed, imposing his rule upon an unwilling population that absorbed his native language of French but would not cease to be "English". Incidentally, it is almost possible to date the assimilation of a French word by its English pronunciation. Beef, for example, most certainly dates back to the invasion. Rendezous, litle changed from the original French, was not assimilated until much, much later. I wouldn't want to hazard a guess.

In a little more than two centuries hence, Norman "Kings" would be referred to as "English" and would assert their right to rule over Normandy – now thought of as "foreign". Still, William’s crossing of the English Channel, a feat never again equaled, has become a bookend for a millennium only recently ended.

It seems like yesterday that the world celebrated the end of a millennium. But historians will most probably mark the end of that era with another event. Nearly one thousand years after William’s daring channel crossing, American, British and allied soldiers mirrored his feat by invading Normandy, an event that may yet prove to be of equal historical importance. It may be tempting to think of William’s invasion as the beginning of an era and the conclusion of World War II as its end.

World War II changed the world in profound ways. It was a dramatic culmination of issues that are easily traced to 1066. Secondly, World War II defined the Twentieth Century even as it summed up the millennium. It was an event that shaped the lives of Vonnegut's generation.

First of all, World War II sobered the world. When the Americans exploded the first Atomic Bomb in the desert of Alamogordo in July, 1945, American scientist, Robert Oppenheimer was inspired to quote an old Hindu poem:
"I have become death, the destroyer of worlds".
That blinding flash in the desert was the reductio ad absurdum of a process of technological warfare that began with William’s victory over the English at Hastings, the English victory over the French at Agincourt, and the American victory over the Lakota Sioux in the Black Hills, the American genocide throughout the horrific trail of tears, an event my own ancestors barely survived. Warfare became unthinkable and in becoming unthinkable became never-ending: a cold war of fifty years followed now by the unceasing struggle against world terrorism. George Orwell's perpetual war.

Secondly, the computer, itself a product of World War II, has changed the way we think about the universe. Information is seen to be the very warp and weave of space-time. Not Eniac - but Colossus - was the first electronic computer. Colossus was the product of English and American code-breakers, the team headquartered at Bletchly Park. They cracked the Nazi enigma machine but would not reveal the eastern Nazi troop build-up to Russian allies. It would have blown the Enigma advantage but the Russian people would pay with their millions of lives.

Inspired by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead who had sought, in Principia Mathmematica, to ground Mathematics upon a foundation of pure logic, Alan Turing envisioned a machine that could write symbolic theorems derived from symbolic axioms. Such a machine could, and did, automate the code-breaking process. Turing has forever established the criterion by which we may judge artificial intelligence, i.e. if a computer’s responses to our queries cannot be distinguished from those of a human being, then that computer may be said to be "thinking." Mankind will have created "consciousness" in a machine.

Some thinkers have put forward the idea that at the end of the first millennium – the year 1000 - human consciousness was raised. In fact, the first stirrings of a Renaissance are in evidence in a mere two centuries hence. It’s full flowering, of course, came in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth centuries.

Arguably, the 20th was the bloodiest of centuries, and, until Iraq descended into chaos, it had been said, erroneously, that we had been at peace for over 50 years. That was not so, course. What are called "isolated" conflicts –Korea, Viet Nam, Persian Gulf War I –were but continuations and aftershocks of a conflagration that engulfed the world. Can it be said that the legacy of that conflagration will raise human consciousness yet again as it had been some one thousand years earlier? We must hope. There is no alternative. Perhaps humankind, surviving yet another one thousand years under the threat of nuclear annihilation, will so conclude. Bluntly, however, unless men like Bush are forever forbidden any power at all, mankind will be fortunate to survive another 50 or 100 years, let alone a millennium.

Lest we despair Wasserman adds:
Now he's (Vonnegut) having dinner with our beloved siren of social justice, Molly Ivins, sharing a Manhattan, scorching this goddam war and this latest batch of fucking idiots.
Vonnegut lives and rocks on. You can find a good list of his major works at the usual reference sites: Wikipedia and at the Harold Tribune.







4 comments:

David said...

So it goes...

To a great man, I salute you.

The greatest minds of my generation (born 1984) are nowhere to be found.

Ginsberg - hoist a toast to this man.

As always Len, a good read.



Vox Populis
Meta-tations

Anonymous said...

Doonesbury quotes Vonnegut:

If flying-saucer creatures or angels or whatever were to come here in a hundred years, say, and find us gone like the dinosaurs, what might be a good message for humanity to leave for them, maybe carved in great big letters on a Grand Canyon wall? Here is this old poop's suggestion: WE PROBABLY COULD HAVE SAVED OURSELVES, BUT WERE TOO DAMNED LAZY TO TRY VERY HARD..."
-- Kurt Vonnegut
.....................

along side Doonesbury's Impeachment series...

trying to save ourselves...

.................

Again here is us trying to save ourselves, dear Kurt...

Though late at posting, if you do not have plans for this afternoon, Saturday, April 14, please consider STEP IT UP 2007.

Please click on Link (this one is for you sadbuttrue) for events in your area.

STEP IT UP EVENTS SEARCH

Abilene, TX
National Day of Climate Action

Alpine, TX
Step It Up Alpine

Austin, TX
Campus Environmental Center

Austin, TX
Step It Up Rally

Bellaire, TX
Bellaire Earth Day 2007

Brownsville, TX
RGV Step It Up 2007:
Our Earth. Our Home. Our Future.

College Station, TX
Step It Up Brazos Valley!

Conroe, TX
End pollution and safe money and the future

Dallas, TX
Step It Up Dallas 2007

Dallas, TX
Step It Up Oak Cliff

Denton, TX
Step it Up 2007

Fort Worth, TX
Clean Air - Aledo

Fort Worth, TX
step it up FUNKYTOWN

Fort Worth, TX
No New Coal Plants!

Galveston, TX
Step It Up Galveston!

Houston, TX
Global Warming Cafe

Houston , TX
An Inconvenient Truth Movie

Houston, TX
Houston billionaires for coal love Merrill Lynch

Houston, TX
Time for REAL CHANGE in AMERICA!

Lubbock, TX
The Day of the Guerilla Poem

Plano, TX
Fair Friends Action Day

Plano, TX
LIve Green in Plano Walk, Energy Film & Concert

San Antonio, TX
Step It Up San Antonio!

San Antonio, TX
Breathe Easy

San Marcos, TX
Step it Up San Marcos

Sherman/Denison, TX
Step It Up - Texoma

Austin, TX
Step It Up Austin!

The Woodlands, TX
Earth Day - Be a Climate Action Hero!

Angleton / Lake Jackson, TX
Step It Up Angleton!

.............

You don't have to have ever done anything like this-you're not organizing a March on Washington, just a gathering of scores or hundreds in your town or neighborhood.

We need creativity, good humor, commitment. If you are active in a campus group or a church or a local environmental group or a garden society or a bike club-or if you just saw Al Gore's movie and want to do something-then we need you now.

And by now, we mean now.

The best science tells us we have ten years to fundamentally transform our economy and lead the world in the same direction or else, in the words of NASA's Jim Hansen, we will face a "totally different planet," one infinitely sadder and less flourishing.

The recent elections have given us an opening, and polling shows most Americans know there's a problem. But the forces of inertia and business-as-usual are still in control, and only our voices, united and loud, joyful and determined, can change that reality.

Please join us.

Bill McKibben

............

from:

Democracy Now

JUAN GONZALEZ: This weekend tens of thousands of Americans are gathering across the country in the largest ever demonstration against global warming. Over 1,300 rallies, demonstrations and actions are being held in all 50 states to call on Congress to cut carbon emissions by 80% by the year by 2050. The actions range from a rally of thousands in New York City, to a handful of scuba divers of the coast of Key West, to several hundred pounds of ice being left melting on the sidewalks in Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. April 14th is being billed as a National Day of Climate Action. It is being spearheaded by a group called Step It Up.

AMY GOODMAN: Bill McKibben is one of the organizers of Step it up. In 1989 he wrote the book, The End of Nature one of the first books to describe global warming as an emerging environmental crisis. He writes frequently about global warming and alternative energy. He is author of eight book books, his latest is Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. Bill McKibben joins us in the firehouse studio, welcome to Democracy Now!. Tell us about the span of actions that’s taking place tomorrow and what sparked April 14th?

BILL MCKIBBEN: What sparked it was after sort of 20 years of writing about this, my sense of growing despair that we were doing nothing. I mean Hurricane Katrina and Al Gore had educated us about the problem, the polling showed that most Americans understood it and still the 20-year bipartisan effort to accomplish nothing in Washington was succeeding all too well. In January, we – and by that I mean me and six students, recent graduates at Middlebury College where I work, launched a website, www.stepitup07.org and we started encouraging people around the country to hold rallies tomorrow, on April 14th. We had no money and no organization, so we figured we’d be doing well if we could organize 100 of these things by April 14th. And that would have been about 100 more global warming rallies than there had been.

Instead, because people were really eager to finally be able to take action about this, the thing has just kinda exploded. We have 1,350 rallies that’ll be taking place tomorrow in every corner of the country. And the creativity that people have brought to bear is as amazing as the numbers.

In Jacksonville, Florida, people are going to descend on the parking lot of the Jacksonville Jaguars football stadium and they have hired a crane to lift a yatch 20 feet in the air so they can show people where the sea level is going to be some day and they are going to have a big gathering underneath. Down in the battery, midday, in Manhattan, there are going to be thousands of people in blue shirts crowding into Lower Manhattan to show where the new tide line will be, a kind of sea of people to demonstrate where the ocean will come not too far from now. Out in the Rockies there will be people descending, skiers descending in formation down those dwindling glaciers. You know, every corner of the country and every kind of person, evangelical churches, environmental groups, you name it, all joining this stepitup07.org thing.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Bill, given the enormous crisis that continues to mount over the environment and climate change, why do you think the environmental movement became so quiet for so long, so unable to go in the streets and be able to put the kind of pressure necessary on government? Obviously Earth Day was co-opted long ago by the corporations. But what has happened to the activists?

BILL MCKIBBEN: You know, the environmental movement that we have was built to fight a different problem. The sets of problems it was built to fight: air pollution in the cities, or toxic pollution and things, has done a pretty good darned job of fighting. Our air is cleaner, we have more cleaner lakes and rivers, and that kind of thing. It's too much to ask that environmental community alone to take on something as central as global warming, which means dealing with the most fundamental parts of our economy. We need a much larger movement than that. In fact, there is no question, we need a movement as morally urgent, as committed, as passionate as the Civil Rights Movement if we’re gonna have any chance of turning this around. That's what we are trying to build and that’s what we’re seeing the first real glimpses of this weekend.

AMY GOODMAN: Bill McKibben, you’ve written the book Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities in the Durable Future, you talk about happiness through history.

BILL MCKIBBEN: You know, one of the questions -- the only question we ask about the economy in our society is how can we make it bigger? That question is running out of steam for two reasons, one, the environmental damage that we’re now seeing on a global scale. Two, as economists and others are beginning to realize with new research, endless expansion isn't making us as happy as it's supposed to. In fact, if anything, just the opposite.

If you poll Americans as people have done since the end of World War II, asking them are they happy with their lives, the number who say that they are very happy peaks in 1956 and goes downhill ever since. Now, that was before I was born so I missed what was ever going on in 1956. But the tragedy of it is that that downward curve coincides with an upward curve of about – we’re about three times as rich as we were in the late 50s. We have three times as much stuff. If what we think we know about economy was true, those two curves, satisfaction and prosperity should move in somewhat the same direction. That they are moving in opposite directions, really should lead us to ask some pretty stiff questions, and should lead us also not to fear the kind of world that we are going to need to create to deal with the environmental problems that are at hand, a world with much more localized economies, and much stronger communities, and much more emphasis on belonging and much less on belongings.

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Thorne said...

Poo too weet?
An aside, (but a relevent one) Have you read David Brin's speculative fiction novel entitled "Earth"?

Anonymous said...

thorne:
I do not know if this comment was directed at me....but, I looked "Earth" up; it looks very interesting.