“Remembering Kurt Vonnegut”
By Reverend James Kubal-Komoto
Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church
Des Moines, Washington
May 27, 2007
Reading
The most prestigious lecture every year among Unitarian Universalists is the Ware Lecture given each year at the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Past speakers have included Jane Addams, Reinhold Niebuhr, Linus Pauling, Martin Luther King, Jr., Saul Alinsky, Norman Lear, May Sarton, Jesse Jackson, and many others. In 1986, the invited speaker was the writer Kurt Vonnegut. The following is an edited excerpt from his remarks that night…
So what we have here in Rochester tonight is a congregation of people who have faith. You have it in an era when so many Americans find the human condition meaningless that they are surrendering their will and their common sense to quacks and racketeers and charismatic lunatics. Bad preachers will give them faith for money, or in exchange for what little political power the frightened souls without faith may have in this pluralistic democracy.
I listen to the ethical pronouncements of the leaders of the so-called religious revival going on in this country, including those of our President, and am able to distill only two firm commandments from them. The first commandment is this: “Stop thinking.” The second commandment is this: “Obey.” Only a person who has given up on the power of reason to improve life here on Earth, or a solider in Basic Training could accept either commandment gladly: “Stop thinking” and “Obey.”
I was an Infantry Private during World War II and fought against the Germans in Europe. My religion as well as my blood type was stamped on my dogtags. The Army decided my religion was P for “Protestant.” There is no room on dogtags for footnotes and a bibliography….
[The Germans we were fighting were Christians too.] They had crosses on their flags and uniforms and all over their killing machines, just like the soldiers of the first Christian Emperor Constantine. And they lost, of course, which has to be acknowledged as quite a setback for Christianity.
Now what is it, do you think, that makes Christians so bloodthirsty?
I will tell you what my theory is, and I will be glad to hear yours after I am through standing up her and going “Blah blah blah.” I think the problem is linguistic, and might be repaired, if the evangelists would only allow it, with startling simplicity. The Christian preachers exhort their listeners to love one another and to love their neighbors and so on. Love is simply to strong a word to be much use in ordinary, day-to-day relationships. Love is for Romeo and Juliet.
I’m to love my neighbor? How can I do that when I’m not even speaking to my wife and kids today? My wife said to me the other day, after a knock-down-drag-out fight about interior decoration, “I don’t love you anymore.” And I said to her, “So what else is new?” She really didn’t love me then, which was perfectly normal. She will love me some other time - - I think, I hope. It’s possible.
If she had wanted to terminate the marriage, to carry it past the point of no return, she would have to say, “I don’t respect you anymore.” Now - - that would be terminal.
One of the many unnecessary American catastrophes going on right now, along with the religious revival and plutonium, is all the people who are getting divorced because they don’t love each other anymore. That is like trading in a car when the ashtrays are full. When you don’t respect your mate anymore - - that’s when the transmission is shot and there’s a crack in the engine block…
…And look at the spectrum of emotions we think of automatically when we hear the word “love.” If you can’t love your neighbor, then you can at least like him. If you can’t like him, you can at least give a damn about him. If you can’t ignore him, then you have to hate him, right? You’ve exhausted all the other possibilities. That’s a quick trip to hate, isn’t it? And it starts with love. It is such a logical trip, like the one from “white hot” to “ice cold,” with “red-hot,” “hot,” “warm,” “tepid,” “room temperature,” “cool,” “chilly,” and “freezing” in between. The spectrum of emotions suggested by the word “love” again: “love” and then “like” and then “don’t give a damn about,” and then “hate.”
That is my explanation of why hatred is so common in that part of the world dominated by Christianity. There are all these people who have been told to do their best at loving. They fail, most of them. And why wouldn’t they fail, since loving is extremely difficult? Most of these people are also failures as polevaulters and performers on the flying trapeze. And when they fail to love, day after day, year in and year out, come one, come all, the logic of the language leads them to the seemingly inevitable conclusion that they must hate instead. They step beyond hating, of course, is killing in imaginary self-defense.
“Ye shall respect one another.” Now there is something almost anybody in reasonable mental health can do day after day, year in and year out, come one, come all, to everyone’s clear benefit…
I have come all the way to Rochester to speak to a congregation of person of such deep faith that they dare to be skeptical about widely accepted pronouncements of what life is all about, who call themselves Unitarian Universalists. So I should surely offer an opinion as to the present condition of that relatively small denomination.
I will say that you, in terms of numbers, power, and influence, and your spiritual difference with the general population, are analogous to the earliest Christians in the catacombs under Imperial Rome. I hasten to add that your hardships are not the same, nor are you in any danger…
Like the early Christians, you are part of a society dominated by superstitions, by pure baloney. During Roman Imperial times, though, pure baloney was all that was available…Everybody including the early Christians, had no choice but to be full of baloney. That is not the case today, and my goodness, do we ever have a lot of information now, and proven techniques for creating almost anything in abundance and for moderating all sorts of catastrophes.
How tragic it is, then, that the major impulses in this and several other societies nowadays should be in the direction of the pure baloney and cruel entertainments of thousands of years ago, which almost inevitably lead to the antithesis of beauty and the good life and Christianity as taught by Jesus Christ, which is war.
When I say that the Unitarian Universalists, the people who know pure baloney when they hear it, are something like the early Christians in the catacombs, am I suggesting that contempt for baloney will someday be as widespread as Christianity is today?...
You would need a logo - - something you could put on T-shirts and flags to start with, and then maybe on the sides of tanks and airplanes, and peacekeeping missiles later on. If you really want a logo, I recommend a circle with a baloney sausage in the middle, and with a bar across the sausage - - meaning, in international sign language, “No baloney.”
But then, in order to recruit a large and enthusiastic following, perhaps even a rabid following, you would have to repudiate that symbol - - without saying so, of course. You would have to make up a lot of highly emotional baloney, which you surely don’t have now, all about what God wants and doesn’t want, whom He likes, whom He hates, what He eats for breakfast. The more complete picture of God you can cobble together, the better you’ll do.
The more violent picture of Him you create, the better you’ll do. I say this as an expert, as a former advertising and publicity man. The President and I came out of the same division at General Electric. And there he is in the White House, and here I am speaking to some obscure religious sect in Rochester. But that’s another story… My point is that if you are going to succeed as a mass movement, you are going to do it on television and videocassettes or nowhere, and any God you invent is going to be up against Miami Vice and Clint Eastwood and Sylvester Stallone…
And stay clear of the Ten Commandments, as do the television evangelists. Those things are booby-trapped, because right in the middle of them is one commandment which would, if taken seriously, cripple modern religion as show business. It is this commandment: “Thou shall not kill.”
I thank you for your attention.
Sermon
On this Sunday before Memorial Day, I thought it might be appropriate to remember and talk about a famous Unitarian Universalist.
I’ve never done this before on Memorial Day, but thought that I might even make it a tradition - - each year spending this Sunday talking about a famous Unitarian, Universalist, or Unitarian Universalist from our tradition’s past.
You know, that’s the danger of trying something new in a Unitarian Universalist church. If you do something once or twice and people like it, it becomes a tradition that you can’t change for 25 years.
However, at least for today, I’ve decided to talk about Kurt Vonnegut.
As many of you know, Vonnegut died this spring, on April 11, at the age of 84. He was a novelist, an essayist, and a playwright.
In the 19th century, especially in the first half the 19th century, it was hard to name a famous author who wasn’t a Unitarian, but for whatever reason, there were fewer famous Unitarian authors during the 20th century, and Vonnegut was probably the most famous of them.
But some of you may ask, was Vonnegut really a Unitarian Universalist?
You see, Unitarian Universalists have a habit of claiming people as our own who probably really weren’t Unitarians, Universalist, or Unitarian Universalist. For example, Alexander Graham Bell is sometimes claimed on the basis of the fact that he once said something like, “If I had to be anything, I guess I would be a Unitarian.” For me, that’s a bit of a stretch to claim somebody as one of our own.
But for Vonnegut, I think a stronger case can be made.
Vonnegut was born into a family that had been German freethinkers for several generations. His parents were married by the Unitarian minister Francis Scott Corey Wicks in Indianapolis, and Vonnegut’s father, an architect, designed the first building for the Indianapolis congregation and his parents became members of that church.
To the best of my knowledge, Vonnegut was never himself a member of any Unitarian Universalist congregation, but he did publicly identify himself as a Unitarian Universalist as recently as 1986, and sometimes attended worship services at various Unitarian Universalist churches.
But my question for us today is, “What’s important for us to know about him?” And here, I have a confession to make. I always knew that Vonnegut was a Unitarian Universalist, but I never read any of his books before he died.
Vonnegut probably made his biggest impression on those who reached young adulthood growing up during the 1960s and 1970s, and is still, I believe read mostly by young adults, mostly likely because of the strong anti-authoritarian streak in his writing, and though I was aware of his books growing up, he was one of those many authors that I never got around to reading.
But since he died, I’ve read Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five as well as many of his essays, and this is what I’ve learned.
Vonnegut was, more than anything else, a satirist, in the tradition of Jonathan Swift and especially Mark Twain, whom he admired and even physically resembled. Through the exaggeration and absurdity of his fiction, Vonnegut held up for ridicule the social practices he wanted to criticize. However, since satire is a literary genre in which an author often seems to promote the very thing he is meaning to criticize, it’s occasionally hard to know exactly what Vonnegut was trying to say.
In his writings, Vonnegut didn’t make it any easier on us. For example, on one of the first pages of Cat’s Cradle, he writes “Nothing in this book is true.” Did he mean this? Or is this way of a satirist of saying, “Take this very seriously because it represents the truth as I best know it.”
Vonnegut even realized that people sometimes misunderstood him and poked fun at this himself. He had a cameo as himself in the very bad 1986 movie Back to School in which Rodney Dangerfield plays a very wealthy man who finally decides to get a college degree. When Dangerfield’s character is assigned to write a paper about Vonnegut, he hires Vonnegut himself to write the paper. The professor grading the paper says, “Whoever did write this doesn’t know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut.”
Nevertheless, here’s my best attempt to tease out what Vonnegut was trying to tell the rest of us about life on this planet.
Vonnegut’s writing explorers the darker side of human existence, most likely because he experienced some of the darker side of human existence himself.
He grew up during the Great Depression.
He also grew up with a mentally ill mother who was emotionally abusive to his father. “When my mother went off her rocker late at night,” he writes, “the hatred and contempt she sprayed on my father, a gentle and innocent a man as ever lived, was without limit and pure, untainted by ideas or information.” Her eventual suicide haunted him for the rest of his life.
The defining moment of his life was his experience of the firebombing of Dresden. As a scout with the 106th Infantry Division during the Battle of the Bulge during World War II, Vonnegut got lost behind enemy lines, was captured, and became a prisoner of war. He was working in the basement of a slaughterhouse - - Slaughterhouse Five, in fact - - when the firebombing of the city began, and it was only because he happened to be in the basement of this building that he and seven other American prisoners of war survived the bombing, while tens of thousands of others, mostly civilians, died horrible deaths. After the bombing, he and his fellow soldiers were ordered by their Nazi captors to help in collect bodies. It was this book that became the basis of his most critically acclaimed novel, Slaughterhouse Five.
Less horrifically, after becoming a graduate student at the University of Chicago after the war, his thesis for a master’s degree in anthropology was unanimously rejected by the faculty.
In 1958, his beloved sister Alice died of cancer a day after her husband had been killed in a train crash. Vonnegut and his wife adopted their three young children.
After Slaughterhouse-Five reached Number 1 on best-seller lists in 1969 and Vonnegut became a cult hero, especially to the anti-war movement, he experienced a severe depression.
In 1970, he separated from his first wife, whom he later divorced.
In 1984, he attempted suicide with sleeping pills and alcohol.
Even more recently, he seemed weary of life and the world. I watched an interview of him on PBS during which he threatened to sue the manufacture of the cigarettes he chain-smoked because he had been smoking them for decades and despite the warning on the package, they hadn’t killed him yet. He said he was going to sue for false advertising.
Not surprisingly, much of his writing deals with the cruelty, the randomness, and the apparent meaningless of life.
Many of the characters in his books voice nihilistic themes.
In Cat’s Cradle, Newt Hoenikker, the midget son of the inventor of the atomic bomb, questions why the children’s game with string is called a “cat’s cradle.” “There’s no cat, and there’s no cradle!” he says and implies that life is similarly ridiculous and pointless.
In Slaughterhouse Five, the main character seems helpless to live out a fate to which he has been predestined and about which he can do nothing but fatalistically accept it.
In Fates Worse Than Death, a collection of essays, Vonnegut talks about Mark Twain, saying, “Mark Twain finally stopped laughing at his own agony and that of those around him. He denounced life on this planet as a crock. He died,” and reading these words, one wonders if Vonnegut had become equally pessimistic, not only about his only life, but about the future of humanity as well.
He at least sometimes seemed despairing about the future of humanity. In a poem titled “Requiem” at the end of another collection of essays titled A Man n Without a Country, he writes:
When the last living thing
Has died on account of us,
How poetical it would be
If Earth could say,
In a voice floating up
Perhaps
From the floor the Grand Canyon
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.
Real cheery, uplifting stuff, huh?
But the value that I find in Vonnegut as a writer is that despite experiencing a lot of the darker side of human life, despite seriously wrestling with the question of nihilism - - the belief that nothing is really important - - he ultimately affirmed in his writings the possibility that there are things in life that are redeeming, that make life worth living, that make hope and meaning possible.
What are these things?
Well, for example, in Cat’s Cradle, he described the last rites of a made up religion called Bokononism, which express the idea of how lucky each of us is to be alive, despite life’s limitations. “God made mud./God got lonesome./So God said to some of the mud, ‘Sit up!’/‘See all I’ve made,’ said God, ‘the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.’/And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around./Lucky me, lucky mud...Now mud lies down and goes to sleep./What memories for mud to have./What interesting other kinds of sitting up-up mud I met./I loved everything I saw.”
Vonnegut also seemed to believe that despite life’s limitations, it was still possible to find meaning and pleasure, especially by enjoying the simple things in life. In his book Fates Worse than Death, he talks about one of his happiest memories, which was of a visit to his Finnish publisher. “…My Finnish publisher took me to a little inn on the edge of the permafrost in his country,” he writes. We took a walk and found frozen ripe blueberries on bushes. We thawed them in our mouths. It was as though something somewhere wanted us to like it here.” In another essay, in A Man Without a Country he writes about the simple joy that could be found interacting with people on an errand to the post office, ending the essay, with the memorable line, “We are here on earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.”
Far from believing that nothing was sacred, he believed that human beings were sacred, as reflected in a conversation between two characters in Cat’s Cradle.
“What is sacred to Bokononists?” I asked after a while.
“Not even God as near as I can tell.”
“Nothing?”
“Just one thing.”
I made some guesses. “The ocean? The sun?”
“Man,” said Frank. “That’s all. Just man.”
And far from believing that nothing we did on this planet mattered, he seemed to believe that there was at least one important thing that each of us should do. A character in his 1965 novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater summed this up, saying:
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies - - ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’
Though several of Vonnegut’s books end with doomsday scenarios, I think Vonnegut even held out some slim hope for the future of humanity. Remembering that he is a satirist, I read his doomsday scenarios as prophetic warnings to his readers about what will happen if they don’t start paying attention and doing something about the problems of this world.
If the world is to be saved, it will not be saved by the elites, by religion, or by science, Vonnegut seemed to suggest, but by ordinary people acting together. Vonnegut seemed to be especially hopeful regarding the possibility of voluntary organizations. I find it high praise that in Vonnegut’s short story, “Who am I This Time?” he has Harry Nash abandoned as a baby on the steps of a Unitarian church. Vonnegut also finds hope in organizations such as community theater and volunteer fire departments, places where ordinary people come together.
And one of the most important things ordinary people can do is to think critically for themselves and to question, question, and question. “Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith,” Vonnegut once said, “I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.”
To summarize, Kurt Vonnegut was someone who understood through his own experience and explored through his writing the darker side of life - - it’s cruelty, randomness, and apparent meaninglessness. Nevertheless, despite this, he affirmed that life was miraculous, that each of us was lucky to be alive, that we could gain meaning from the simple pleasures of life - - like blueberries and music and errands to the post office and through our relationships with other people. He believed the most important thing in life was to be kind and treating everybody with respect, and if there was any hope for us as individuals or community, it lay in simple institutions like families, churches, volunteer fire departments, and public schools, and ordinary people trusting in themselves enough to question the idiocy of their leaders, and just perhaps, this might be enough to save this planet and all those who live here.
In a time when there seems to be so much so terribly wrong with our world, his seems to be a terribly important message to hang onto.