OK, we all know that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. But on some rare occasions there are those who predict the repitition.
Kurt Vonnegut did this in 1961, but I don't think he meant to.
Come along on a journey from the past to the future...
1961/1962 is when Vonnegut finished and published Mother Night. It is the story of Howard Campbell, a fictional character who was a double agent in WWII. While working as a propagandist directly for Goebbels, Campbell is also passing coded messages to the allies through his radio broadcasts. The story considerers the question of Campbell's guilt or innocence regarding the Holocaust, his own struggle with the question and other people's struggle with the question.
Vonnegut says in the foreword to the novel that it is "...the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don't think it's a marvelous moral, I simply happen to know what it is."
And that moral is, according to my various Google searches, one of Vonneguts better known quotes: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be".
A pretty good moral. But if that were all there were to Mother Night it would be one of the thousands of very average books in the world today. So it goes.
That moral is not what makes Mother Night the compelling commentary on human behaviour that it is, which Vonnegut reveals to us in the words of the beleaguered Campbell. "I had hoped, as a broadcaster, to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate."
Vonnegut expands on this idea in various ways throughout the book, but at this point I'll send you off to your favorite bookstore or library for further reading.
Because that one sentence of Campbell's sums up our current situation quite nicely.
Some of our favorite targets, the MSM and RWNM, certainly are reluctant to laugh, not to mention incapable of thought. Whether this is in the form of Rush Limbaugh who refuses to even admit the ludicrous nature of his drug problems in the light of what he has previously said about drug users, or Pat Robertson who has demonstrated a penchant for being willing to snarl and to hate, right wing broadcasters live this phrase of Campbell's to the letter.
But Vonnegut was not just talking about the broadcasters, he was talking about the audience. And when the audience is willing to buy ideas like the New York Times committed treason, then they are exactly the people Vonnegut was talking about. We see some churches filled with people who are eager to believe, regardless of the complexities of the Bible their faith is supposed to be based on.
We all have many more examples of this kind of behaviour. In fact, the sentence itself could be considered axiomatic-that people have always been eager for the quick and simple solution rather than the complex one that might force us to consider how ludicrous we often are. What pulls all these observations and ideas together is quite simply the title of the book itself-Mother Night. No less a being than Mephistopheles in his speech in Faust is the source of the title:
"I am a part of the part that at first was all, part of the darkness that gave birth to light, that supercilious light which now disputes with Mother Night her ancient rank and space, and yet can not succeed..."
Mother Night, the ancient empty void from which we have come, metaphorically, waits just outside that light. The book itself is one small story of one insignificant struggle to dispute a tiny plot of space with Mother Night. For those who have not read the book, I won't say how that dispute ends.
What does this have to do with July the 4th?
Today we honor and remember those who disputed Mother Night's ancient rank and space. They pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to hold back Mother Night without knowing whether they might succeed.
And we must commit ourselves to their struggle. We must not be the human beings who are reluctant to laugh, eager to believe and snarl and hate. We must determine what we will pretend to be carefully.
In 1961 Vonnegut was reflecting back on WWII, and all the people who had, through failure to be careful about what they pretended to be, let Mother Night succeed. At the same time he was predicting how the same thing might happen again, whether he meant to or not. In this world that is so hard to be ludicrous in he wove a story about humanity that all of us can learn from this 4th of July.