| Palm Saturday I'd like to apologize for something. My girlfriend's birthday is fast approaching. I had given her a DS Lite and a couple books in person, but that was over a month in advance. Closer to the actual date, I sent her the three Little ____ Books from Disinformation: Money, Food and Earth. I find terrible and little-known facts about the world around me to be intellectually engaging, and probable ways of fixing them even more so. The books contain about 80% of the former and 20% of the latter, each. I thought that a mind like hers might appreciate the knowledge, might take to heart some of the solutions and know the world is not all lost. She appreciated the thought of the gifts but did not necessarily appreciate the awful truths therein. I did not exercise sufficient forethought to realize the probable negative impact of telling someone who has lived over two decades in fear of future catastrophe exactly how the world is a mess. I just wanted to show her a part of how I saw the world, with the hopeful side-effect of broadening her knowledge. Given her reaction, however, I knew I did something wrong and sent off a measurably more fun present as a temporary apology. I didn't quite realize how wrong I was until I read more Vonnegut today, specifically his autobiographical collage, Palm Sunday. I have not finished reading it yet I suspect I've already hit the high points. So how was I wrong by wanting to give my girlfriend a piece of the truth? "Truth [Vonnegut's great-grandfather said] must always be recognized as the paramount requisite of human society." As I myself said in another place, I began to have my doubts about truth after it was dropped on Hiroshima." Truth isn't always as useful or comforting as we'd like to think. The truth of the matter is that I'm seemingly immune to bodily effects of awful truths and pessimism. I can drink them and sling them around without personal consequence, so far. For example, I recently replied to a frustrated cry, something to the effect of "Is Iraq's oil really that important?", with a blasé "No, but militarily controlling its output to the rest of the planet sure is." That was mean of me. I feel I ought to explain how I could say such a thing. Ironically, I've been inoculated against debilitating levels of despair and pessimism by reading so much of Kurt Vonnegut's darkly funny and oft-depressing writings, rather like a flu shot. The man can be as pessimistic as you please, but he can also be very optimistic and helpful precisely because he isn't fond of so much of this world. He wasn't, I should say. Kurt is up in heaven now, but I keep reading him. By quoting him and meandering a bit I hope to illustrate a bit of how I think and show that neither he nor I are all passive doom and gloom. He was a humanist, so he was concerned about what humans were doing to each other, how much they suffered and how they might suffer no more. One example, from Palm Sunday as all of these quotations are, was about the need for puberty ceremonies. Every primitive society (and he likes primitive societies) has one. He spoke a few paragraphs about them to a college graduating class: "I suggest to you that the withholding of a puberty ceremony from young males in our society is a scheme, devised cunningly but subconciously, to make those males eager to go to war, no matter how terrible or unjust a war may be. [...] "And when does a female stop being a little girl and become a woman, with all the rights and privileges appertaining thereto? We all know the answer in our bones: when she has a baby in wedlock, of course. If she has that first baby out of wedlock, she is still a child. What could be simpler or more natural and more obvious than that -- or, in these days and in this society, at least, more unjust, irrelevant and just plain stupid? "I think we had better, for our own safety, reinstate puberty ceremonies." Coincidentally, Allison had a good idea for a puberty ceremony. Any children of hers would be born without a middle name. They could choose one for themselves on their 18th birthday, and the necessary measures would be taken to make it legal. She borrowed the idea, with a little secular tweak, from Catholicism. Allison, the girlfriend spoken of above, is a recovering Catholic, by the way. That bodes well for me, for as Vonnegut's great-grandfather reportedly said: "Whoever entertains liberal views and chooses a consort that is captured by superstition risks his happiness." Not that religion is a bad thing, in and of itself. Far from it. In a world where Truth can be packed into steel containers and dropped on cities to turn them into parking lots, religion and superstition can be very comforting. The problem is that they don't easily mesh with the brain of somebody who entertains liberal views. After all: "How on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash? For one thing, I guess, the balderdash is usually beautiful -- and therefore echoes excitingly in the more primitive lobes of our brains, where knowledge counts for nothing. "More important, though: The acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a congregation. It is a way to fight loneliness. Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore." It's loneliness, he says, that is the real problem. In a nuclear family you have only one other person and whatever children you've made with him/her. None of them are likely to be of much help if you break a limb or go crazy from too many things to do. The only place to turn to for real help is the government. This makes me cynically suspicious as to why everybody in America was pressured to make nuclear families right after World War II. In an extended family, however, you would have hundreds of blood relatives to turn to in case of emergency, to live with if things turn sour at home, to talk to in case you're feeling lonely. If one member tells you to bugger off, you can go to another, and it costs you nothing. Extended families of hundreds are what humans are used to and what we need the most, Vonnegut says. But not many of us have an army of relatives. In lieu of that, we form congregations with little creeds, like church groups with their "Amen" or paratroopers with their "Geronimo!" or Anonymous with its "POOL'S CLOSED." I like to think the Internet will solve a lot of our "extended family" problems. I like to think I have a tiny extended family already. Last night we were farting around on IRC, fresh from dealing with the problems of one of our members. I posted a link to a story about a boy in Alabama who shot and killed a 9' 4"-long, 1051-pound monster boar. zaphy suggested that we all go out and hunt monster boars after Otakon as an RPG group. This led to discussions about what job classes we would be. Using AltanaView, a semi-legal Final Fantasy XI model viewer, I made a few of us into Final Fantasy characters. -zaphy the tiny Archer, first in line for having broached the subject. -deathtosocrates the Philosopher/Symbologist/Scholar/Black Mage and part-time Chef. Maker of delicious HP-restoring foods. -jinguj the Pictomancer. Pretend that's a brush in her hand and not a chocobo wand. -gelgameth the Chemist. That's a caduceus at his side. -And finally me, the giant Monk tank with a snazzy hat. HUEG! That's certainly not everybody I like and/or love, but they were there at the time, so they got Final Fantasized. It's a little thing I did which they liked. It made me happy to have done it. And for a while I couldn't be moved to care about the problems of the world. |
