Thanks, Kurt

No one knows how many people perished when waves of British and American planes firebombed Dresden, Germany, in February 1945. Estimates range from the 20,000+ official burials to the 300,000 claimed in Nazi propaganda. Propaganda is distrusted, of course, for good reasons, and official records of burials are of limited usefulness in this case because the firestorm transformed Dresden into a crematorium: The conflagration’s consumption of oxygen was so intense that fleeing people were literally sucked into the flames, which incinerated them to unidentifiable ash.

In 1939 the city had been the home of more than a half million, but in the chaotic displacement of the war’s endgame that number provides few clues. The actual population when the bombing commenced on Feb. 13 may have been much higher, in fact, because Dresden was considered a safe haven, a city with no military targets. It had become a magnet for as many as a quarter-million refugees, and thousands of wounded soldiers had been transported there as well. We know the exact tonnage of bombs dropped, but no one knows how many humans perished.

But we know one who survived, a young American conscript and prisoner of war named Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Emerging from underground shelters into the total devastation, the prisoners were ordered to assist in the disposal of bodies, but the gruesome task proved impossible. Flamethrowers were brought in to incinerate mountains of corpses and body parts in the ruins of the elegant old center of culture, whose orchestra Beethoven had once proclaimed, “the best in Europe.”

That experience sat in his guts for more than 20 years before it emerged in a virtuoso fantasia, “Slaughterhouse Five.” In the interim, Vonnegut worked as a journalist and wrote several novels, most of them lightly regarded (if regarded at all) and critically consigned to the then-disreputable “science fiction” genre.

Vonnegut was prepared to chuck his writing career by the mid-1960s – most of his work was out of print, he was in his 40s, and he had a family to support. But then an unexpected call came, offering him a job teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. Looking back many years later he called that improbable employment as a life preserver tossed to a drowning man.

Vonnegut arrived in Iowa City anonymously in his dilapidated Volkswagen, and left, two years later, an international cult figure. One of his colleagues became his critical champion. A new agent secured him a three-book contract. And “Cat’s Cradle,” his Hugo Award-nominated 1963 satire about the scientifically caused end of the world -- not by fire but by Ice Nine -- became unofficial required reading on college campuses, particularly for “countercultural” students in the civil rights and anti-war movements.

But more important, Vonnegut’s rejuvenated career dredged Dresden out of his gut. He had traded on fantasy, irony and absurdity in all his works, but in “Slaughterhouse Five,” the extravagant fantasy was propelled by, permeated with and framed by reality – the true but absurd reality he had experienced first-hand in Dresden, refracted through a sardonic lens of whimsical melancholy. Horror with a cynical shrug – not to mention time travel, alien abductions, a meek but well-hung “hero,” a porn star and extraterrestrials shaped like toilet plungers.

“Slaughterhouse Five” was fatalistic irony incarnate, a novel that regarded all human personal or communal pretensions as mere hubris. In the book’s unitary vision of time, Dresden, for all its apparent horrors was not merely just what happened, but just what has always happened, an event whose impact is blunted by its inevitability – like Billy Pilgrm’s murder by Paul Lazzaro, Billy’s abduction to a zoo on Tralfamador with Montana Wildhack, and Poor Old Edgar Derby’s summary assassination for his naïve awe that something of beauty had survived Dresden’s devastation – events resistant to analysis more logical or reasonable or insightful than the pronouncement of the birds, oblivious to human tragedy or moral concepts – poo-tee-weet.

Of course, irony-squared was that the “so it goes” shrug of “Slaugherhouse Five” was not a shrug at all. Vonnegut was a depressive character, haunted by his memories of Dresden, distrustful of science and technology, and pessimistic about the prospects for humanity. His alter ego was Kilgore Trout, a failed science fiction writer powerless to affect, or even be heard by, an irredeemably failed species.

My younger son was about 15 years old when I asked him to watch the film adaptation of “Slaughterhouse 5.” I explained to him how it was not only one of the 20th century’s greatest works of English-language fiction – which meant that it was important to me – and a remarkable film adaptation of a novel considered impossible to adapt, but that it had been written in our little town, in a house that in the mid-‘70s I could glimpse through the window of my apartment. (www.flickr.com/photos/toadaway/430842371), as if that was something he should care about. (Probably not true -- he went to Germany to research, on a Guggenheim, after he left Iowa -- but legends have power.)

Having viewed the film, he asked me an insightful question (such a bright boy): “Is that supposed to be a comedy?” Caught off-guard, I responded, “Why, were you laughing?”

His question deepened my appreciation of the artistry of Vonnegut’s whimsical melancholy. Yes, all the superficial signs and triggers tell you that you are experiencing comedy, but where are the jokes? Where are the laughs? Is Edgar Derby’s execution the punch line of a dark-humor joke, or an absurd, infuriating injustice from which we want to avert our eyes – or is there any difference?

Kurt Vonnegut’s final act of artistic magic was to die less than a week before the psychotic slaughter in Blacksburg, VA, -- where we know not only how many people died, but their names and life stories -- as if the purely coincidental recollection of his work was divinely designed to provide perspective.

As everyone in the Land of Blog knows, one of the right wing’s professional self-parodies and voluntary strawmen, Dinesh D’Souza, asserted that atheists are nowhere to be seen at such horrific moments. And he concluded that part of the explanation is that atheists have no answer to the problem of evil.

And, you know, he’s right. The people who step forward at a time of senseless tragedy are those who wish to deny its senselessness – to reinterpret and rationalize the horror in the context of some ultimate plan or process or meaning, to say that the victims have gone to some better place, to reassert the ultimate cosmic justice that all such events call into question. Billy Graham’s son went on Wolf Blitzer’s show to assert that Cho was possessed by demons.

Atheists have no turf to defend. Senseless horror is merely senseless horror, an occasion for shock, grief and compassion. With “Slaughterhouse Five,” the atheist Kurt Vonnegut provided an imaginative, entertaining parody of contextualization.

Vonnegut was a fantasy virtuoso. If faced with the gory truth of the Dresden firebombing – or Cho’s exaggerated, dramatic, bloody, ritual, YouTubish suicide – why NOT a fantasy involving toilet-plunger aliens, who deny humans even the romantic illusion that the fate of the universe is in their hands? Where a Dresden survivor is abducted by those aliens, who accommodate his media-driven sex fantasies so that they can observe his behavior in a glass-domed zoo? Who dies and he has always died, because of a madman’s ridiculous vendetta over a trivial slight in the midst of an historic atrocity?

Of course, “so it goes” and “poo-tee-weet” are not acceptable comments at memorial services, even though they make more sense than the magical gestures enacted and the mystic formulas intoned by “designated authorities” in robes and silly hats. The non-believers are more likely to ask questions than provide answers: Why do the relatively small destructive acts of individuals, close to us in time or space or nationality, shock us and involve us more than machete genocide in Rwanda or the daily horror of Baghdad? (The mass slaughter of the Dresden firebombing was nearly a forgotten incident until Vonnegut reminded the world.) What are the extremities of moral logic under stress that rationalized a personal massacre of nearby strangers for Cho, or the impersonal incineration of thousands in far-away Dresden, or Hiroshima?

Fortunately, though a chance convergence of experience and opportunity, Kurt Vonnegut was there to provide us with the commentary of the birds.

More from da bus

I had purchased a tube of sour-cream-and-onion Pringles in the Sioux City station, and I had barely popped the top and taken a couple of bites before the voice came from behind me. She started with something mundane, like, "They were supposed to transfer my bag from the other bus, weren't they?" or "What time are we supposed to get into Omaha?" But soon a learned that she had left Chippewa Falls, Wis., that morning and was heading back to Reno, Nevada, where she had lived for 23 years.

“I’m done with that town,” she said. “I’ve never been in a place were people were so unfriendly. Nobody would even offer he a ride to the store. I’m there all alone, without a car, and nobody would come by and say, ‘I’m going to the store, do you want to go along?”

"I just couldn't stand the the cold anymore. And it's the most boring place I've ever been; there's nothing going on there." She'd moved from Reno to Chippewa Falls several months ago, because she had a couple of friends living there and they suggested she move there to be close to them. "People were so unfriendly there," she said. "No one would even offer me a ride to the store, and I didn't have a car. My friends never stopped and said, we're going to the store; do you want to go along. I just couldn't take any more. My rent was due today, so I just left."

Apparently, given her comments, she did have a bag in the luggage compartment, and she also had two carry-on items: A purse, filled to overflowing, and a white, kitchen garbage bag bulging with clothes and shoes. The garbage bag was already stretching out and had a developed a couple of holes. I figured that its chance of surviving all the way to Reno was a long shot.

She never told me her name but I learned what it was when she would quote someone saying to her, "Shirley..." Shirley grew up in a small town in southern Indiana, so small that there were only three or four kids in the town, total. I learned this when I said I was surprised at her experience in Wisconsin, because people in the Midwest are generally friendly and nice. "My mother was never all that nice," she responded, and told me how, as a young teenager she escape her mean, selfish mom to spend time at the house of some childless neighbors, who gave her beer and cigarettes. Or she would lift cigarettes from the grocery store her parents owned and sneak off into the fields or the woods to smoke.

I knew about southern Indiana. A colleague of mine taught high school band in a little south Indiana town, I told her. And his recollection was that mostly they wanted to spy on each other and gossip.

But Shirley didn’t really require any prompting from me.

Politics Uber Alles

OK, now we finally have the confirmation. This administration, and this Atty. Gen., do not grasp the difference between a political appointment and a political operative. This "personnel matter" involves the unwillingness of officers of the court to become partisan advocates: The unwillingness of federal attorneys to influence elections by smearing innocent people in grand juries convened with disregard for the facts of investigations. And the truly astonishing possibility is this: The contemporary GOP has become so disconnected from any concept of moral or constitutional or legal principle that they cannot discern the difference between the law and partisan power.

Da Bus -- part 3

The girl across the aisle from me -- http://www.flickr.com/photos/toadaway/386733754/ -- the one with the piercings and the bright yellow snap-up pants, was making cellphone calls, too. Her purse had been stolen somewhere back down the line, but she still had her phone. "I'm so pissed at mom. (pause) She was drunk again." But she was cool. She was almost to her destination, Sioux Falls. I'm not sure where she had come from, but she was wearing a Dillon, MT, sweatshirt that declared, "Everyone in this town is high -- 5,280 feet."

Seven hours down the road, to the sound of the worn-out wipers attempting to remove the freezing rain, we arrived in Sioux Falls. The Sioux Falls bus depot actually has four computer stations, with a neon sign over them proclaiming, "Internet Cafe." Except there is not really a cafe -- only an assortment of chips and microwavable lunches to be purchased from a woman at a card table set up in the middle of the room.

She has worked there for four years, she says, and that a snowstorm forced her to spend a night there once, except that she spent the night outside in the cold because she felt safer there. The old guy with the red-dyed hair is giving her a hard time: "I'm legally blind so just count it out for me. I gave you a 50 dollar bill." So she puts the bills and coins in his hand one at a time. "There," he concludes, "we both learned something. You just learned to make change."

Although "fuck" is part of the working vocabulary of the gaunt young woman selling tickets, this is a high-tech bus depot. Arrivals and departures flash on LCD screens, and the lobby TV is set to the soccer channel, which no one is watching.

Partly because the "vow of poverty" woman, the gray-haired lady with the severe underbite, is crying. "I'm hopeless," she whimpers as she shuffles across the waiting room. The station manager is assisting her, and patting her on the shoulder, but she shuffles off again, wipes tears. I think at first that she has left some valuable item back at her point of origin, but when I offer assistance I learn that she's come to Sioux Falls with a one-way ticket, to relocate for some reason. "54 years old and I have to come here where I have no place to live, and I know nobody. This shouldn't be happening," she says. But the nice station manager has called and found a place for her to go, and is going to give her a ride. Somebody tells her there are worse places to end up. And I would have taken her to be 70.

By now the two kids are out of control, running and twirling and nearly knocking people down. The young mother with the missing front tooth is ordering them to stop, with no effect. They still have 13 hours to go before she reunites where her boyfriend in detox, and I assure her that they will run out of energy sooner or later. She looks at me blankly.

A couple of guys, one in his 30s and one in his 40s, I would guess, have struck up a conversation. Bus people talk to each other much more readily than airplane people. The younger man is wearing a Carhardt jacket and a baseball cap, and he says affably that he started out in Jackson at 6 AM and has only made it this far. The bus ride isn't so bad, it's waiting for hours in the depot. He gestures to his small bag and says with a grin, "This is all the luggage I have. All I need is in there. All I've got." He's bought a ticket as far south as he can afford, to start over. "I hope this is the last time," he says.

The other guy is going to bus all the way to Los Angeles, and then north from there. "Central coast," he says. "Pismo Beach. I lived there for 20 years."

By the ticket counter, I see a skinny, nervous woman with dirty blonde hair squatting down, and I'm surprised when I walk past her to see that she's ancient -- one of those shriveled up old women of indeterminate age. I don't realize it then, of course, but I'm going to hear her life story between Sioux Falls and Omaha.

(to be continued)

Da Bus -- Part 2

Her father was a school custodian (a dear man who I miss a lot) and she grew up in a working class, ethnically diverse neighborhood near the cement plant where many of the residents worked, inhaling lime in the days before OSHA. Many of her childhood friends were bus people, if they managed not to end up in prison. Recently she has managed medical research focusing on the healthcare deficiencies of the Lakota reservations, where the cancer mortality rate is twice that of the general population. What she encountered broke her heart. At one point, they had no choice but to put an immunosupressed patient on a bus for treatment in Omaha.

So we hug and kiss, and I head onto the bus. No, I don't want to sit in THAT seat. It's filthy and the seat is torn, with the foam rubber exposed. Well, OK, ALL the seats are like that, and a couple have hand-lettered signs on them, warning not to sit there. I chose a seat toward the back with an oily stain over the one with the hairball behind the cushion. From my previous bus experiences I had already determined to eat and drink as little as possible, to avoid the necessity of using the "washroom."

A middle-aged woman and a blind man are talking. She says, "I took a vow of poverty." And he laughs and says, "Well, apparently I did, too."

Behind me is the skinny Indian or Hispanic woman with the missing front tooth and the two cute little kids -- I would guess 6 and 4. The kids start off well-behaved and the mother starts off patient, but it's going to be a 20-hour ride for them to Chicago.

Through a series of overheard cellphone conversations, I'm able to piece together their story. First it was "I've been trying since 6 p.m. last night to reach him, but they say there's no one there by that name, and they won't even tell me if he's been discharged." Eventually he calls, and she says "I got the kids back, but I had to get on the very next bus. And I've been trying to reach you since 6 p.m. yesterday." And then more calls where she tells friends that he has finally called, from a detox center.

Only three hours into the long ride and the kids are starting to act like kids. How long? I told you we'd be on the bus all day, and we'll get to Chicago when you wake up tomorrow. What's this place? The toys loose their appeal as we make a series of stops by gas station convenience stores to take on more passengers and allow the smokers to take a few puffs. Lots of smokers among bus people.

(to be continued)

Da Bus

I started this account of my recent 800-mile bus trip on Table Talk, but I'm migrating it here.

Part 1

The drive down out of the Hills to the bus station was magical. On Thursday night the snow and fog had flocked the pine trees, and on Saturday morning the sun was out and lighting them up. The hillsides looked like they had been sponge-painted with Bob Ross' happy little trees. I had trouble keeping my eyes on the road. I'm sure that by midday the sun had burned off the flocking, but early in the morning the Hills were a fairyland. The equal of any fall color display I have seen.

After a couple of wrong turns, we located the Milo Barber Transportation Center, a modern building with buses parked out back. Now, I've ridden buses before, but you have to realize that I had flown out, starting at the Eastern Iowa Airport, and changing planes at the Lindbergh Terminal in the Twin Cities, where I had a nice taco lunch at the Maui Surf Bar. The bartender was dressed in a Hawaiian shirt -- a nice juxtaposition to the snow falling outside. Businessmen in suits were talking on cellphones about corporate meetings and tapping away on their laptops. The comforting low voice of a British woman warned, at regular intervals, "Caution. You are approaching the end of a moving walkway." Enroute attractive women in uniforms served us complimentary beverages. You know the routine.

So, heading into the waiting room of the bus depot -- filled with bus depot people sent over from central casting -- provided a stark contrast to those recent images. They guy behind the counter had obviously taken a new career path after playing the banjo in "Deliverance." Behind him, in the office, tacked to the bulletin board, was a napkin on which a cross had been drawn with red marker. Below that was a sheet from a legal pad, turned horizonal, proclaiming, "Jesus Loves You. He will Save You!" I couldn't read everything on the sheet below that, except for the word "GOD" in oversized letters in the center, with rays shooting out from it.

I had plenty of time to scope this out because the ticketing of the guy at the head of the line was apparently challenging the skills of the agent and the capabilities of the computer system. I learned from the two hispanic guys in front of me -- one of them wore a do-rag and sported a tattoo of a black widow spider and web on his neck, and the other grinned continuously -- that the guy had been at the counter for a half hour.

Eventually I got my ticket with five minutes to spare. My wife kissed me goodbye with tears in her eyes -- I later learned that it was not because we were parting, but because she was pained to leave me there in those conditions. "It's a thin line," she said.

(to be continued)

Leaving Iraq?

The ongoing discussion of when, and how, and with what rationale the United States will withdraw from Iraq floats in an atmosphere of surrealism. The Bush administration, and its neocon plotters and enablers, never intended to leave, ever. Oh, of course they futilely fondled their rabbit's feet in hopes of a stable, friendly Iraq, but not because stability would permit them to leave, but because it would permit them to stay.

You don't build permanent military bases, construct the world's largest embassy and push the Iraqi parliament to pass legislation gifting the country's oil wealth to western corporations if you intention is to say "best wishes" and wave bye-bye as you retreat into the sunset. Sure, they did not expect a military occupation to be required, but you don't convene secret "energy-policy" meetings, months before 9/11, where maps of Iraq's oil fields are studied and lists of corporate suitors for its petroleum wealth are compiled, without the intention to remain and plunder.

Just because their rabbit's feet turned out to be the monkey's paw is no reason to carry on the current fantasy debate, based, apparently, on perpetuating the image of a white-hat America, saving the Iraqis from a brutal dictator who built luxury palaces while children starved, and spreading the flowers of democracy.

Meet the new boss...

Faulty Intelligence

Today I screwed up a home improvement project. It's not a disaster; the big, jagged hole in the bathroom ceiling can be patched and, with a little work, no one will ever be aware of my battles to remove the original vent fan. How did I get myself in this predicament? I proceeded on false assumptions and inadequate investigation. I didn't assume that the fan extraction would be easy; I just assumed it would be possible, without creating a big, jagged hole in the ceiling.

I knew I was going to have to call on my old spelunking skills for multiple crawls and wriggles through the tight ranch-house attic, dragging crawl boards over the insulation. I was ready for that. And I have even installed a ventilation fan before, a project that included cutting an exhaust-duct hole through the exterior wall of the house. I had the tools, I had a plan. I had a timeline. On my timeline, I was at the point where I removed the old fan, expanded the dimensions of the existing opening in the ceiling, and installed the new fan, before priming the ceiling and then applying texture. I had even removed the old electric motor from the fan housing without incident.

So, imagine me -- a portly 57-year-old man in knee-pads, arriving at the fan location after much grunting, wheezing through a particle mask with sweat running down my glasses, dragging a bag of tools and a flashlight over the cellulose -- digged out the insulation around the fan to discover that the fan housing is attached, firmly attached, to thick metal supports that entend under the joists and over the ceiling. This is what I had failed to anticipate: The fan had been original equipment in the house, installed before the ceiling drywall. Can the housing be detached from the supports? Several minutes of grunting and straining with inadequate leverage tell me it can't, and that any attempt to do so expands the hole in the ceiling. Chunks of drywall are breaking off and thudding to the new ceramic tile floor below. (Excuse the uncouth transition from past tense to present)

Eventually, I resign myself to the obvious: I'm going to be forced to intentionally expand the hole, clear out to the joists on either side -- actually, to the outside of each joist so that a new rectangle of drywall can be screwed onto the joists, taped and mudded. The timeline is out the window. All I can do is retreat from the attic, with more grunting and wheezing, and shift my project in reverse.

And what is running through my mind, as I drag my crawlboards and toolbag ahead of me? George W. Bush and Condi Rice, of course. I may not be able to complete a bathroom remodel without a mishap, but I could not possibly have screwed up like those clowns. The average American has very little reason to be well-informed about ceiling fans, construction standards of the mid-'60s, security reports of the intelligence community, or the social/political/religious complexities of Iraq.

Now, most average Americans who know nothing about ceiling fans and mid-'60s ranch-house construction would have the sense -- unlike me -- to call in an expert. A remodeling contractor would have that job done in no time. There a bunches of them in the yellow pages. And if it turns out that the "expert" you contacted is incompetent -- much like yourself -- you can require that it be done right, or that they tear up the bill. If the plumber snakes your drain and fails to open it, there's no charge.

So, that's why I was thinking about Condi Rice after 9/11, the chief scrutity advisor of the President of the United States, saying that no one could imagine terrorists hijacking airplanes and flying them into buildings. Which is to say -- the country's top "expert" on such matters expressing ignorance of a terror scenario discussed frequently and seriously by the intelligence/security community for years, the subject of top-level reports.

That's why I was thinking about George W Bush invading Iraq while not knowing the difference between Shi'ites and Sunnis, and appreciating that the differences might be a problem. Not understanding that the probable outcome would be bloody, unmanageable chaos. Gotta have that oil. Gotta have those bases. Gotta be tough.

Yes, strange as it seems, that is what I was thinking as I wriggled back toward the attic access, preparing myself to face the rather mundane consequences of my domestic screw up. Trying to make myself feel better; rationalizing my failure. "I would never have screwed up that bad, in a situation with real, serious consequences, because I would never have invaded Iraq in the first place," I thought. Of course, the immediate problem was that I know more about Iraq than I know about ceiling fans. And, unfortunately, my immediate task involved a ceiling fan. Average folks have to deal with the big, jagged holes they create.

Why the top security advisor does not know about security -- and after that failure gets a promotion -- and why the "decider" is ignorant about what he is deciding, and compounds the disaster with more bad decisions? THEY have to answer for that.

Don't they?

Having to start somewhere

Seems strange to be beginning, when often it seems like the end. What you will find here: random thoughts about diverse topics. Angry political rants. Dismissive caricatures of those I think deserve to be dismissed. Comments on culture, the arts, the news, the weather, whatever. I will link to other things I stumble upon that I think others might enjoy -- or by which they might be enraged. I will also slip in news about the arts at the University of Iowa. I also take requests. And I DO promise to occasionally mutter and frequently be uncouth.