Read Slaughterhouse 5 again the other day, in homage to the great man. Two things struck me like a plane hitting Sugarbush Mountain. When I first read it, way back when I wore a younger man's clothes, two wars were fresh in my mind. Hell, they were fresh in everyone's mind. Vonnegut was writing explicitly about Dresden, and he was writing implicitly about Vietnam.
The First World War had been the war to end all wars. Wrong. Then the Second World War had been the war to end all wars. Hell, after the horrors of Dresden (and Coventry) and Hiroshima, no sane person would go to war again. And yet, undeniably, there was Vietnam. And giant bombers were carpet bombing Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia, just as they had done in Germany. And small children, clothes burnt from their bodies, were running from the flames in Vietnam as in Germany. And we know even more now about the tonnage of bombs dropped in and around Vietnam - what was the figure that emerged the other day for Laos alone, more than in the Second World War in total? Vonnegut didn't know those figures, and some of the worst horrors were still to come after he wrote, but he sensed the truth, deep in his war-scarred marrow. Wars would 'keep coming like glaciers'.
And reading it now, rather than in the 1970s, his other metaphor strikes home with the force of Paul Lazzaro shooting your pecker off. The only safe place, the only place where people can live, for a little longer, is the slaughterhouse. All around, in their houses, and cellars, and shelters, the people of Dresden were dead, but the only survivors were the prisoners in the slaughterhouse, the place the bombs missed. These days Dresden is a metaphor for Iraq, and not just for that war, but for the world. As destruction seems to spread everywhere in Iraq, except in Green Zone 5, so it seems to be engulfing the world as a whole. Mad people are destroying Chechnya, Lebanon, Israel, Afghanistan, Gaza, Darfur; smashing the Twin Towers, and Spanish trains, and Bali night clubs, and London buses, and Pakistani hotels. Instead of being repulsed by earlier wars, as Vonnegut thought, we seem to have embraced war, endless war and rumors of war, as a fact of life. The only survivors may be in the slaughter house, the only sane people in the mad house. When are the dolphins going to leave and thank us for all the fish? Hopefully before they and the whales are destroyed by the Japanese, in that renewed orgy of killing that is whaling - something else we thought had ended forever.
And the other thing that struck me with the force of inoffensive bangs from German rifles far away? That if a time traveller from 2007 had been talking about war to Harrison Starr, the movie maker, in the 1960s, the conversation would have been quite different:
"'You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war books?'
'No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?'
'I say, "Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?"'
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that too."
I bet Vonnegut, great ironist, appreciated the irony of that blast from the past in recent years. Yet another recent study (http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/23/1396/) underlines how easy it has been to stop the glaciers. Glaciers in the Andes melting ten times faster than they were 20 years ago. Glaciers everywhere melting, retreating, being forced remorselessly up mountains until they disappear off the top (along with mountain bird and mammal species like Pikas and Pigmy Possums, going, going, going ...). Now of course, the conversation would be:
"'You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-global warming books?'
'No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?'
'I say, "Why don't you write an anti-war book instead?"'
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be global warming, that it was as easy to stop as war. I believe that too."
And perhaps the only place where small groups of survivors may find refuge from a warming planet is in giant baker's ovens. Trouble is, when they emerge, blinking in the harsh sun, there is unlikely to be a wagon with food and wine, coming to rescue them. Us. So we go.
And the mountain birds say 'Poo-tee-weet?'
Just like TS Eliot (and Kurt Vonnegut), on my Watermelon Blog at http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick -
'We will not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time'