I Don't Get the Hype

I don't find JFK's assassination overly interesting. Unfortunate, I know, since we are beginning a four hundred page book about conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination. But it just doesn't draw me in. I do find conspiracy theories interesting. I like to hear about the NSA and the ways that the government is controlling our lives as much as anybody else. But present conspiracies are more interesting than past conspiracies.

One of the reasons for my apathy is that there is nothing about the government's version of the story (the little that I know about it) that I find difficult to believe. I don't find it hard to believe that a 24-year-old nobody with little education and no real role in any government or military activities could kill the President. I recognize that during Kennedy's presidency, people viewed him as almost a deity. He was loved, revered, even though some of his policies were questionable. JFK and Jackie were role models for the entire country. But he was only human, and the people who were guarding him were human. At its core, it was one man killing another, something that has happened countless times over the course of history. He was a political leader--political leaders are killed all the time, whether by rebels or complete lunatics.

I also do not find it that hard to believe that the government might have been behind that. I grew up post-9/11. I have grown up in a society that does not entirely trust its government. Recent scandals with the NSA have made the government even more suspect. No one I know has complete faith in the government. There are many countries that have corrupt governments; as cynical as this may sound, I do not find it that difficult to see that ours might be one of them.

Finally, I believe that no one will really know what happened, and that what happened in the country after JFK's assassination is more interesting that the conspiracy theories that surround the actual murder. JFK was killed--that is terrible. But the political implications of his death, rather than the governments' possible role in it, are more important to understand because they have led us to where we are today. Contemplating the details of JFK's assassination has gotten us nowhere.

How Kevin and Dana's Relationship Applies to Affirmative Action

During panel presentations this week, there was a paper entitled "Do I look like someone you can come home to from wherever you may be going: Remapping Interracial Anxiety in Octavia Butler's Kindred", and one of the author's arguments was that it is impossible to be colorblind--people must recognize the history of racial differences and conflicts that have occurred in this country. It struck me that this argument is relevant to the questions about affirmative action that have been coming up in college admissions discussions lately. Recently, about eight states have virtually banned the use of race as a factor in college admissions, and the Supreme Court has made it clear that if colleges intend to consider race, they must prove that "considering race is absolutely necessary to maintaining diversity". A court case last year, Fisher v. University if Texas, ruled that the use of race in determining college admissions was legal, but it might be brought up again in court with the different ruling. Some people argue that affirmative action is not a good thing because our goal should be a color-blind society rather than one that is aware of race and working to make different races more equal in education, and later income and job opportunities.

However, in the light of this book, it seems like bad logic. Butler seems to be saying that examining the past is a good thing for both the majority and minorities through Kevin and Dana's relationship. At first, there seem to be some unspoken tensions between Kevin and Dana; although they try to ignore them, they both realize that they do come from different backgrounds. When they spoke to their families, they essentially rejected them; it would be difficult not to feel some regret and tension about that. After they come back from the 1800s they seem to understand each other more, because they both realize that their backgrounds and their histories are very different. This applies to affirmative action because the history between whites and other races in America has always been filled with tension, and must be understood. While people do not like talking in terms of race, that is often the only way to address the issue. In principle, affirmative action at least recognizes this history, rather than trying to put it behind us. It is a gesture that says we want people to be more equal because we were not always and that is not right.

Rufus: Man or Monster?

Like Dana, I find it hard to not forgive Rufus, even when he has done something horrible and manipulative, so it surprises me that everyone in the class seems to have hardly any sympathy for him. He is actually in quite a bad situation; he grew up with a crazy woman for a mother, and a cold father, and his only "friends" as a child--Nigel and Alice--are unavailable to him (for friendship and love respectively) as he grows older. (Some people will probably complain at this point that I am trying the lessen the cruelty of the slave owners; I recognize that they did many terrible things, but the slaveholders were still complex people). Today we would probably look at his erratic behavior and, provided he wasn't enslaving anyone in the present time, diagnose him with a variety of psychiatric disorders related to neglect and identity confusion. I don't think he is bad to the core, and that is why I still sometimes find him sympathetic.

Strangely, I found it harder to like Kevin when he comes back after five years in the nineteenth century than to like Rufus throughout the novel. It must have been the contrast between Kevin's earlier kindness and his harshness when he returns to the present. The situation with Kevin is also more confused because although he usually seems very progressive and egalitarian, he exhibits flashes on strange behavior that makes you question his relationship with Dana. His insistence about her typing his manuscripts makes him seem less egalitarian and modern than he may have seemed at first. Of course, Rufus is no more predictable, but his unpredictability is expected because he lived in a time where it was okay to be kind sometimes and cruel other times. This makes him almost easier to understand. 

Finally, I'd like to comment on a remark that was made in class last week. Someone said something about whether or not Rufus was a "monster". I would like to argue that he cannot be a monster because Kindred is not a book about Dana's relationship with a monster. This is not a story about a monster, because a monster can exist in many time, and what makes this book so complicated and interesting in the effect of an era on a person's personality. I don't like the phrase "a man of his time" --it seems like a cop-out, a way to avoid passing judgement or blame--but I think there is a lot of validity to the phrase. Rufus was formed by his time, and although he has unique characteristics (we don't know if he was kinder or crueler than most of the men around him, though he was certainly different), I cannot imagine that he would act the same way in 1976 as he did in 1815.

Billy Pilgrim Reaches Nirvana

"The guide invited the crowd to imagine that they were looking across a desert at a mountain range on a day that was twinkling bright and clear. They could look at a peak or a bird or a cloud, at a stone right in front of them, or even down into a canyon behind them. But among them was this poor Earthling, and his head was encased in a steel sphere which he could never take off. There was only one eye hole through which he could look, and welded to that eye hole were six feet of pipe."

The Tralfamadorians believe that Billy is sadly limited by his inability to see that all of time is always occurring and that time itself is not at all linear. But Billy has a much better understanding of the Tralfamadorian idea of time. He cannot see all of time at the same time, but he has become unstuck in time, allowing him to understand that the order of events does not matter. This limited understanding seems to us almost like enlightenment (as in Buddhist enlightenment), even though it is not nearly as sophisticated as the Tralfamadorian viewpoint.

Englightment is a contested term; no one really seems to understand what it means. Western culture has adopted the idea of Buddhist enlightenment to use it in self-help books, but there is a very deep religious tradition based on it in both Buddhism and Christianity. The Buddhist idea of enlightenment seems more in line with Billy's attitudes.So what is Buddhist enlightenment? There are multiple terms for enlightenment that come from the various branches of Buddhism in different regions.

Kensho--"seeing one's true essence".
Bodhi--"to have woken up and understood".
Samyaksambodhi--"highest perfect awakening".
Satori--"comprehension, understanding".

Buddha's enlightenment involved three knowledges. He understood his past lives, how karma and reincarnation worked, and the four noble truths (the truth of suffereing, the orgin of suffereing, how to stop suffering, and the truth behind following that path). In this way, he "attained supreme security from bondage". It has been described as an awakening to some larger reality that most of us never understand.

Billy Pilgrim seems to have reached enlightenment in many ways. He has not escaped suffering so much as accepted and thus escaped it. Billy was a prisoner of war. He was in Dresden. Later, he was in a plane crash and his wife died in the same week. He has had his share of suffering, and he has lived through it. He does not let the sadness take him over on a daily basis; when it does surface, he cannot understand what it is about.For example, it takes him a long time to understand why the barbershop quartet affects him so strongly. "Unexpectedly, Billy Pilgrim found himself upset by the song and the occasion. he had never had an old gang, old sweethearts and pals, but he missed one anyway, as the quartet made slow agonized experiments with chords...Billy had powerfully psychosomatic responses to the changing chords. His mouth filled wit the taste of lemonade, and his face became grotesque, as though he really were being stretched on the torture engine called the rack" (173). The effects of his suffering have made their mark on him, but he worked through it, and as a result of becoming unstuck in time he seems to have reached a strange serenity.

Billy accepts everything. For example, when his father throws him into the pool, he does not attempt to paw his way to the surface: "...he was at the bottom of the pool, and there was beautiful music everywhere. He lost conciousness, but the music went on. He dimly sensed that somebody was rescuing him. Billy resented that" (44).When he was being shot at, he stood there and gave the sniper another chance. He lets his daughter make him feel like a child by patronizing him without getting upset. Everything just seems to drift by him, and he looks at it, understands that it has to happen that way because the moment is structured that way, and lets it go. In fact, this attitude is similar to the attitude that you are supposed to try to adopt when meditating, a practice that is intimately connected to enlightenment. When thoughts come into your head, you are supposed to let them pass you by without judging them, in an attempt to eventually become almost thoughtless. It seems that maybe Billy is living in a constant state of meditation., reaching a state of uninvolved presence that allows him to view the world more calmly.

Wayne and Sinatra in Slaughterhouse-Five?

I was reading through an interview with Kurt Vonnegut in the online version of the Paris Review (the link is at the bottom) and saw that Vonnegut had originally intended to tell his story as "a classy adventure". He really did intend to create a book that would be have roles for Frank Sinatra and John Wayne at the beginning of the writing process:

Others had so much more to write about. I remember envying Andy Rooney, who jumped into print at that time; I didn't know him, but I think he was the first guy to publish his war story after the war; it was called Air Gunner. Hell, I never had any classy adventure like that...Then a book by David Irving was published about Dresden, saying it was the largest massacre in European history. I said, By God, I saw something after all! I would try to write my war story, whether it was interesting or not, and try to make something out of it. I describe that process a little in the beginning of Slaughterhouse Five; I saw it as starring John Wayne and Frank Sinatra. Finally, a girl called Mary O’Hare, the wife of a friend of mine who’d been there with me, said, “You were just children then. It’s not fair to pretend that you were men like Wayne and Sinatra, and it’s not fair to future generations, because you’re going to make war look good.” That was a very important clue to me.

It surprised me that Vonnegut actually thought that he would right the typical war novel; it wasn't really even his intention to write an antiwar novel when he began. The first chapter had not given me that impression at all. I was also surprised that his conversation with Mary O'hare was true. The first chapter is Vonnegut speaking about his experience, but I didn't realize the extent to which he is present. Even the name Mary O'Hare is the same. Another comment interested me as well, all about his experience in the war. When the interviewer asked "What did you do when you got to the front?", he answered, "I imitated various war movies I’d seen."
These two statements made me realize that Slaughterhouse-Five would have been very different if Vonnegut had written it earlier on, just after he had come out of the war. Most of the war books and movies of the time starred soldiers who were patriotic, brave, masculine, and eager to fight on the front lines for their countries (and usually featuring large weapons to demonstrate the power of the United States and the other Allies). If Vonnegut had written Slaughterhouse-Five while he was caught up in the feeling of success of the postwar years, I think he might have written it like a war movie. I wouldn't want to say that he wasn't deeply affected and disturbed by the war at that time; he probably was--I think it would be hard to come back from the war without being kind of messed up. But he was still very young when he came back, and did not, even according to him, fully understand the gravity of what he had witnessed in Dresden.

When the city was demolished I had no idea of the scale of the thing . . . Whether this was what Bremen looked like or Hamburg, Coventry . . . I’d never seen Coventry, so I had no scale except for what I’d seen in movies.

Vonnegut waited all the way until 1968-1969 to write Slaughterhouse-Five. This was right before the Vietnam war, and there was a lot of anti-war protesting at the time which also might have influenced him to write about his experiences from an anti-war perspective. As an older adult, he better understood how young he was when he went to war, especially after he talked to Mary O'Hare. 

She freed me to write about what infants we really were: seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. We were baby-faced, and as a prisoner of war I don’t think I had to shave very often. I don’t recall that that was a problem. 

I don't that Vonnegut could have seen that if he was writing the book in his twenties, because people cannot see how naive and young they are--they can only look back and realize how little they knew and understood in the past. We would undoubtedly be reading a very different book if Vonnegut had written Slaughterhouse-Five in the forties; in fact, I don't think we would be reading it, because it would most likely be less controversial and less creative in its approach.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3605/the-art-of-fiction-no-64-kurt-vonnegut

The Aten-Aton Connection

I had no idea that the group called the Atonists, to which Hinckle and Hierophant 1 belong, comes from the group of Egyptians who worshiped Aton in the 1300s BC. This was because I've usually seen the name spelled Aten--had the group been called the Atenists, I think it would have been much more obvious.

I think that the most interesting part about this is the reversal of the accepted religions over time. During the time when Ahkenaten was forcing his people to worship Aton as the only God, religions with many gods were more common, and the pantheons of popular gods and goddesses often changed. There were some twenty-nine gods and goddesses in ancient Egypt, and they became more or less popular depending on what the people needed spiritual protection from. When forced to worship Aton, the people rebelled and eventually overthrew Ahkenaten's rule. Later, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism became the most prominent religions, all worshiping essentially the same God, although they called him by different names: God, El, and Allah. Of the 86% of people who consider themselves to be religious, 54% of those define themselves as monotheists, and the some most powerful nations in the world, though often theoretically secular, are built on Christianity and Islam.

As Jes Grew emerges, people are beginning to fight back against the Atonists and their strict rules, just like the Egyptians fougt for their right to worship their many gods. The religion of the Atonists does not, according to Reed, allow them to be close to nature or to sing the right songs or to know the true words. They cannot dance right, just like Set, while the people who are surrendering to Jes Grew are returning to the old ways, to the gods of Egypt and Africa. They are connected to nature and the cycles of the world. This does have basis in the religions; monotheistic gods are usually considered to be watching us from afar, creating everything but not getting involved in it anymore or having feelings, whereas gods from polytheistic religions are more fallible, emotional, and involved in the lives of their believers.

I can definitely see  the connections between the Atonists of Ancient Egypt and the Atonists of the modern world, and it is interesting to see how it could have been carried on through the ages. However, the book does seem to take a very negative view towards the Atonists. This was clear from the beginning, but this connection makes them seem even darker and more misguided. Ahkenaten's rule was a time of great conflict in ancient Egypt, and although monotheistic religions today have caused many problems and wars, they do have more merit that Reed is giving them credit for.

From Rags to Riches in Just a Few Pages

Tateh's life changes so suddenly that it is almost unbelievable. Before he sells his little flip books to the Franklin Novelty Shop in (page 133), he is struggling to support himself and his daughter by working on the street or in the mills for very little pay. Then we hear nothing about him until page 254, when we meet the Baron Ashkenazy and find out that he "had produced dozens of movie books for the Franklin Novelty Comapny. Then he had designed a magic lantern apparatus on which strips of paper printed with silhouettes turned on a wheel...the owners of the Franklin Novelty offered to make Tateh a partner...he sold his interests and went into the movie business...he invented a baronry for himself...his child was dressed as beautifully as a princess. He wanted to drive from her memory every tenement stench and filthy immigrant street. he would buy her light and sun and clean wind of the ocean for the rest of her life" (258-259). That was a long quote, but overall the time spent discussing Tateh's success was just a few pages. This makes it seem like it all happened very fast, although we do not actually know how much time passed between the two parts of his story.

In any case, Doctorow is clearly saying something about the immigrant experience. He even comments directly on it several times, making somewhat ironic-sounding generalizations about success in America as an immigrant. For example, he says "thus did the artist point his life along the lines of flow of American energy. Workers would strike and die but in the streets of cities an entrepreneur could cook sweet potatoes in a bucket of hot coals and sell them for a penny or two" (134). The narrator seems disappointed in Tateh in some ways. Instead of fighting for his rights, he made a living however he could, and succeeded at doing so. he escaped bad conditions, but he didn't work for the greater good. It is easy to imagine a mill worker feeling resentful towards Tateh; Tateh got out and made it big, while the mill worker has protested and been part of the I.W.W. and won against the mill owners, and has only gained "a few more pennies in wage" (130).

Doctorow also seems to be making fun of the idea that you could easily be successful in America by making it seem so easy. I'm not exactly sure why, but it seems pretty clear that Doctorow is not saying "Look, it really is that easy for immigrants to start their own businesses and become really rich". The speed with which Doctorow relates his rise makes it seem unreal, like a dream. Probably it was a dream for most of the immigrants who came to America, and remained one for their entire lives. Doctorow is saying that it was not a reality for most people by illustrating one of the people for which it was a reality.

However, it does seem like the narrator feels some admiration towards Tateh. He is not portrayed as a weak and sort of silly character, like Younger Brother is at the beginning of the book. He seems serious but intelligent before his transformation, and ebullient and jovial afterwards. He had "constructed [his happiness] without help", which is something he can be proud of. he is also clearly an innovative and enterprising man. Thus, although he is in the novelty and entertainment business, his success is respected and Tateh himself is respected.

Overall, Doctorow's depiction of Tateh's rise has mixed meanings. In may ways, the narrator seems to have the perspective of a person who had been born and raised in the U.S. but who worked in a mill or other factory and could not figure out a way to increase his wealth, status, or living conditions. He is jealous and annoyed that Tateh has managed to get out of the system rather than trying to improve it, admiring of his "pluck and luck" that enabled him to succeed, and, in the back of his mind, cognizant that such a rise does not happen to many people.