The World Is Darker Without Him

Okay, yes, I'm a member of the generation that came of age and into consciousness with the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. The two novels that ushered me into an adult awareness of the world were Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five and Joseph Heller's Catch 22. Not much seems to have changed in the world since those guys wrote those books. I've read all of Vonnegut's books, except his last one, A Man Without a Country, and I haven't read that one because I knew it would BE the last one, and I didn't want to face that fact. Now it is indeed a fact. Vonnegut died today, ostensibly from injuries sustained in a fall.

But I bet he was more than ready to leave the planet.

Here's an excerpt from that last book, Custodians of Chaos, in which he meditates with horror on contemporary US politics. Here, from In These Times, a political journal for which he wrote during his last years, a compilation of his contributions to the journal. Cold Turkey is my personal favorite, and I'm pretty sure I've referred to it in previous posts

Never an optimistic fellow, he grew more and more pessimistic about our future with every passing year. A surprising number of his essays in the group from In These Times deal with the way we've effectively destroyed planet Earth, quotes like this (rom the essay The End is Near): litter many of his final works.

Fossil fuels, so easily set alight! Yes, and as Bush and Kerry are out campaigning, we are presently touching off nearly the very last whiffs and drops and chunks of them. All lights are about to go out. No more electricity. All forms of transportation are about to stop, and the planet Earth will soon have a crust of skulls and bones and dead machinery.

And nobody can do a thing about it. It’s too late in the game. Don’t spoil the party, but here’s the truth: We have squandered our planet’s resources, including air and water, as though there were no tomorrow, so now there isn’t going to be one.

To his abiding sorrow about the horrors of the human atrocity of war, in his final decade he added the new sorrow of awareness that the game was in all liklihood really finally entirely up. He was a man who could often make painful awareness of the horrors that surround us amazingly funny...in a painful kind of way. I think this was a man whom more of us should have listened to more closely. Things might have turned out better. It's a dark world, for sure, and it's gonna be a lot darker now, for me anyway.

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