I rolled my eyes as I read the message. Then I went to Powell’s and bought it. On the bus I read the first few pages, which struck me as gimmicky. It concerns, among other things, the first atomic bomb, an island nation in the Caribbean and a religion called Bokononism that has, of course, its own vocabulary. Nonsense, I thought as the bus glided across the Burnside Bridge, but I kept reading and I’m happy to report that while I don’t necessarily love the book, I do like it.
Here, then, are a couple of passages I read on Sunday morning. The narrator meets a couple on an airplane. The wife had written a letter to the New York Times, the publication of which causes her husband to lose his job with the U.S. State Department. The wife explains that the letter she wrote expressed many negative sentiments about U.S. foreign policy, primarily that she was “ … very upset about how Americans couldn’t imagine what it was like to be something else, to be something else and proud of it.” Then her husband chimes in, quoting directly from his wife’s letter: “Americans … are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.”
Cat’s Cradle was published in 1963. On the last Sunday evening of the first month of 2011, I sat in my nice hot bath and listened to 60 Minutes. The first two segments of the show were dedicated to an ‘exclusive’ and ‘extensive’ interview with the Julian Assange, the Australian guy from WikiLeaks. The master of ceremonies was Steve Croft, whose pre-election interviews with Barack Obama were conducted with sycophantic tendencies embarrassing enough they almost put him in the same league as Charlie Rose. In addition to leaking from the diplomacy realm, WikiLeaks toyed with the financial institutions briefly, which made the Bank of America quite uncomfortable. Steve Croft, who apparently doesn’t have much experience interviewing Australians, seemed to think it was his job to chastise Julian Assange for toying with the almighty and then for admitting, repeatedly, and quite clearly, that he’d enjoyed doing so. Then how, Steve Croft asked incredulously – and this is where he really showed his journalistic chops, in a God Bless America sort of way – can the face of WikiLeaks be surprised that the U.S. is trying to have him extradited? After all, Steve Croft said, “you screwed with the forces of nature.”
Forces of nature? Good God, I thought. Has 60 Minutes off-shored its editing department?
But it all reminded me of why I like to read fiction, even fiction by Kurt Vonnegut: It’s all so familiar. The exchange reminded me, of course, of that vanished frontier I’d read of earlier in the day in a book published before I was born. Out there, vanished though it may be, the horses roaring across the frontier landscape are ridden by bankers and diplomats who aren’t mere humans but have been elevated, empowered if you will, with a kind of indisputable authority once reserved for tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes.
