The Kraemenator

Recently, this happened:

You might recognize those two people as William and Kate, the royal couple who got married on April 29th. It was a wonderful event celebrating the love between two people. It received international news coverage and was in everybody’s hearts and mind.

Meanwhile, the death toll in Libya had reached possibly as high as 30 000 (10 times the number of people that the 9/11 attacks killed). Gaddafi has continued to shell citizens in an attempt to gain control of the city of Misrata, killing indiscriminately between innocents and  rebels. When the aid ship Red Star docked in the harbor of the city to evacuate refugees, it came under heavy shelling, killing 5 people. Two of whom were children. There are at least two sniper nests near the heart of the city who are reportedly “…in addition to attacking civilians, are targeting doctors, nurses, and the injured in hospitals.“. Gaddafi has even gone so far as to use cluster bombs, weapons banned in most parts of the world. But these powerful weapons were not used against the rebel bases, they were instead fired into the middle of residential areas, killing and wounding untold numbers of people.

And amidst all of these horrors, the National Transitional Council is planning for the foundation of a new country. They plan to draft a new constitution and put it into a referendum, to be accepted or rejected by the people of Libya. Once Gaddafi has been defeated, the council plans to hold public elections and even now is asking the UN to oversee municipal elections shortly within the liberated areas under their control.

The city of Misrata

And what were people talking about last Friday? That’s right, the royal wedding.

@ Stephanie and every one who commented on her post

You have just read these words. Did you make a conscience decision to read them or is the universe and time structured in such a way that you had no choice but to read these words? That, I believe is the question at the heart of Slaughterhouse Five (albeit, somewhat oversimplified).

The concept of inevitability is certainly popular in human culture. Many different religions believe that their deity has a “plan” for people and any attempt to change the will of god is futile. Even if you are not religious and “believe” in science, the idea of inevitability still persists. According to science every  effect that occurs has a cause. Since the universe is governed by a specific set of laws, and since neither matter nor energy is thrown into the universe willy-nilly (everything was created at the moment of the big bang) then theoretically, the future has already been decided for us. I, for one, am not comforted by the possibility that my future choices have been made by future me already because of the way the world is constructed.

This, of course, brings up the question of whether we have free will or not. Personally, I think this depends on your definition of free will. You, as a person will always have a choice in what you do, however, your reaction to certain events will be pre-determined by who you are. For example, if you love your family very much, and all of a sudden they die, you have the option to feel happy overjoyed; you have free will, but you won’t, because you loved your family.

Some people who commented on the post brought up the idea that “…if they REALLY knew they were going to lose [at a war], for sure, they wouldn’t try at all.” Meaning that, if  Country A knew that their attempt to defended themselves from country B would be futile, then they wouldn’t even try and would probably just surrender (of course, they might not for the same reasons that there are kamikaze pilots). However, if they indeed surrender, then the 100% accurate prediction that they had would turn out to be false (you can’t lose [by fighting] at a war if you surrender right away). This implies that the future can be changed simply by knowing what it is, but then, if you know what the future is, and then change it, then it isn’t really the future anymore is it?. Though I’m now getting into complicated physics and I don’t think that Vonnegut was trying to explain String Theory through his tale of Billy Pillgrim.

However, I do think he was trying to explain the nature of life. I think he compares time to a mountain range because, like moments in time mountain ranges are so diverse. As humans, we go through time, travel across the mountain range without being able to see whats beyond. You might find sheer – seemingly insurmountable - cliffs at one point and a nice, natural trail to follow at another. There will be breathtakingly beautiful views, and ugly landslides on the mountain, just as in life there will be moments of hope and inspiration as well as times of death and despair. But, if you had the power to look at the entire mountain range, instead of just the part that you were walking across, would you choose to look at the landslides from the bottom of the valley or the beautiful forests from the peak?

And as we can look into the past that is our memories, what will we chose to focus on, the landslides or the forests, the beauty or the horror?

They made Billy get out of the wagon and come look at the horses. When Billy saw the condition of his means of transportation, he burst into tears. He hadn’t cried about anything else in the war.

Later on, as a middle-aged optometrist, he would weep quietly and privately sometimes, but never make loud boohooing noises.

Finding the theme (or themes) within a book, or any work of literary art is difficult at the best of times. Usually, I try to approach this daunting task by finishing the book and then attempting to make sense of what I’ve just read so that I can come up with a theme (or “moral” if you want) that I can justify based on the particular order of words that the author used in his book.

Meaning within words

While this approach works most of the time, it’s not very time efficient, and often when I try to produce a theme statement by simply reading a book and then trying to reflect on the whole thing at once, the statement either becomes very confusing or not very well supported. So this time, I decided to start looking for “themes” as I read the book or, more specifically, for passages that, basically summarize the entire plot line in a paragraph or two. I believe that  the quote above is such a passage.

In my last post, I talked about how the book seemed to be trying to convey a sense of inevitability, that things are the way they are “just because”. The quote that I found talks about the main character, Billy, crying over the poor conditions of the horses that he is using to get around. He is not particularly fond of these horses, in fact, he had seen the horses for the first time very recently, yet, it is the situation of these horses that brings tears to his eyes. He was captured as a prisoner of war, shuttled around Germany POW camps and treated like human cargo. He saw his fellow Americans die by the hand of the German firing squads and saw an entire city of civilians turned into a moonscape by allied bombers. But he did not cry about those things.

I think that Billy was struck  by the situation of these horses more than he was affected by the death of his fellow human beings for a simple reason. The war in Europe had just finished when this quote takes place. The end of a war is a time for celebration and a time of joy, especially if you are  POW belonging to the winning side. So Billy was happy then, and rightfully so. He probably felt that all was right with the world and that things were good. But the horses shocked him into a harsher reality, one where tragedy occurs to the most innocent of people(or in this case, animals).

I may or may not be mistaken, but I think that the author is trying really hard to convey the fact that (in simpler terms) “stuff happens”. I think that he believes that there will always be horrors amidst wonders, tragedy amidst celebration, but there are also wonders amidst horrors and a silver lining in every cloud to use a metaphor.

The character seems to come to the realization that, things generally aren’t worth getting upset about, because things like it will happen again, and there is no use grieving over hard times when life also has so many wonderful things to offer.

To use Mr. Jackson’s analogy of Aliens coming to Earth and finding nothing but a copy of Slaughterhouse five left, I believe that said aliens believe that humans wanted them to look past the bad things in life, and to focus on it’s pleasures.

If you ask me about the book “Slaughterhouse Five”, I will tell you that it reminds me of a pseudo random number generator (a program that creates seemingly random numbers, although after many repetitions, a pattern begins to emerge). At first glance, and indeed throughout the first few chapters of the book, there seems to be no apparent linear (as in one event relates to another) plot or even any sort of relation between Billy’s time-jumps and the overarching story of his life during WW2.

Though after reading the first few chapters, I started to pick out some meaning from the madness that was Slaughterhouse Five.

As I’ve mentioned, at first glance, the book doesn’t seem to have any sort of overall story, metaphor or message. It’s really hard to take a book about WW2 as a deep dark gloomy horrors-of-war type book when every second page the main character jumps around in time to random points in his life that don’t really relate to what’s going on in the war at the moment. The only thing that stood out to me was that whenever something shocking happened (A.K.A, someone dying) two things would happen. The first being that Billy Pillgrim would seem to take the news in stride, as if someone dying happened everyday and he had become immune to the shock that most people experience when a fellow human being dies. The second, is the author would say “so it goes”. “On the eighth day the hobo died. So it goes.” “…He cradled his head in his arms as he died. So it goes”.

So it goes. Those three words could sum up all that I’ve read so far, and, I have a feeling that they could sum up the rest of the book to. That simple sentence speaks volumes to me. It seems to say that, things happen, and the world moves on. There’s nothing you can do to change events. Things are the way they are not for any  particular reason, but simply because that’s the way the are.

Dwelling on the whys and why nots of life is a fruitless endeavorer. Wondrous things have happened. And terrible things too. They will happen again. You may as well enjoy the good moments and get through the bad.

History has been. The present is, and the future will be.