Vika blogged an essay by Vonnegut, Cold Turkey that rails against our addiction to oil and suggests that what is happening now is an empire desperately securing a last fix of petrochemicals before it has to go cold turkey.
What stands out for me is the anger of Vonnegut’s essay, an anger I find in myself. Such anger is a warning, but not rightious. This anger mirrors the fury Republican’s felt about Clinton – an anger that was more than partisan pretense – it included a deep sense of insult accompanied by an intolerance of the other intolerant.
As James Hynes describes Lamar, Texas in Kings of Infinite Space, there are three parts to disfunctional America (and this includes Canada):
There are the musicians, slackers, aging hippies, computer entrepreneurs, and academics in the arboreal old city north of the river; the Republican, Texas two-stepping, cowboy boot-wearing, SUV-driving Baptist middle managers in the sun-blasted suburban prairies south of the river; and the Hispanic and African-American gardeners, nurses, fast-food workers, and day laborers crowded into the crumbling streets east of the interstate, among the taquerieas and truck depots and tank farms. (p. 37)
Lets call them the Whigs, Tories, and Immigrants. These three ghettoes are closing on each other – the signs are that each have their story to tell of the other enclaves, each have their cultivated anger, each are erecting their own types of gates (ironic or ironware) and each have reason to avoid really engaging the other. Vonnegut voices the apocalyptic discourse of Whigs afraid of an empire managed by Tories.
The virtue of Hynes’ book is his refusal to let the Whigs off the hook, or for that matter, the Tories (I don’t know yet how he will deal with the third and disempowered class). He damns us both, and our intolerance of the other, to a Texas hell where, as in The Island of Dr. Moreau, we are asked again and again “Are we not Men?” by those we forgot.