Stuck with Billy Pilgrim

When I was very little, I watched all or part of a movie on TV -- I think with a babysitter -- that I remember as a kind of combination western and horror movie. A group of men entered some kind of cave or underground realm that trapped them for (I think...) the movie's duration in a kind of phantasmagoric horror. At the end, they finally get out, and there's a (I think..) long shot of them riding horseback through a (I think...) western landscape.  My companion-babysitter said at that point (I think...) "it's about to start all over again...they're going to go back in," or words to (I think...) that effect.

Two things about the near-static image I have of this film have stayed with me. One is that wormhole notion -- that the unwary protagonists are in a kind of chronological feedback loop, where they keep reliving the same horror over and over without knowing it. There's a Star Trek/Next Generation episode playing on that horror, beginning and ending with a poker round.

Two feelings about Slaughterhouse-Five

As I've mentioned before, as a teenager I was a serial reader of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five.  When I read this little frame-up from a long essay on Vonnegut on the Dish, it was an absolute eureka:

William Deresiewicz argues Slaughterhouse-Five is "not about time travel and flying saucers, it’s about PTSD":

The novel is framed by Vonnegut’s account of trying to write about Dresden—of trying to remember Dresden. But a different kind of memory became the novel’s very fabric. "He tried to remember how old he was, couldn’t." This is Billy the optometrist. "He tried to remember what year it was. He couldn’t remember that, either." For the traumatized soldier, the war is always present, and the present is always the war.

He is unstuck in time in the sense that he is stuck in time. His life is not linear, but radiates instead from a single event like the spokes of a wheel. Everything feels like a dream: a very bad dream. The novel is framed the way it is because Vonnegut, too, was traveling in time. He needed to make himself a part of the story because he already was a part of the story.

I contain multitudes, and not in a good way

As I mentioned once before on this blog, Kurt Vonnegut got me early (at about age 14) with his vision of time in Slaughterhouse Five, and it's stayed with me: all moments always have existed and always will exist; to be finite in time is no more remarkable than to be finite in space. This raises the question: when you die, in whose "when" are you dead? Even for a monotheist, there's no clear answer. For millennia, theologians have asserted that all moments are equally present to God. You're only 'dead' in the perception of those who live 'after' you -- and they will soon be dead, and so it goes. But our personal timelines are not the universe's. 

A Kling-free future prosperity?

I sure hope Arnold Kling is wrong about the future of employment and wealth distribution in the U.S. --  and I suspect that he does too, as he seems gloomy about his own prognosis. Overviewing a long-range and recently accelerated squeeze on mid-level jobs,, he envisions an American society rather like that portrayed in Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano (1952), in which a small uber-class of engineers rules a society in which the masses are consigned to "reeks and recs," a kind of permanent WPA for the superannuated.

Kling suggests that increases in productivity may no longer generate new kinds of jobs in sufficient numbers:

Quick trip to Tralfamadore

Lightning round: trying to catch a quick chain of thought/association:

a) Read:  "Mayor Bloomberg, who just lost his beloved mother, also used his influence with Republicans to move the needle."
b)  Thought: strange, to lose your mother when you're yourself pushing 70...must concentrate the mind on mortality.  Then thought....

Jews, Gays, and History

Defending Andrew Sullivan's use of the term "final solution" to describe experiments aiming to prevent homosexuality by tampering with hormones in utero, Goldblog free-associates a further link between that  pair of strange, pardon the expression, bedfellows, both victims of Nazi hate:

I've come to the conclusion that some people are gay because God specifically wanted them be to gay. Don't ask me how I came to this; don't ask me to explain my thinking (yet) and don't ask me to explain what I think to be God's purpose is in this case. I can't quite figure out God's reason for creating Jews, much less gays.

Maybe Richard Florida can help; he's suggested that gays are an essential element in "the creative class: a fast-growing, highly educated, and well-paid segment of the workforce on whose efforts corporate profits and economic growth increasingly depend."  Sound familiar?  Jews are another reviled out-group that have catalyzed economic and cultural development in the city.  As medieval kings and dukes periodically courted Jews, Florida has suggested various means by which ambitious city fathers and employers should -- and perhaps semi-consciously, in some cases, have --  provided amenities that attract "creative class" types, who are disproportionately gay.

For the theologically minded, is it such a leap to suggest that God created Jews and gays to prick forward human progress?  And for those more inclined toward amorphous rationalist mystery, that cracker-barrel philosopher Kurt Vonnegut, in Slaughterhouse Five, gropes in a congruent vein toward the unseen dynamics of human sexual-social life:

One of the biggest moral bombshells handed to Billy by the Tralfamadorians, incidentally, had to do with sex on Earth. They said their flying-saucer crews had identified no fewer than seven sexes on Earth, each essential to reproduction. Again: Billy couldn't possible imagine what five of those seven sexes had to do with the making of a baby, since they were sexually active only in the fourth dimension.

The Tralfamadorians tried to give Billy clues that would help him imagine sex in the invisible dimension. They told him that there could be no Earthling babies without male homosexuals. There could be babies without female homosexuals. There couldn't be babies without women over sixty-five years old. There could be babies without men over sixty-five. There couldn't be babies without other babies who had lived an hour or less after birth. And so on.

It was gibberish to Billy (p. 114, Dell edition).

 Perhaps we can credit Florida with some 4-dimensional thinking:

There is no one-size-fits-all model for a successful people climate. The members of the creative class are diverse across the dimensions of age, ethnicity and race, marital status, and sexual preference. An effective people climate needs to emphasize openness and diversity, and to help reinforce low barriers to entry. Thus, it cannot be restrictive or monolithic. 

 Go for it, Goldblog. Gay and straight created he them....