About Excrement Hitting the Air Conditioning
Post 915:
We live in strange times.
A statement thought, said or written by everyone ever. Good satire helps remind us of that. Kurt Vonnegut’s Hocus Pocus is a nice example. And it’s a Halloween-type title, so I went with it.
I don’t know where it rates in the order of his work, but its probably somewhere in the middle. Meaning, it’s better than pretty much anything else you could read.
The story is wild and all over the place, as is his method. If you’ve ever been in on an inside joke, that might give you an idea of how the story goes. At first its just a few little things, but then through self-referencing, repetition, and rhythm, the joke builds and takes new forms. They are scathing and devastating and hilarious in their sadness.
The protagonist’s life is a mess. Everything he’s good at is horrible by his own estimation. He’s a former Colonel in the army that was extremely skilled at his job, killing people in Vietnam. He looks back on his time and fellow soldiers and all the strangers they killed with a strange reflection, like fighting tears with rough laughter.
Other themes include the industrialized incarceration of much of the population and the destruction of local economies at the hands of globalization. It’s nice to know (not really) that not much has changed since 1991, when the book was written.
The New York Prison System has been outsourced to the Japanese. There’s a machine that will predict your future with stunning accuracy if you plug in your race and just a few other variables. Though he describes all sorts of horrors and degradation, there are no bad words. The main character uses other euphemisms when describing Vietnam and other atrocities, saying, “When the excrement hit the air conditioning.” This sounds sort of silly, but that’s the point. People clutch their pearls at bad words but they clap and cheer at other societal ills because they are acceptable and part of the culture.
It’s not always pleasant to be reminded of this stuff, but KV doesn’t care. He’s a gadfly. Something of a Socrates, poking at the powers that be, though luckier. Vonnegut wrote in a time when it was still pretty cool to attack institutions. When Socrates did it, they sentenced him to death. Small difference. Both entertaining guys and heroes of mine with wildly different takes on life and society. Check out Hocus Pocus. Give it fifty pages. There’s literally nothing Halloween-ish about it, and for me that’s probably the best part. Cheers and see you after.
