Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Again with the yellow pad at a seminar.  The back-patting isn't so bad, but there is plenty of other crap. 

As I scribble this, I am listening to a discussion about the legal enabling of greed!  So much energy and effort to further selfishness!  Nauseating, really.  At least they have toned down the circle-jerk these seminars usually become.  All of this makes me think of Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut.  Of the many things that caught my attention in this book, I want to focus on "the Hook." 

Everyone has either heard or said (C'mon... we've all probably said it) something along the lines of this:  "If I were (King/President/Ruler), people who (name offense or nuisance) would be (jailed/killed/brutally castrated) immediately." 

San Lorenzo is a fictional island, but it holds the hopes of those who want a clean slate and a simpler world.  "The Hook" provides the guillotine for their dreams. Anyone who goes afoul hangs by the hook. It's so simple and alluring to the worst part of us.

A couple traveling to San Lorenzo on a plane discusses how US deterioration led them to seek a new start and a clean slate.  What they found was dirt and poverty. 

Most people utter their hopes for swift justice (the formula above) and then immediately realize the origin to be from frustration rather than reality or fairness.  Some cling to the idea of simplicity.  Their hopes for perfection walk them into a punch.

In an income tax class I took, the professor illustrated why simple rarely works and never remains simple.  Sales tax... flat tax... propose what you will because it all leads to complex because we are complex.  All paths lead to a long and complicated tax code that clears the forests to publish.  Don't we want to encourage home ownership?  Of course!  So, we add a deduction.  Business?  Of Course!  Another deduction, but not for X or Z, so... and on and on it goes. 

How does this relate to "The Hook?"  It's the same thing.  I imagine the hook works well initially and annoyances are punished with blinding speed while the people cheer to celebrate their freedom from annoyance.  I imagine it works like Roger Goodell, commissioner of the NFL.  Cheers accompany the first few punishments as he hung some "consensus assholes" on the hook for everyone to see. 

But, to quote a favorite movie of mine, "who watches the Watchmen?"  What happens when he starts to over-punish? What about under-punishments?  What about when it happens to your team or favorite player... or family.  Just like the tax code, simplicity falls apart. 

Cat's Cradle illustrates the degree we are enslaved by our hopes.  No matter how often logic and good sense intervene, we always long for a simpler, more ideal, world.  Those clinging to Segregation in the 60s looked to Rhodesia (and its poverty and isolation) to be an ideal.  The pull of a simpler time never remembers the flaws or the forgotten complications. 

Even Blue Bell Ice Cream appeals to that desire and says its ice cream tastes like the "good old days" even if it meant strife at the lunch counter where it was served.  At that time, some decided Rhodesia was the utopia.  James Earl Ray tried to flee there after killing Martin Luther King, Jr.  Those people who fled found dirt.  And, Rhodesia's independence in furtherance of apartheid fizzled quickly. 

Cat's Cradle is a complicated book, and I chose this one element. All cases reflect the force of our hopes and expectations outside of reality. 

Streamline. Cut duplication. Economize.  Just don't start over like San Lorenzo. 

Where would we be without hope?  It's how we lie to ourselves to live (Bokononism!).

I loved how Vonnegut used "the Hook" as just one of his many illustrations of how ridiculous humans can be.  This was a very good book if you have a taste for cynicism and can laugh at it.





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