Identity Crisis: A State of the Union Address by Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut (Essay‪)‬

NO TWO CONTEMPORARY WRITERS HAVE LOOKED HARDER or with greater analytical intelligence at the forces undermining the American Dream than Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut. Whatever individual differences of vision or temperament may separate these brooding seers, Mailer, the mystic Existentialist, and Kurt Vonnegut, the comic Absurdist, serve as shamans, spiritual medicine men whose function is to expose various forms of societal madness--dispelling the evil spirits of greed, irresponsible mechanization, and aggression while encouraging reflection and the will to positive change. It is this almost mystical vision of the writer as spiritual medium and healer that Vonnegut intends by calling himself a "canary bird in the coal mine"--one who provides spiritual illumination, offering us warnings about the dehumanized future not as it must necessarily be, but as it surely would become if based on the materialism, government corruption, and promiscuous technology of the present (Wampeters, Foma, and GranfalloonS 238). In books Mailer might call existential errands, like Why Are We in Vietnam?, The Armies of the Night, Of a Fire on the Moon, and Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Mailer's particular genius has been to penetrate the facade of contemporary events to show us who we are, where we are, and where we are likely to go, pointing up the significant in the most trivial of events, and conversely placing in perspective the truly momentous acts of our time. Canary birds notwithstanding, of course, Mailer and Vonnegut have been as painfully conscious of the fundamental absurdities of their age as any of their contemporaries: the stockpiling of doomsday weapons to keep the world safe, the brutalities of World Wars, the quest for God through material acquisitions and technological advance, uncritical patriotism--the list goes on. Both see the atrocities of the death camps and those that followed Auschwitz as symbolizing the spiritual devastation of our age. In his essay "The White Negro," Mailer describes the Holocaust as a mirror to the human condition that "blinded anyone who looked into it." "Probably," Mailer says, "we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. For the first time in civilized history, perhaps for the first time in all of history, we have been forced to live with the suppressed knowledge ... that we might ... be doomed to die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation in which our teeth would be counted, and our hair would be saved, but our death itself would be unknown, unhonored, and unremarked, a death which could not follow with dignity as a possible consequence to serious actions we had chosen, but rather a death by deus ex machina in a gas chamber or a radioactive city" (338). In an address at Bennington College in 1970, Vonnegut said, "I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientists, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima" (Wampeters 161). Vonnegut acknowledges that in the wake of Hiroshima and the death camps, faith in human improvement has not come easily, pointing out that he and his fellow canary-bird artists chirped and chirped and keeled over in protest of the war in Vietnam, but it made no difference whatsoever. "Nobody cared." But, he says, "I continue to think that artists--all artists--should be treasured as alarm systems" (Wampeters 239). That's what our minds were designed to do.