There's a deer in the works and I'm not sure what to make of it

There’s a deer in the works.

Not like Kurt Vonnegut’s errant deer in his Welcome to the Monkey House story. This deer just breezed by my living room window and traipsed across my front yard before disappearing through the hedge and into my neighbor’s vegetable garden. When I looked to see if it took time out to munch on Swiss Chard, I saw nothing.

How odd to see a deer in my neighborhood on a Sunday morning. Any day, for that matter. I instantly though of Vonnegut’s story, Deer in the Works. It impressed me when I first read it and gained a lot more meaning when I joined a billion-dollar corporation as a publications editor in the 1980s. I had grown tired of the freelance writing game and was looking for something more permanent, something that would help me buy a house and start a family. I found it at the Gates Rubber Company’s Denver works.

A younger Vonnegut found his job at the General Electric works in Schenectady, N.Y. Vonnegut’s character, David Potter, lasts only one day at the works. I went five years and Vonnegut worked from 1947 to 1951 at GE. A young father, he quit the job after selling several short stories to the now defunct Collier’s Magazine. Knox Burger, the magazine’s fiction editor, took Vonnegut under his wing but was surprised when Kurt quit his day job and moved the family to Cape Cod so he could write. Burger later said, “I never said he should give up his day job and devote himself to fiction. I don’t trust the freelancer’s life, it’s tough.”

Vonnegut had some tough years. He persevered. He hit it big in 1969 with Slaughterhouse-Five, possibly the best war novel ever written. It’s really considered a darkly comic antiwar novel. He met Hollywood producer Harrison Starr at a party who asked if Kurt was writing an antiwar novel. He said he was and Starr replied, “Why don’t you write an anti-glacier novel?” Not sure about Vonnegut’s response. But Starr’s questions seems very Vonnegut.

Vonnegut studied biochemistry while a student at Cornell. He was kicked out of Army ROTC for poor grades and a satirical article he wrote in the college paper. He lost his deferment, dropped out of college, and enlisted in 1943 before he could be drafted. He ended up as a scout with the 106^th Infantry Division which was overwhelmed by Nazis at the Battle of the Bulge. The division lost 500 troops and 6,000 captured. Vonnegut ended up a POW in a slaughterhouse in Dresden. Then came the firebombing. Twenty-four years later, Vonnegut was able to write about it.

I read it as a high school senior in 1969. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was reading but knew it was wonderful. I was also reading Catch-22. None of that stopped me from accepting a Navy ROTC scholarship. ROTC kicked me out in January 1971 due to bad grades and bad attitude. I was able to scrape up enough dough to last another semester and then I was done. My 1-A classification came in the mail at my parents’ house where I would have been living in the basement if we had one. I worked a day job at a hospital taking care of old people. I surfed on my days off and waited to get drafted but that didn’t happen.

This morning, the deer disappeared into my neighborhood. Not sure what happened to it. It seems unreal now, maybe a figment of my overactive imagination. All morning, all I could think about was Deer in the Works and every Vonnegut story and book I read which was most of them. The Vonnegut section fills up considerable space in my memory bank. The wayward deer is in there somewhere.  

Russia will need another Tolstoy to write about Putin's war on Ukraine

Odd in 2022 to be rooting for an underdog European country against a maniacal dictator bent on war.

Seems like 1939. Not that I experienced it first-hand -- I didn’t arrive on this planet for another 11 years. In that span, World War II began and ended and other wars erupted. One maniacal dictator was defeated and another one rose. We can’t get rid of these guys. Face it, almost all are guys. In America’s zeal to blunt Stalin, Khrushchev, etc., we waged war in Vietnam and sponsored dozens of proxy wars in Latin America. We jumped into Korea. My father, a World War II veteran who only returned to the States in 1946, faced a call-up for Korea just when he was celebrating the birth of his first child, me. He wasn’t called up but wondered in a letter: “I thought they gave us 20 years between wars?”

They do, as it turned out. His father fought in The War To End All Wars (TWTEAW) and 23 years later, Dad enlisted in the U.S. Army. In the early 1960s, the U.S. waged war in Vietnam with “advisors” and, just a few years later, draftees were being flown to Ton Son Nhut. I wasn’t one of them, thankfully, but many were, reluctantly going overseas to fight yet another war. Twenty years later, we were in Southwest Asia to fight Saddam and back again 10 years later to fight Saddam and Osama and the Taliban. We were in Afghanistan 20 years.

War never ends. Each generation gets it taste and a generation later elects warmakers that send their sons and daughters off to be killed in a foreign land.

So it goes.

After living through that history, I find it ironic that I cheer on the Ukrainians. In my head, I watch the coverage and say in my head, “Kill the Russians.” I don’t say it out loud but the sentiment is there, floating around the ether. Putin is the bad guy here and we try to stop him with economic sanctions and solidarity with NATO countries. It may work. But what happens if Putin uses chemical weapons or nukes? We have to respond. Kill the Russians! I say it although I know that it's young conscripts and civilians doing the dying while Putin plays Risk in his bunker. 

Inside of me is the part that read Chekhov and Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. I remember Tolstoy’s writing about his horrific experiences as a Russian officer in the Caucasus campaign ("Hadji Murat") and Crimean War ("Sevastopol Sketches"). In the Caucasus, Chechens waged a guerrilla war against Russian troops. They responded by torching the forests so the enemy had no place to hide and decimating villages that lent aid to the guerrillas (sound familiar?). Says one of Tolstoy's Chechen fighters returning to his burnt-out village:

“Nobody spoke about hatred towards the Russians. What they all felt, from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hatred. It was not hatred, but an unwillingness even to acknowledge these Russian dogs as people.”

The Crimean War spawned Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” that I once had to memorize in detention at Catholic School. It also brought ministrations of Florence Nightingale to our attention. It was as bloody as the one in Chechnya and Tolstoy described his vanity and that of his fellow officers this way:

“A thousand human self-images managed to be offended, a thousand managed to be awfully pleased, to puff themselves up, and a thousand – to find their rest within the arms of death.”

Maybe there’s a Tolstoy among the troops assaulting Mariupol or closing in on Kyiv. Someone who goes off to war in high spirits but comes home in tatters.

Dark times demand dark humor

We live in absurd times. A Reality TV show star is president. He is a narcissist who is never wrong about anything but is wrong about everything. He enlists creepy people, straight out of a Dickens' novel, to do his dirty deeds.

You gotta laugh. How did we get into such a mess? If I was a serious columnist for a major metropolitan newspaper, I could dissect Trump's faults with a litany of facts and figures. Real journalists do that.

I'm a blogger so am not constrained by facts. I do know truth from lies and I try to adhere to them when it matters. I'd rather turn a nice phrase or get a laugh. I'm a fiction writer, too, which gives me a certain leeway to embellish, maybe even lie.

What makes us laugh at serious topics? It's in our genes, a human response to inhumane acts. How else can we deal with a monster like Trump, a ghoul like Stephen Miller? How can we tolerate war and pestilence?

It takes some talent to get us to laugh at human foibles. It takes skill and wit. Wit in the old-fashioned sense. A person with wit has "the ability to relate seemingly disparate things so as to illuminate or amuse," according to Merriam-Webster. Here's another: "a talent for banter or persiflage," persiflage meaning "light or slightly contemptuous banter or mockery."

A good stand-up comedian has wit. A bad one just tells jokes. A witty politician can turn a phrase, helps us laugh at ourselves. A bad politician heaps scorn on helpless people, afflicts the afflicted.

There's a darkness to good humor. And it takes skill to tease the humor our of war and pestilence, sex and death. The Seven Deadly Sins, a.k.a. capital vices, are as serious as the name. A good comic writer can find a lot of fun in "lust" and its sister, "envy." I've heard many a comedian describe their lustful ways -- failed relationships, oddball sexual practices, the inevitable heartbreak that comes with opening up yourself to others.

A novelist gets thousands of words to show you heartbreak. It can come in many ways. The pursuit of love. How love of country or religion can turn out badly.

We could blame war on "wrath," another deadly sin. For those who experience war, heartbreak may best describe its aftermath.

In the film version of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, a platoon of heroic U.S. soldiers back from Iraq are celebrated at an NFL playoff game. The pageantry of a big NFL bash is juxtaposed with Billy Lynn's memories of Iraq and the guilt he feels at not saving a buddy. One of the scenes involves Billy Lynn and the team owner, played straight by comedic actor Steve Martin. The fatuous owner chides Billy for his uncertainty and notes that his platoon now is bigger than Billy Lynn -- it belongs to America. So America gets to celebrate by playing a football game and shooting off fireworks. EDM beats power the costumed dancers who writhe around the stage while the soldiers stand and get appreciative applause from the crowd. The pageantry and pathos of America on stage.

Dark humor and satire are cousins. Often, dark humor is poking fun at a cataclysmic event. World War II was not a laugh riot but some amazing books came out of the struggle. Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five. Same goes for World War I. The Good Soldier Svjek is a great example, a book that set the stage for later war books and movies all the way up to the present. In the hands of a good writer, one with wit, the most serious war novel can yield some laughs. All Quiet on the Western Front is a good example.

Vietnam was my generation's heartbreak. Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato with its magical-realist elements. Meditations in Green by Stephen Wright is another darkly comic take on Vietnam and its aftermath. The movie Full Metal Jacket came out of a novel by Gustav Hasford but took a darkly comic path in Kubrick's hands. No surprise from the director of Dr. Strangelove. Michael Herr, Hasford and Kubrick collaborated on the screenplay. Herr wrote the memoir Dispatches which was part of the inspiration for Apocalypse Now, which has its own absurdist moments. Herr was a correspondent in Vietnam for Esquire Magazine. Although Herr has admitted that he invented some of the characters and did not actually witness some of the events and dialogue, he contends it is all true. In France, Dispatches was published as a novel. In Vietnam, it was all true and it was all fiction.

Fiction writers yearn to go beyond the history into a place of story, a place where the reader is compelled to move on and possibly laugh or shake their heads or both.

What would Kurt Vonnegut say about the April 22 March for Science?

If he were still alive, Kurt Vonnegut might have attended the science march near him this weekend. New York City will probably have a big one. He would probably attend more to protest numbskull Trump than to applaud science.

Some of Vonnegut's big books, especially Cat's Cradle, carry warnings about runaway scientific research. In Galapagos, Vonnegut posits a future where humankind has evolved into sea-lion-like creatures with flippers and beaks and smaller brains in heads streamlined for swimming. One of that book's recurring themes is that contemporary human brains are too big and possess all sorts of ways to screw things up. In Slaughterhouse Five, Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. Vonnegut has fun with time travel and memory. He also has the fire-bombing of Dresden, brought to us by masterminds in science and war-making. They go hand in hand. So it goes.

Vonnegut studied biochemistry as an undergrad and has a master's degree in anthropology. He worked as a PR guy for General Electric while he wrote his novels and raised his family. He and his fictional alter-ago, Kilgore Trout, are noted sci-fi writers. But Vonnegut stands out for his scientific background and his social commentary. Baby Boomers discovered his novels just as we headed off to college or Vietnam or the assembly line or wherever. It spoke to the absurdity of war, as did Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Ken  Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest completes the big three books of the 1960s that changed my life and many others. Just think about their backgrounds for a minute. Heller was a World War II veteran and NYC ad man in the Mad Men era. Kesey was a rural Oregon boy who made his way to Stanford and sixties legend as part of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. He wrapped up his life on a farm in Oregon, back where he started. Vonnegut came from an educated Indianapolis family but the war changed everything, as it did for many of our fathers. My father was able to attend college on the G.I. Bill, begin a career as an accountant, marry a nurse and fathered nine children, of which I am the oldest.

Dedicated sci-fi readers know the thrill and the danger of science. We know that science leads to Hiroshima and to the Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator or ICD. I wear one of those in my chest. It was invented by Morton Mower, a Denver resident, now a millionaire art collector. Part of his world-renowned collection of Impressionists (Degas, Renoir, Monet, etc.) is now on display at the Fulginiti Pavilion for Bioethics and Humanities at the Anschutz Medical Center, 13080 E. 19th Ave. in Aurora. A med center with a gallery that exhibits artwork collected by a scientist/inventor? You can attend for free as you get an ICD check-up at the cardiac telemetry unit. A nifty blend of science and art, invention and patronage.

Saturday's Science March is not an effort to promote science above religion or instead of religion. It is a move to celebrate scientific innovation against those who would hide inconvenient facts and cut funding for research. Consider the Know Nothings of the 19th century U.S. They professed to "know nothing" other than that written in their bibles. They valued The Word over words and imagination and science. Today's conservative Republicans are descendants of the Know Nothings.  They are threatened by humankind;'s march into the future. And it is scary. Technology brings drastic changes. The arts expose our children to other voices and other cultures. People who don't look like us force us to consider our deeply held beliefs about race and gender.

It's really fear that drives conservatives. Fear of galloping change. Science and the arts and education represent the most threatening fields. That's why Congressional conservatives' budget cuts target them. If only we could stop the clock, everything would be all right with the world!

But you can't stop change. So we write and we march and we challenge the people who want to deny climate change and evolution and higher ed.

On Saturday, April 22, we meet at 10:30 a.m. in the service station parking lot at Little America in Cheyenne. We then caravan over to Laramie, where we will join others at noon for the Wyoming March for Science from the UW Classroom Building at 9th and Ivinson to downtown. An Earth Day Rally follows, with music by Laramie's Wynona. If you are interested in making an appropriately clever sign, one that honors wit and science, gather at the UU Church in Cheyenne from 6-10 p.m. on Friday, April 21. I missed the Wyoming Art Party's sign-making session last night in Laramie. You may remember WAP's performance art at the Women's March in Cheyenne in January. Their uterine-based signage ("Wild Wombs of the West") was a big hit for many, although some follow-up letters in the local paper called them crude and insulting to women. It's always a good thing when a protest incites letters to the editor.

See you on Science Day on Saturday. It's also Earth Day. Naturally.

Vonnegut won't be there. He's on Tralfamadore, most likely. But he will be there in spirit, both as an encouragement -- and as a warning.

Vonnegut's final interview

Heather Augustyn conducted the last interview with Kurt Vonnegut on Feb. 28. It’s featured in In These Times. Here’s an excerpt:

In the public schools, I learned what America was supposed to be — you, you know, a beacon of liberty to the rest of the world. And obviously, that wasn’t the case. I wrote a letter to Iraq, an open letter signed Uncle Sam [laughs], and what it said was: "Dear Iraq. Do like us. At the beginning of democracy, a bit of genocide and ethnic cleansing is quite okay. After a hundred years, you have to let your slaves go. And, after a hundred and fifty years, you have to let your women vote and hold public office." Some democracy. Anyway, when I was young, I noticed these contradictions and, of course, they were quite acceptable to a lot of people, but not to me.

Nebraska E85, Iraqi oil are disappearing

Last Monday, I paid $2.60 per gallon for E85 at our town's lone ethanol station. I pumped just a few gallons, as I always do between paychecks. But 2.5 gallons won't go very far in my 2000 flex-fuel Dodge Caravan. On Thursday, I returned for more and the station was all-out of E85, and almost everything else. So I motored on fumes over to my handy neighborhood station and pumped a few gallons of regular unleaded. It was at $2.99 a gallon then, but I saw yesterday that the price is up to $3.04.

Our prices are low compared to those in other states. And I'm sure that ethanol -- when it's available -- will also be going up, as diesel-burning trucks bring it in from Nebraska. I've been reading about various reasons for the price increases. Limited refinery output. Increase in summer driving. War and pestilence. Where is all that Iraqi oil we were supposed to get as thanks for our enduring sacrifices in Mesopotamia? According to this morning's New York Times, millions of gallons a week are disappearing, probably stolen by Tralfamadorian starships in the dead of night.

I guess I could throw a tantrum: I want my E85! I want my E85!

Or I could take responsibility for my own actions. They are more reasonable that radical. The weather's nice and it's time to break out the bicycle for commuting. It takes me less than 30 minutes to get to work via bike. I can also walk, if I leave earlier. These Cheyenne mornings are gorgeous now, and what better way to enjoy them than a walk under the blooming crabapple trees?

We were Vonnegut fans once -- and young

I’ve reads dozens of obits and remembrances about Kurt Vonnegut since his death on Wednesday. I spent a couple hours on Friday reading through 600-some comments about Vonnegut’s books on the New York Times’ web site. I even added one of my own, noting how his stories in "Welcome to the Monkey House" have stayed with me over the years. "Deer in the Works" was about the debilitating effects of corporate life. "Harrison Bergeron," if written today, would be viewed as a sharp send-up of political correctness, a term not in vogue when Vonnegut wrote the story. There’s also a very sweet love story based on the author’s wooing of his first wife.

Vonnegut wrote satire and humor. Not easy. A humorist gets very little leeway from his/her audience. The test is simple: does this make me laugh or at least smile? Do my readers bug their friends by reading aloud passages from the book? I remember doing that with "Breakfast of Champions." During the summer of ‘73, I lived in a little house in Holly Hill, Florida, and hitched to work at an Ormond Beach lumberyard. My roommate was Bob, a high school dropout from northern Wisconsin who was a terrific mechanic but worked as a laborer, building beachside condos. Our neighbors were my brother Dan and his friend Blake, both working construction. Dan was about to go off for Air Force basic training in Texas. Blake, a college dropout like me, planned to start his own construction company.

We took turns reading my tattered copies of Vonnegut’s novels. When I bought "Breakfast of Champions," my friends bugged me to finish quickly so they could read the passages that I kept blurting out during meals of Hamburger Helper. I’d come home from work and the book would be missing and I’d find Blake chortling over it next door. I got to the point where I took it with me instead.

But it wasn’t just the humor. Kilgore Trout was an intriguing character. Vonnegut’s writing style made the book fun and accessible. We were all smart guys who didn’t think we were very smart. We were looking for interesting distractions in the pre-PC, pre-cable TV, pre-middle-class-lifestyle days.

Another thing about Vonnegut. He was the age of our fathers but he wasn’t like our fathers. Mine lived a few miles away but was still pissed at me for getting booted out of my college ROTC scholarship and then vagabonding around the country. Dan was a long-haired hippie with no plans for the future. His girlfriend’s father would not let him in their house. His star began to rise when he joined the Air Force. Blake’s airline pilot father was royally pissed off at him. Bob never talked about his dad.

Vonnegut was a World War II veteran, as were all our fathers. He’d survived the Dresden fire-bombing, which gave him some hefty credentials. He was a family man, raising his own kids and those of his dead sister. He worked for a living, doing stuff he hated until leaving it behind for the life of a writer. At least one of his stories had appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, for Christ’s sake. He smoked like a chimney and always looked as if he’d just gotten out of bed. We could relate to that.

But his what-the-fuck attitude seemed to resemble ours. "So it goes" seemed to sum up the crazy times we lived in. He openly opposed the Vietnam War and our country’s nuclear arsenal. His hard-edged sense of irony struck a chord. We all knew that the technocrats would kill us off with nukes or ice-nine or some other fancy invention. In defense, we partied hearty and we partied often, although that’s not exactly what Vonnegut had in mind.

We all eventually moved on. After about 1980, I read no more Vonnegut books. I did listen to and enjoy "Galapagos" on audiobook during a long trip across Wyoming in 1993. I read Vonnegut’s commentary in the electronic edition of "In These Times," a radical mag I once subscribed to. The author looked worn and a bit confused when he appeared on the Jon Stewart show last year, promoting his newest book. His biting wit was intact.

I encouraged my son to read "Slaughterhouse-Five," but I don’t think he ever did. I saw it on his bookshelf during a recent visit to his apartment in Tucson. Maybe I should buy a copy for my teen daughter.

I haven’t see my former roomie Bob since the mid-1980s, when he called me out of the blue in Denver as he was traveling the country with his Orlando-based road-surfacing crew. We talked old times, and he showed me photos of his new wife and his new Harley, not necessarily in that order. Blake runs his own construction company and I’m not surprised to hear he’s the best contractor in central Florida. I see him during trips to Daytona, as he’s still good friends with my brother Dan, who’s retired from a career as an air traffic controller. Dan’s done well for himself. He married his high school sweetheart. When he came to Daytona during the 1970s on leave from the Air Force, his girlfriend’s father (and future father-in-law) opened the door for Dan, welcoming him to the family. My brother and I can’t talk politics as he’s a diehard Republican and I’m on the opposite end of the spectrum. I’ve never tried discussing Vonnegut with him. I don’t think he would approve of Kurt’s politics.

I'm older now than Kurt was when he gave himself "Breakfast of Champions" for a 50th birthday present. I'm a writer and arts administrator, a guy who likes his job. I celebrate my 25th wedding anniversary next month with my wife Chris. We have two kids, a teen girl and a 22-year-old son. They make trouble but I love them just the same.

So it goes.