Book Report: HOCUS POCUS - KURT VONNEGUT
No, Wilder’s America is founded on the illusion of perpetual motion.
The title of the book, Hocus Pocus, refers in one way to the myth of perpetual motion. The idea, of course, is that a machine can power itself by its own motion. For example, a fan-powered car, whose fan turns by gears connected to the rolling wheels. Ain’t that America.
When Hartke, the physics teacher, arrives, there are a series of perpetual motion machines locked away in a dark attic (I believe of the library), and Hartke finds them and is the only person who knows what they are.
They were constructed and then stored away by one of the school’s founding fathers, and Hartke gathers them all up and puts them on display, with a sign saying “THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE.”
This is Vonnegut's America.
The founding father of Tarkington (or America, take your pick) assembled these things and got one of them running for a maximum of 50 seconds or so, before it sputtered and stopped. Part of the dream of America is that society can be run like a perpetual motion machine, where all that's going on will churn gears or turbines to provide sufficient energy to keep it running, which will in turn provide energy to keep it running, which will in turn . . .
Instead of acknowledging the impossibility, these naïve machines were locked away and forgotten. The crazy dreams of the founding fathers are hidden away, and instead the things made publicly visible are vague notions of democracy and progress which appear valiant and wonderful. For pulling the skeletons out of the closet, Hartke winds up a heretic for pointing out this nonsense.
In other words, he’s putting a sign on the American dream, saying “THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE”
Beyond this, the ‘college’ where Hartke teaches is a micro-America. It is a daycare for children of aristocrats, whose ultimate education is exposure to a hodgepodge of subjects and the reinforced message that Life Is Fair, and Life Is Pleasant, and so on and so on.
Of course, to these kids the main goal of their education is ensuring that they aren’t told otherwise, that they never see Vonnegut's America on the other side of the lake, where thousands of colour-coded inmates live in an ‘American’ prison run by Japanese labour, after it has been farmed out to them.
It won’t matter anyway where the aristocrat children go to school or what degree they get, the only thing important is that they constantly hear that life is fair so when they enjoy the spoils of their own positions, they think nothing of the fact that it has been brought to them on the backs of many, many others.
The structure of the school, though, is like America in that the people who are teaching are of a totally different caste, and are basically the laborers of the system. Hartke was the Vietnam vet who did work that few others would have, and is now instructing these dyslexic kids.
And it too is like a hopeful perpetual motion machine, that each stupid generation can keep moving forward with enough momentum that the ship will never slow down, while the world outside remains at a safe distance for the school on the hill to keep trucking along.
In the title, Vonnegut says what this whole generational perpetual motion machine is: Hocus Pocus.
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The other aspect of Hocus Pocus is the belief that anybody can become anything in dreamy America. This is where GRIOT makes its shiny appearance. GRIOT is a computer program which can determine a person’s entire life after having inputted a few crucial aspects including the subject’s age, ethnic background, and drug use.
The underlying message is: people are not people; people are sets of variables.
The other message is, if you don’t have the right set of variables, you’re screwed.
Yet the American dream screams this isn’t true, and that anybody can be anything at any time, if only they can muster up the energy and the gumption and lift themselves up by the bootstraps and get to it.
Well, maybe not. Not according to GRIOT, and not according to Vonnegut.
Hocus Pocus.
“Rich people are poor people with money” (though this was George Orwell, apparently)
“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance”
“I think any form of government, not just Capitalism, is whatever the people who have all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decide to do today.”
“Freedom of speech isn’t something someone else gives you. That’s something you have to give yourself”
“I told him my maternal grandfather’s idea that obscenity and blasphemy gave most people permission not to listen respectfully to whatever was being said.
Here’s my take on a few points in Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut. It’s a book well worth reading, though I can’t quite put the whole thing together, here a few things that stand out:
Hartke being fired from the school is the realist’s run-in with established fairy-tale America.
They don’t like him teaching their kids because he’s a pessimist, not keeping afloat the American virtue of hope, and they say his pessimism itself is anti-American. Ultimately, Vonnegut’s termination is after the board of trustees is blackmailed by a right-wing talk-show host named Jason Wilder who threatens to denounce the school if Hartke isn’t fired. Indeed, he might have good reason to denounce it from his standpoint, because independent thought is not part of his America.
No, Wilder’s America is founded on the illusion of perpetual motion.
The title of the book, Hocus Pocus, refers in one way to the myth of perpetual motion. The idea, of course, is that a machine can power itself by its own motion. For example, a fan-powered car, whose fan turns by gears connected to the rolling wheels. Ain’t that America.
But Hartke, as we see, is not quite the faithful disciple. “I used to tell classes that anybody who believed in the possibility of perpetual motion should be boiled alive like a lobster”.
When Hartke, the physics teacher, arrives, there are a series of perpetual motion machines locked away in a dark attic (I believe of the library), and Hartke finds them and is the only person who knows what they are.
They were constructed and then stored away by one of the school’s founding fathers, and Hartke gathers them all up and puts them on display, with a sign saying “THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE.”
This is Vonnegut's America.
The founding father of Tarkington (or America, take your pick) assembled these things and got one of them running for a maximum of 50 seconds or so, before it sputtered and stopped. Part of the dream of America is that society can be run like a perpetual motion machine, where all that's going on will churn gears or turbines to provide sufficient energy to keep it running, which will in turn provide energy to keep it running, which will in turn . . .
Instead of acknowledging the impossibility, these naïve machines were locked away and forgotten. The crazy dreams of the founding fathers are hidden away, and instead the things made publicly visible are vague notions of democracy and progress which appear valiant and wonderful. For pulling the skeletons out of the closet, Hartke winds up a heretic for pointing out this nonsense.
In other words, he’s putting a sign on the American dream, saying “THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE”
Beyond this, the ‘college’ where Hartke teaches is a micro-America. It is a daycare for children of aristocrats, whose ultimate education is exposure to a hodgepodge of subjects and the reinforced message that Life Is Fair, and Life Is Pleasant, and so on and so on.
Of course, to these kids the main goal of their education is ensuring that they aren’t told otherwise, that they never see Vonnegut's America on the other side of the lake, where thousands of colour-coded inmates live in an ‘American’ prison run by Japanese labour, after it has been farmed out to them.
It won’t matter anyway where the aristocrat children go to school or what degree they get, the only thing important is that they constantly hear that life is fair so when they enjoy the spoils of their own positions, they think nothing of the fact that it has been brought to them on the backs of many, many others.
The structure of the school, though, is like America in that the people who are teaching are of a totally different caste, and are basically the laborers of the system. Hartke was the Vietnam vet who did work that few others would have, and is now instructing these dyslexic kids.
And it too is like a hopeful perpetual motion machine, that each stupid generation can keep moving forward with enough momentum that the ship will never slow down, while the world outside remains at a safe distance for the school on the hill to keep trucking along.
In the title, Vonnegut says what this whole generational perpetual motion machine is: Hocus Pocus.
*******************************
The other aspect of Hocus Pocus is the belief that anybody can become anything in dreamy America. This is where GRIOT makes its shiny appearance. GRIOT is a computer program which can determine a person’s entire life after having inputted a few crucial aspects including the subject’s age, ethnic background, and drug use.
The underlying message is: people are not people; people are sets of variables.
The other message is, if you don’t have the right set of variables, you’re screwed.
Yet the American dream screams this isn’t true, and that anybody can be anything at any time, if only they can muster up the energy and the gumption and lift themselves up by the bootstraps and get to it.
Well, maybe not. Not according to GRIOT, and not according to Vonnegut.
Hocus Pocus.
QUOTABLE QUOTES:
“Rich people are poor people with money” (though this was George Orwell, apparently)
“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance”
“I think any form of government, not just Capitalism, is whatever the people who have all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decide to do today.”
“Freedom of speech isn’t something someone else gives you. That’s something you have to give yourself”
“I told him my maternal grandfather’s idea that obscenity and blasphemy gave most people permission not to listen respectfully to whatever was being said.
I repeated an old story Grandfather Wills had taught me, which was about a town where a cannon was fired at noon every day. One day the cannoneer was sick at the last minute and was too incapacitated to fire the cannon.
So at high noon there was silence.
All the people in the town jumped out of their skins when the sun reached its zenith. They asked each other in astonishment, “Good gravy! What was that?”
My lawyer wanted to know what that had to do with my not swearing.
I replied that in an era as foulmouthed as this one, “Good gravy” had the same power to startle as a cannon-shot.”
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