Slaughterhouse-Five

 a challenge to American exceptionalism

BOYD CAMPBELL

MAR 30, 2024

A girl I liked in ninth grade reported on “Slaughterhouse-Five” in class. Able to read much better and much faster than I could in previous years, her classroom book reports inspired me to read “The Hobbit” and “Watership Down.” While I couldn’t compete with her academically, I didn’t want her to forever know things I couldn’t, so even though it took me until the next fall to finish the book, I read “Slaughterhouse-Five” because she did.

When Kurt Vonnegut died, Fox News said he was a “despondent liberal.” They mentioned the suicide attempt he had written about years before and suggested that he finally got his wish. Upon his passing, the National Review called him a “leftwing nutjob.” What sort of person invokes this kind of hatred when he dies?

Franklin Delano Roosevelt used the Great Depression and the impending war in Europe to whip the Republican Party into submission. When he died, and the war ended, the Grand Ole Party resurfaced with a new and better mission. Men like Walt Disney, Joseph McCarthy, Howard Hughes, and Roy Cohn used their powers to deliver a new message. America, with its corporate giants, is the strongest, smartest, best, most powerful, and most moral country in the history of the world, and if you didn’t agree, then you clearly were a communist. The Democratic response became, “What about the people you left out of the equation?” and that’s essentially the situation we live in today.

In school, you were probably told that the most horrible, most destructive attacks in World War II were Nagasaki and Hiroshima and the advent of the American Atomic Bomb. America was quite proud of our bomb’s destructive capability. The success of last year’s film “Oppenheimer” suggests this feeling continues. You weren’t taught correctly, though. The most destructive attacks in World War II came not as a product of American scientific genius but from conventional weapons produced in mass quantities by America’s corporate giants. The bombings of Tokyo and Dresden brought on more destruction, more human carnage, and suffering than any other attack in the history of the world.

In December 1944, four months after his mother’s suicide, Kurt Vonnegut was deployed with the 106th Infantry Division to what became known as “The Battle of the Bulge.” By the end of December, Vonnegut was captured with fifty of his fellow servicemen and shipped by rail to the Prisoner of War camp in Dresden. He described it as “the fanciest city I’d ever seen.” He was told, and he believed, that the Germans had their prisoner-of-war camps in Dresden because Dresden had no military industry. Following World War I, treating war prisoners became a concern in the West and the Germans. This concern became part of the Geneva Convention that met after the end of World War I.

Between February 13 and February 15, 1945, a joint operation by the United States and Great Britain unleashed a barrage of incendiary and concussive bombs on Dresden with such ferocity and volume that it is still recorded as the most destructive single attack in human history. It would be another twenty-five years before Americans became willing to discuss this. When Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five, most Americans had never heard of Dresden. Mired in the Vietnam War, draft-age young people and godless liberals attached considerable meaning to the book.

The book begins with an omniscient narrator telling us about Billy Pilgrim, a member of the Chaplin Corps Who was captured in the Battle of the Bulge and sent by rail to a prisoner-of-war camp in Dresden. Pilgrim and the other men on the train were housed in a repurposed abattoir, which they are told was named Slaughterhouse-Five. In Slaughterhouse-Five, we meet characters who appear in subsequent Vonnegut stories and novels, including a teacher named Edgar Derby, an American Nazi Propagandist named Howard Campbell, and Paul Lazarro, who blames Pilgrim for the death of his friend, Elliot Rosewater, and swears one day to kill Pilgrim.

The science fiction element of the novel is introduced with an alien race known as the Tralfamadorians. In the 1972 film, they are portrayed by balls of light. In the novel, Vonnegut gives them an appearance similar to what Salvador Dali might have created. After his encounter with the Tralfamadorians, Pilgrim becomes “unstuck” from time, experiencing the scenes in his life out of their natural order, sometimes simultaneously, and often looping back on themselves.

After reading Slaughterhouse-Five in the ninth grade, it would be several more years before I knew how Faulkner or Joyce used non-linear time in their writing. Vonnegut would have been acutely aware of them. There’s a clear and deep connection between modernist writers like Faulkner and Joyce and post-modern writers like Vonnegut.

A veteran of World War II and the Korean Conflict, George Roy Hill went on to direct some of the more notable films of the 70s and 80s, including “The World According to Garp,” “Slapstick,” “The Sting,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” and in 1971, at the height of the Vietnam War, and the surrounding protests, he directed “Slaughterhouse-Five.”

Not wanting to use “name” actors, Hill introduced Michael Sacks as Billy Pilgrim. Sacks went on to do “The Sugarland Express,” “Hanover Street,” and “The Private Files of J Edgar Hoover.” Realizing that the part of Montana Wildhack required a fair amount of nudity, Hill hired Playboy Playmate Valerie Perrine, who had never acted before. She went on to be nominated for a Golden Globe and an Academy Award for her part in Bob Fossee’s “Lenny” on the life of comedian Lenny Bruce.

In 1954, Buckminster Fuller shocked the world when he introduced a cardboard model of his revolutionary building technique that became known as the “Fuller Dome.” Durable and economical, there are several notable Fuller Domes in Mississippi, including one in Rankin County, which is sometimes called the best fried catfish restaurant in the world. Without question, the Fuller Dome is the most important architectural development of the entire post-modern era.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, the Tralfamadorians rescue Billy Pilgrim from his own troubled planet and build a home for him on theirs, in a luxuriously appointed Buckminster Fuller dome, where they bring pornographic actress Montanna Wildhack for him to mate with.

Using non-linear time in much the same way Faulkner did in “The Sound and the Fury,” Vonnegut spins a tale that questions American Exceptionalism, the American Dream, the condition and meaning of man, and the horrors of war.

Ray Bradbury used science fiction to expand and explore the limits of man’s imagination, and Kurt Vonnegut used science fiction to expand and explore the limits of man’s condition. I suppose there will always be those who hate Vonnegut for challenging the idea of American exceptionalism and the Vietnam War. I don’t think that would bother or surprise him.

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The Bug Truck

 How often have you heard that we lived in simpler times? When people my age say it, they’re often forgetting the Cold War, the culture war, school desegregation, civil rights protests, Watergate, Iran-Contra, Aids, crack babies, and more. Like Billy Joel said, we didn’t start the fire. It was always burning.

Our parents, who were born during the Depression and celebrated the end of World War II, did seem to have more faith in our government than anyone does now. An issue during the baby boom was dealing with childhood diseases, and our parents dealt with that in much the same way they dealt with World War II, with technology and organized effort.

We had to receive a series of inoculations at different ages to enter any school. Vaccines for everything from the mumps to polio were administered either at your pediatrician’s office, or they would line us up in school and administer a multi-vaccine in the fatty part of our arm using a device called a pneumatic jet injector that looked like something Buck Rogers might use and left a tell-tale ring-shaped scar in your arm for the rest of your life, proof you were born in the fifties or sixties. No one ever questioned it. If you lived here, you got the shot, and nobody got polio.

There were no vaccines for diseases carried by mosquitos or biting flies. In northern states, this wasn’t as much of an issue because the cold weather kept the mosquito population in check. In the deep South, though, disease carried by mosquitos was a genuine danger to children.

The federal government determined that the most effective method to control the mosquito population was to use the chemical Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, otherwise known as DDT. Like many Southern states, Mississippi paid men to drive through neighborhoods in a truck with a fog device in the back, emitting a dense cloud of insecticide-laden smoke.

The clouds the spray trucks were emitting must have contained kerosene because they smelled strongly of it. As children, we would either ride our bikes behind these trucks or run behind them, laughing insanely at the spectacle. The whole neighborhood would turn out.

We were so trusting of adults, especially anybody we identified as a civil servant, that none of us ever gave a moments thought to whether this might be dangerous or not, even though we knew the smoke was used to kill bugs.

My grandmother, who had raised two girls during the great depression in Mississippi, which was already desperately poor, didn’t share our trust in the government and begged us not to ride our bikes behind the bug truck. My mother insisted that they wouldn’t be out in the neighborhoods spraying like that if the smoke was any danger to us, so we were allowed to continue chasing the truck without getting in trouble.

We were allowed, that is, until 1972, when the federal government, which had proscribed our use of DDT, decided that it was a dangerous chemical that might give little boys like me cancer, so the state of Mississippi discontinued the use of DDT.

So far, nobody I know has died from riding behind the bug truck. They say some of us who were exposed to DDT might be at risk for Alzheimer’s disease, but I don’t know how they’d ever determine if it was the bug juice or any of the other millions of chemicals we were exposed to.

Nobody ever talked about the government secretly using mind-control drugs in the bug spray, or population control or any of the other things you hear people on the edges accuse the government of these days. We didn’t trust the government not to make mistakes because DDT clearly was one, but there wasn’t this widespread paranoia about what the government might do to us.

Maybe we didn’t live in simpler times. Maybe we had simpler minds and didn’t clutter them with fears and paranoid delusions. Maybe we trusted that the government was people just like us, for all the good and all the bad that might suggest.