DAMN
I had been yapping about Kurt Vonnegut to my little sister Britta this week and gave her a book. Then I was checking the news tonight on the web and caught the story just as it first started to appear. It made me feel creepy. It turns out that he and I went to the same college and both studied biochemistry despite having, on some level, no interest in it. This makes us members of a granfalloon, a bokononist term for a meaningless association of human beings that people take great pride in. Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows--and any nation, anytime, anywhere.
Galapagos was one of his best books and I'm surprised people don't mention it more. Writing in the eighties, when every member of the republican party was dismissing the seventies energy crisis and global warming, he describes one character as having had the silly and completely ridiculous idea that power could be generated for free using strange contraptions that harnessed energy from the sun and the wind. Also:
It is hard to believe nowadays that people could ever have been as brilliantly duplicitous as James Wait--until I remind myself that just about every adult human being back then had a brain weighing about three kilograms! There was no end to the evil schemes that a thought machine that oversized couldn't imagine and execute.
So I raise this question, although there is nobody around to answer it: Can it be doubted that three-kilogram brains were once nearly fatal defects in the evolution of the human race?
A second query: What source was there back then, save for our overelaborate nervous circuitry, for the evils we were seeing or hearing about simply everywhere?
My answer: There was no other source. This was a very innocent planet, except for those great big brains.
and so it goes.
Posted on Thursday, April 12, 2007, 12:23 AM