But Enough About You: Essays

by Christopher Buckley

  Several other episodes since have combined—rightly or wrongly, as Kissinger might put it—to turn Chinese popular opinion against America: Tiananmen Square; the accidental 1999 U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade; and the Hainan incident in 2001, when a Chinese fighter jet collided with a U.S. reconnaissance plane and precipitated George W. Bush’s first foreign-policy crisis. Then there are more recent, obvious events, such as the collapse of the American and European financial markets in 2007 and 2008, which stripped much of the luster from our image as the global economic leader. That latter year, as the world’s Olympic athletes gathered in Beijing for a proxy celebration of China’s arrival on the world stage, Washington was busy coping with a distressed Wall Street, two quagmire wars, and three ailing auto companies.

  Is Kissinger optimistic about future relations between the United States and China? In a word, yes and no. No, because of a disturbing, emergent “martial spirit” that envisions conflict with the United States as an inevitable consequence of China’s rise—much as the Kaiser’s naval buildup led to World War I. In this Chinese view, the United States is not so much Mao’s famous “paper tiger” but “an old cucumber painted green.” In retrospect, I think I preferred it when we were a paper tiger.

  On a more upbeat note, Kissinger explains that despite its unprecedented economic ascendance, China has one or two problems of its own. Its economy has to grow annually by 7 percent—a goal that would leave any Western industrialized nation gasping—or face the dreaded internal unrest. Corruption, meanwhile, is deeply embedded in the economic culture. “It is one of history’s ironies,” he writes, “that Communism, advertised as bringing a classless society, tended to breed a privileged class of feudal proportions.” Then there is China’s rapidly aging population, which may dwarf our own impending Social Security crisis.

  Yet the Chinese may be better equipped, psychologically and philosophically, to withstand the coming shocks than the rest of us. A country that has endured four thousand years of uncounted wars and upheavals, through the Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s (tens of millions killed), and man-made calamities such as Mao’s Great Leap Forward (twenty million) and the Cultural Revolution, is nothing if not resilient. Sun Tzu coined a term, shi, which roughly translates to “the art of understanding matters in flux.” Writes Kissinger: “A turbulent history has taught Chinese leaders that not every problem has a solution.” The Chinese get it—shi happens.

  It’s hard to imagine a U.S. president holding such a view, much less expressing it out loud. But by the time one reaches the far shore of this essential book, there’s little doubt that Henry Kissinger, historian and maker of history, Nixon consigliere, and secretary of barbarian management, also takes the long view. Perhaps, from the heights on which he perches, it may be, for better or worse, the only view.

  —Bloomberg BusinessWeek, June 2011

  HOW IT WENT: KURT VONNEGUT

  Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007, but one gets the sense from Charles J. Shields’s sad, often heartbreaking biography, And So It Goes, that he would have been happy to depart this vale of tears sooner. Indeed, he did try to flag down Charon the Ferryman and hitch a ride across the River Styx in 1984 (pills and booze), only to be yanked back to life and his marriage to the photographer Jill Krementz, which, in these dreary pages, reads like a version of hell on earth. But then Vonnegut’s relations with women were vexed from the start. When he was twenty-one, his mother successfully committed suicide—on Mother’s Day.

  It’s a truism that comic artists tend to hatch from tragic eggs. But as Vonnegut, the author of zesty, felicitous sci-fi(esque) novels such as Cat’s Cradle and Sirens of Titan and Breakfast of Champions might put it, “So it goes.”

  Vonnegut’s masterpiece was Slaughterhouse-Five, the novelistic account of being present at the destruction of Dresden by firebombing in 1945. Between that horror (his job as a POW was to stack and burn the corpses); the mother’s suicide; the early death of a beloved sister, the only woman he seems truly to have loved; serial unhappy marriages; and his resentment that the literary establishment considered him (a mere) writer of juvenile and jokey pulp fiction, Vonnegut certainly earned his status as Man of Sorrows, much as Mark Twain, to whom he is often compared, earned his.

  Was Kurt Vonnegut, in fact, just that—a writer one falls for in high school and college and then puts aside, like one of St. Paul’s “childish things,” for sterner stuff?

  This vein of anxiety runs through Shields’s diligent, readable, but uneven biography. But the question seems self-answering: When did you last reread Slaughterhouse or God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater? That long ago? Okay, but when did you last read Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird?

  Or we could just crunch the numbers: in the first six months of 2005, Cat’s Cradle, published the year JFK was assassinated, sold 34,000 copies; Slaughterhouse sold 66,000. Most of those are probably being read in the classroom. But so what? You want to shout across the River Styx: “It’s all right! Cheer up! You’re immortal!”

  Vonnegut and the other great “comic” (or if you prefer, ironic or tragico-comical-ironic) novelist of World War II, Joseph Heller, are getting their biographical due, almost simultaneously. Tracy Daugherty’s fine biography of Heller was recently published, in time for the fiftieth anniversary of Catch-22.

  There are some odd synergies. The two men met years after their respective wars, onstage at a literary festival in 1968, and became great friends and eventually neighbors. Heller’s war was up in the air, as a bombardier in the nose cone of a B-25. Vonnegut’s was at ground level, as an infantryman in the Battle of the Bulge, and ultimately beneath ground level, in the basement of Schlachthof-Fünf during the firebombing.

  Both men were profoundly, and with respect to their war novels, specifically influenced by the French author Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Both their novels were numerically titled—Heller had to retitle his original Catch-18 when Leon Uris brought out Mila 18.

  In a detail that struck me as, well, weird, Vonnegut’s breakthrough moment while he was trying to get a handle on how to write his novel came during a visit to a war buddy—in Hellertown, Pennsylvania. But perhaps most ironic of all is that both their World War II novels ended up being Vietnam novels.

  Heller’s appeared in 1961, just as American pacificists were starting to ask, What exactly are we doing there? Didn’t the French try this? Catch-22 became an existential field manual for the antiwar movement, and a must-read for the grunts and soldiers doing the fighting. Vonnegut’s novel came out in March 1969, by which time the question had pretty much been answered. It made him famous—the proverbial “voice of a generation” (always a problematic title)—and a Pied Piper to disaffected American kids. It also made him rich.

  Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922 into squarely bourgeois circumstances. His father, an architect, lost his money in the Depression; his mother, unable to cope without the luxuries to which she had become accustomed, killed herself. (Thanks, Mom.) Kurt’s older brother, Bernard, was the star; he became a physicist and climatologist, experimenting with ways to supercool water, a detail that perhaps seeped into his brother’s fourth novel, Cat’s Cradle, in the form of “ice-nine,” the substance that turns all moisture on Earth into a supersolid.

  Kurt dropped out of several colleges, but worked while he was there on school or local newspapers, where he learned to write clear, concise, punchy, and often very funny sentences. “Writing that was easy to scan,” Shields tells us, “would become one of the hallmarks of his fiction.” He worked as a reporter at a news bureau in Chicago, covering a city beat, and later as a publicist at General Electric.

  “A lot of critics,” Vonnegut would say later with some asperity, “think I’m stupid because my sentences are so simple and my method is so direct: they think these are defects. No. The point is to write as much as you know as quickly as possible.”

  He did, cranking out short stories, some of which he sold to “slicks” like The Saturday Ev
ening Post; in those years, a single story could earn him the equivalent of six weeks salary at G.E. An editor and old college friend named Knox Burger (to whom Shields dedicates this biography) took him on, publishing him first at Collier’s magazine and then at Dell paperbacks before trying to become his agent in 1970. One of Vonnegut’s less admirable traits was his tendency to throw his mentors—decisively—under the bus. He did this not only to Burger, backing out of their representation agreement, but also to the legendary editor Seymour Lawrence.

  This, as much else here, does not make for pleasant reading. Vonnegut was Whitmanesque, contradictory, containing multitudes. As a parent, he could be sweet and generous but also aloof, and even, according to one nephew, “cruel” and “scary.” When his sister died of cancer within a day of her husband’s ghastly death in a train wreck, Vonnegut and his wife took in and raised three of their four orphaned children. But the domestic scenes do not read like Cheaper by the Dozen.

  Shields has a deep affection for his subject and does what he can to rebut charges of hypocrisy, but in this he is not entirely convincing. Vonnegut the staunch anti–Vietnam War spokesman couldn’t be bothered to help his wife campaign for Eugene McCarthy; more disconcerting is the revelation that as an avid purchaser of stocks, he had no qualms about investing in Dow Chemical, maker of napalm. At the least, it seems an odd buy for a survivor of the Dresden firebombing. The champion of saving the planet and the Common Man also, we learn, owned shares in strip-mining companies, malls, and corporations with antiunion views. So it went.

  As a writer of science fiction—a label he tried strenuously to shed, lest his books be shelved in the genre ghetto—he was curiously blasé, even antagonistic, about the moon landing on July 20, 1969. On a broadcast with Walter Cronkite, Gloria Steinem, and others, he dissed the entire enterprise and reiterated his view that the $33 billion should have been spent “cleaning up our filthy colonies here on Earth.” The avuncular Cronkite let it go, but CBS was swamped with furious letters. (For the record, many of the writers felt that Steinem, too, had been “un-American.”)

  But this was echt Vonnegut: not with a bang or a whimper but with a shrug. If he, like Twain, was angry at the universe—and had every reason to be—he wasn’t going to yell himself hoarse or make himself a spectacle in the process. He possessed more ambivalence than passion; odd, perhaps, in someone of German ancestry. (Seems more . . . French, somehow.) But then the line with which he will always be remembered, from Slaughterhouse-Five, is “So it goes,” as close an English-language phrase as there is to denote hunching shoulders.

  As to whether he wrote for the kids, or for—pardon—kids of all ages, and for the ages, perhaps that’s more definitively answered by the Library of America’s recent publication of Kurt Vonnegut: Novels and Stories 1963–1973, ably edited by Sidney Offit. Turn to the first sentences of Slaughterhouse-Five:

  “All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn’t his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I’ve changed all the names.”

  There’s an echo there of another voice—Holden Caulfield’s, and didn’t the guy who came up with him also have a reputation for writing for kids?

  —The New York Times, November 2011

  APOCALYPSE SOON

  As annus mirabilis 2000 approaches, we’d best start dealing with the fact that there will be Elijahs on every street corner, and cable channels and Web sites urging us to repent—repent!—for the end is at hand. There’s just something about an impending millennium that brings out the gloom and doom.

  The year 999 was a boom year for monasteries. Penitents flocked in, hysterically bearing jewels, coins, and earthly possessions by the oxcartful, hoping to cadge a little last-minute grace before Judgment Day. The year 1999 may turn out to be a similarly good one for the coffers of fundamentalist Christian churches—especially if Pat Robertson’s apocalyptic novel, The End of the Age, is any indication of what the faithful think is going to happen when the ball atop the Times Square tower plunges into triple zeros.

  Mr. Robertson is no ordinary street-corner Elijah. He’s a graduate of the Yale Law School and chairman of both the Christian Broadcasting Network and International Family Entertainment (the Family Channel). He has his own daily television show, The 700 Club, and is the author of nine previous books. In 1988, he ran for president in the Republican primaries, giving the non-fire-breathing Episcopalian George Bush a brief case of the heebie-jeebies during the Iowa caucuses and establishing the Christian Right as an electoral force to be reckoned with. So when he ventures forth into pop-fictional eschatology, attention must be paid—if only for the pleasure of hearing a president of the United States tell the nation in a televised address, “We are the world,” and to watch as an advertising executive is transformed into an angel.

  It’s hard to define The End of the Age exactly. It’s a sort of cross between Seven Days in May and The Omen, with the prose style of a Hallmark card. The good guys are a born-again advertising executive and his wife, a black pro basketball player and a Hispanic television technician, all led by one Pastor Jack, a descendant of the eighteenth-century American preacher Jonathan Edwards. They tend to sound like a bunch of Stepford wives who have wandered onto the set of The 700 Club, eerily polite and constantly telling one another to please turn to the book of Revelation:

  “That’s right, Manuel. Every bit of it is in the Bible. As a matter of fact, whole books have been written about a diabolical world dictator called the Antichrist. He got that name because he will try to perform for Satan what Christ performed for God.”

  “Wow, I hope he fails,” Cathy said.

  The bad guys tend to sound like the villains in a Charlie Chan movie being simultaneously translated from some sinister Indo-Iranian tongue:

  “Panchal, sorry to wake you. Get your people ready. Tonight the gods have given America into our hands.”

  That “sorry to wake you” is one of the many hilarious moments that relieve the general tedium. For all the apocalyptic pyrotechnics, the book leaves the eyeballs as glazed as a Christmas ham. But just when you start wondering if there’s something more interesting on C-SPAN 2, there’s a reason to go on:

  “The Antichrist raged within his palace. . . . The final battle was coming. He would march on Jerusalem at the head of his armies. ‘Then,’ he said to Joyce Cumberland Wong, ‘I will win! At last I will have my revenge!’ ”

  The book begins with a bang in the form of a 300-billion-pound meteor that lands in the Pacific Ocean with the force of five thousand nuclear bombs, setting off a three-thousand-foot tsunami, earthquakes, fires, nuclear plant meltdowns, volcano eruptions, ash in the atmosphere, floods, and food shortages. All in all, a bad hair day for Mother Earth, sending the Antichrist ouching toward Bethlehem to be born. Meanwhile, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, things are getting a bit sticky:

  “Well, here’s the story,” the secretary of defense explains to his top general over lime and sodas while the world burns. “As you know, we had one president commit suicide. The next was killed by a snakebite, and then the man who left the cobra on the president’s desk was murdered. They say he committed suicide, but don’t you believe it.”

  At this point, if I were the general, I’d have asked for some scotch to go with my soda, but in evangelical literature the good guys don’t drink.

  “Now,” the secretary continues, “we’ve got this ex–campus radical in the White House, and if you heard the speech tonight, you know he’s got some mighty big plans.”

  That would be the aforementioned “We are the world” speech, and, yes, President Mark Beaulieu (as in “mark of the beast”) does indeed have big plans: a one-world government with its own currency and a police force in United Nations–ish uniforms, a grand new $25 billion world headquarters palace in Babylon (natch) with some positively kinky special e
ffects, computer-tattoo ID markings for everyone, drugs and orgies for schoolchildren, vintage wines for the grown-ups.

  Your basic liberal agenda, right down to the chardonnay. President Mark of the Beast’s cabinet would certainly provide for memorable nomination hearings:

  “For secretary of education, the president had selected a Buddhist monk who shaved his head and dressed in a saffron robe and sandals. For secretary of agriculture, he asked for a shepherd from Nevada who lived alone in the hills and spoke broken English. The man’s only known ‘credential’ was that he had once played jai alai in Las Vegas. For secretary of energy, he named a Lebanese Shiite Muslim who was a member of the terrorist group Hezbollah and ran a filling station in Dearborn, Michigan.

  “For drug czar, he picked a man who had spent his life crusading for the legalization of all narcotics. For secretary of state, a professor of Eastern religions from Harvard University”—a Yale man just can’t help himself—“who had close ties to Shoko Asahara, the leader of the Japanese cult of Shiva worshipers known as Aum Shinri Kyo, or Supreme Truth. They had been linked with a poisonous gas attack in a Tokyo subway in 1995. And he chose for attorney general a militant black feminist attorney who advocated abolishing the death penalty and closing all prisons.”

  And you know, I’d bet not one of them paid Social Security tax on the nanny.

  The End of the Age is to Dante what Sterno is to The Inferno. When you have a hard time keeping a straight face while reading a novel about the death of a billion human beings, something is probably amiss.

  But lest we be smug, bear in mind two recent events:

  In March 1989, a large asteroid passed within 450,000 miles of Earth. Had it landed in an ocean, according to scientists quite genuinely rattled by 1989FC’s sudden appearance, it would have created three-hundred-foot tidal waves. If you think 450,000 miles is a country mile, consider that Earth had been in the asteroid’s path just six hours earlier.