Mother Night

Wow! Another certified Vonnegut classic. I have yet to read one that I haven't liked. When I was debating what book to read next (choices were this and [b:South and West: From a Notebook 32842454 South and West From a Notebook Joan Didion https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1611917690l/32842454.SX50.jpg 53445066] by Didion), unanimous support for this across two Discord servers. One friend said this is their all time favorite Vonnegut.Vonnegut is one of my all time favorite authors. I read Slaughterhouse-Five once a year (very white-bread, I know, sue me), and I have the big Library of America set that I'm working through. I love his voice and his pleading for us to be better. To listen to our better angels. [b:Slaughterhouse-Five 4981 Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut Jr. https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1440319389l/4981.SY75.jpg 1683562] comes nearly ten years after this work, but there is a lot of it in here.“An eighty-eight was set up in it, and the gun was manned by boys about fifteen or sixteen years old. There was a success story for Heinz's late wife—boys that young, and yet with men's uniforms and a fully-armed death trap all their own.”Hard not to think about Slaughterhouse-Five, the Children's Crusade.There's also just a lot about what Vonnegut says right up front as the moral: be careful what you pretend to be, because that's what you become. Act as if ye have faith, and faith shall be given to ye. Put it another way, Leo McGarry says on the West Wing, fake it til ya make it. It's the flip side of that same coin. I love it.It is of course frustratingly prescient because we humans make the same mistakes on a schedule that'd make a stationmaster jealous.Jones wasn't completely crazy. The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined.Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell—keeping perfect time for eight minutes and twenty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year.The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in mose cases.The willful filing off of gear teeth, the willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information—That is how the Nazi's took a functioning republic into one of the deadliest totalitarian regimes in history. It took about 53 for Hitler to end democracy in the Weimar Republic, apparently. He gained power in January 1933. Dachau opened in March.The willful filing off of gear teeth. A valuation of ignorance. A valuation of national pride over all else. A revulsion to immigration, civil liberties, hope, and love.It is hard to read this book and not feel a little depressed about where we are in 2025, 64 years later. As hard as it is, I basically refuse to be a pessimist. I don't know how or why I have that resistance in me. But I still believe that this world can be better today than it was yesterday, and tomorrow, today, and so on. Not all better, and some days maybe not net-better. But I think and hope it is a cumulative thing. And if I don't believe that, then I don't know what the point of it is. So, I will choose to believe it.