Kids who read Kurt Vonnegut in high school are often the kind of people who have trouble being earnest about anything. These arch-ironist teens sneer at the narrow-mindedness of their families and hometowns and place basketball pep rallies on the same continuum of fascist conformity as the Iraq War. They aren’t what you’d call ‘joiners.’
I should know. My own teenage reading habits tended toward edgy counterculture (including plenty of Vonnegut), and I half admired the kids at my white-bread Presbyterian high school who smoked cigarettes and experimented with Buddhism. Only my ingrained sense of Lutheran guilt and my distaste for excessive cynicism prevented me from truly becoming one of them. The conflicting desires to fit in and stand out, earnestness contra irony, form a paradox found in every society. But irony, apparently by necessity, generally opposes religion and tradition, and its triumph would seem to mean their downfall and the downfall of society itself.
During a presentation on mental health at my alma mater, Grove City College, the speaker quoted Vonnegut: ‘The most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.’ I suspected at the time that she had simply googled ‘quotes about loneliness’ and had no idea who Kurt Vonnegut was. Otherwise, I simply couldn’t reconcile the earnest religious piety and political conservatism that defined Grove City with the words of a godless, obscene, postmodern satirist.
Vonnegut did plenty to offend the conservative Christian sensibilities that characterized my educational institutions, including being among the first to use the word ‘motherfucker’ in print. For one thing, he described himself as a ‘Christ-loving atheist,’ quoting the Sermon on the Mount fondly and frequently while satirizing organized religion. The Sermon does contain admirable sentiments, but they’re hard for any honest thinker to reconcile with its Author’s apparent megalomania, from which He never backed down and for which He was killed (not for any of His moral teachings). Jesus can be Mr Rogers or David Koresh, but He can’t be both.
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