| news | | | recent | | | archives | | | dispatches | | | goods | | | contributing | | | about |
18 Apr 2007, 12:25
In 1963 Holt, Rinehart and Winston published Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle. It became a best-seller. Possibly related, in 1971 the University of Chicago's anthropology department accepted Cat's Cradle in lieu of Vonnegut's proposed thesis on "The fluctuations between good and evil in simple tales", which they uniformly rejected in the late 1940s, and awarded him the master's degree. Some argue that Cat's Cradle helped bring science fiction as a genre into the fold of what could be considered "serious literature"—which is typically a kind of asylum for morose and boring writing concerned with many of the same topics Vonnegut chose to address with humor.
In 1988 N.W.A. released their second album, Straight Outta Compton. It went double platinum. The FBI sent them a letter addressing the prevalent theme in their hit "Fuck tha Police", for which they came to be known in the popular media as "The world's most dangerous group". And some argue that anyone making gangsta rap after Straight Outta Compton is a chintzy-ass biter, ya heard.
So they probably have the same claims to clout, Kurt Vonnegut and N.W.A.
Anyway, what we'll concern ourselves with here are the fluctuations between good and evil specifically as characterized by Dr Felix Hoenikker in the first 30 pages of Cat's Cradle and by the eponymous dopeman, and how the results of those fluctuations are presented. Keeping to theme, for the most part, they're presented simply.
Dr Hoenikker, one of the atomic bomb's many fathers—which was conceived polypatristically in a gang bang, we should presume—reveals his moral MO in three monosyllabics: "What is sin?" Perhaps counterintuitively, and if presented in a comparably Vonnegut-churning context—his is an exchange between Dr Hoenikker and a fellow father of the bomb who, witnessing its explosion, declares "Science has now known sin"—this small phrase becomes more intriguing when made even smaller: "What sin?" What sin, indeed? Killing Japs? Cold War arms race, what? Indisposable radioactive waste, what? But we digress. Our MO here is simplicity, not intrigue.
For dopemen current and aspiring N.W.A. offer this multifunctional readymade response, indicating an analogous amorality: "Cluck, I don't give a shit if your girl kneels down and sucks my dick!" In lyrical context, this is a response to "a man who couldn't quit", begging the dopeman for just "another hit". Experiments show that this phrase can be appropriated to a variety of situations, delivered in a variety of humors, and is typically received in the same manner as delivered—a son-to-father exchange being the most pronounced exception.
If their moralities determine where they should be placed in the good-to-evil spectrum, then Dr Hoenikker and the dopeman reside firmly in the middle together—equally saint and sinner, yet neither; equally to be admired and abhored. Which means to be regarded skeptically. Yet their respective tribes do not regard the two in the same way. Even Newton Hoenikker, Dr Hoenikker's son, describes his father as being "the ugliest thing [he] had ever seen." The dopeman, meanwhile, when he goes steppin, goes dapper, wearing corduroy, with "money up to here"—wherever that is—and consequently has "bitches sucking on his dick 24-7." We should not overlook the fact that, as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, virtue is in the mouth of the judge.
However similar their moralities, Dr Hoenikker and the dopeman embody and affect good and evil in phenomenally contrasting ways. In considering their work environments, the oblique differences between operating from the sophisticated refinements of a government-funded laboratory and the indelicacies of the streets of Compton are cruelly elucidated, and nowhere else is the injustice made so plain. Why should a warlock like Dr Hoenikker get to sit around smoking Cubans and twiddling a string all day—at home, in the lab, wherever he wants—conjuring cataclysms the best and most powerful government in the world is readily willing to enact and take the heat for, when a shaman like the dopeman has to hustle his sheezy in public, himself, hand-to-hand, fearing for his freedom with each new score and each new sell?
The answer is this: Dr Hoenikker creates. His is the brain behind the brain behind the brain. Once his creation leaves his hands, its use or misuse is in the hands of the user. Should Alan Turing be to blame for the Sasser Worm? Of course not. (But, being an amoral and rampant homosexual, he was probably a prime vector of the current gonorrhea and atheism pandemics.) The dopeman, on the other hand, trades, exchanges fungibles, and is himself sadly fungible—he does not create, but nonetheless makes bank exchanging the creations of others for dollars and poon. His is the face in memories and on posters all over town. His patrons know whose door to knock on when they want some more, and where to go in case of irregularities of service.
If radiation fallout leaves a townful of rioting blind mutants behind on its warpath to the sea, no man or group will be held immediately and physically accountable. Dr Hoenikker will continue "dawdling like an eight-year-old", idly wondering about turtle spines and neglecting the healthy development of his children. The dopeman, though, knows that if cholos start dying from a bad batch, his ass is trash. His first words to new customers, in fact—in the Prisoners of Technology Remix, anyway—are a warning of the potentially perilous nature of his wares: "If ya smoke 'caine, you're a stupid motherfucker."
Dr Hoenikker has no such respect for life and common courtesy.
Feel like commenting?
your name
link?
Who is the current US president?