The Cuckoo Clock in Kurt Vonnegut’s Hell

More and more I remain both sad and puzzled by the adamantine hatred of all things American and, by extension, Trumpian that persists among even the soft left and the many flabby thinkers streaming along behind them. I am puzzled because they persist in their hatred even when confronted by a growing deluge of facts and a growing collision with reality. It seems to make no difference to these people how many times quick or slow socialism has been implemented and collapsed in failure and suffering and death from Bolshivk Russia up to Venezula. They remain, in some demented sense, “for it.” How can a human mind remain oblivious to history and reality?

My facebook “Timeline” has, over the year since the election, become ground zero for the NoTrumpers to flounce their way through the “Gotcha-Du-Jour.” But perhaps this is changing, or, more likely, they’ve just gone back to the hive to get some fresh orders.

Sadly, my timeline feed this AM is bereft of folks rubbing their hands together about the Trump/Russia story. It has been such a staple of my morning for so long I’m already nostalgic to see it fade way. ” Who was the FBI director when the Russia probe began in 2009? Robert Mueller. Who was running the FBI when the case ended with a whimper and an apparent cover-up? James Comey. How any of these people can participate with a straight face in an investigation into President Trump’s purportedly nefarious (but, as far as we know, nonexistent) relationship with the Russian regime is beyond me.”

As for what is beyond me, how these folks keep their spite up at Defcon 2 levels is in the top 10.

And then I remember this brilliant assessment of the totalitarian mind by Vonnegut.

“I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind,a mind which might be linked unto a system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random. Such snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even by a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.

The boss G-man concluded wrongly that there were no teeth on the gears in the mind of Jones. ‘You’re completely crazy,’ he said.

Jones wasn’t completely crazy. The dismaying thing about classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, thought 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 most cases.

The wilful filling off a gear teeth, the wilful doing without certain obvious pieces of information –

That was how a household as contradictory as one composed of Jones, Father Keeley, Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer, and the Black Fuehrer could exist in relative harmony –

That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an indifference toward slave women and love for a a blue vase –

That was how Rudolf Hess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse-carriers –

That was how Nazi Germany sense no important difference between civilization and hydrophobia –

That is the closest I can come to explaining the legions, the nations of lunatics I’ve seen in my time.”

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Mother Night