Did Vonnegut foresee Donald Trump's false-idol campaign way back in 1961?

I devoured about a dozen Kurt Vonnegut books when I was a teenager, and they were worldview forming towards my lifelong love of science fiction, political commentary, international relations, and just plain sociology.

Sirens of Titan, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Slapstick are just a few of the best books ever written, and two of Vonnegut's books, Welcome to the Monkey House and Breakfast of Champions, even made my all-time top 60 novels list. And don't forget Harrison Bergeron, easily one of the greatest short stories, period.

Somehow I had missed his 1961 novel Mother Night, written in a very fertile part of his early career, and it stands up very well amongst both his greatest works as well as the test of time.

The layered tale is all about American Howard W. Campbell Jr., who begins the story from an Israeli prison and ends it there as well. He is recruited to be a Nazi spy and goes on to great infamy as a major radio voice in Joseph Goebbels' propaganda machine. Because he is a spy, he is able to escape the post-war Nazi trials and live the rest of his days in anonymity in New York City. He is visited by white supremecists who idolize him, and there isn't a ton of humor in this book, by Vonnegut standards, but the story of the supremacist dentist is among the funniest moments in Mother Night.

Howard had lived a rich love life before the collapse of Germany as well, and a woman calling herself his former wife Helga also visits New York to give him a brief respite of happiness in his old age. Then all goes wrong and he ends up turning himself in. Spoiler alert: the novel does not end well for Howard in that Israeli jail.

Even though Howard is a surprisingly sympathetic character through much of the tale, the moral is that who you pretend to be is who you actually are. Howard tried to hide behind his American spy status, but he truly said horrendous things over the air during the war that make it difficult to forgive him.

Mother Night is a quick read and pretty perfect for these times, when it remains too early to tell, before Donald Trump assumes the American throne, whether certain groups of people will be rounded up and deported or worse. Even if Trump never does all the ruthless and mean things he promised during his campaign, he will never be able to fully run away from who he pretended to be simply for the sake of beating his Republican rivals and Hillary Clinton.

4 out of 5 stars

Don't Read This Post About Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron

"Harrison Bergeron" is one of the 10 best short stories ever written. And it magically takes about 10 minutes to read. I revisit it every few years, usually along with several other stories from Kurt Vonnegut's masterpiece 1961 collection, Welcome to the Monkey House.

Because I'm going to spoil "Harrison Bergeron" (I won't vouch for the 1995 Showtime film, which couldn't possibly be any good), I would highly recommend you go read the story instead of this blog post.

The year is 2081 and the government has been able to successfully place handicaps on everyone to make them all equal. The U.S. Handicapper General, Diana Moon Clampers, has taken 14-year-old Harrison Bergeron away from his parents, George and Hazel because he is a genius whose handicaps are not working well enough.

But it only takes a few pages before Harrison breaks out of jail. A newswoman says "he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous." The handicappers had never been able to keep pace with Harrison's intelligence, despite his large earphones and glasses that made him half-blind and gave him "whanging headaches." To offset his good looks, he had to wear a rubber ball on his nose, shave his eyebrows, and wear black caps on his teeth.

Harrison bursts into the news studio and smashes all his handicaps on screen. He is revealed to be "a man that would have awed Thor, the god of thunder." And he plucks up a ballerina standing nearby to be his "empress."

Barely a moment later, Diana Moon Glampers enters the studio and mows Harrison down with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. George and Hazel, watching the whole thing on their TV, forget seeing their son's execution after a minute or two.

Pure brilliance. I feel like consumerism and the fact that every town has a McDonalds and a Wal-Mart is one way everyone's become equal, or at least the same. However, the endless choices we have on TV (not to mention the web) compared to when Vonnegut wrote this, when everyone watched the exact same shows and had much more similar frames of reference, has gone in the opposite direction from what the author envisioned.


***** out of ***** stars

What F. Scott Fitzgerald Had Against Jelly Beans

An odd thing: Over the years, I've read hundreds of short stories by a handful of my favorite authors (Poe, Vonnegut, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Capote). But, other than a few select classics, I rarely remember them.

One of the reasons I started Pop Culture Lunch Box was to jot down things I should remember from the things I read, watch, or see. Kind of like an, uh, journal. So my next endeavor is to reread F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tales of the Jazz Age and try to remember it so I never have to read any of its lesser short stories. (As a bonus, the Kindle edition is free at Amazon, even though the Library Journal review there curiously calls the collection "nice if you can afford it.")

The first story, "The Jellybean," takes place in small-town Georgia and was apparently co-written by Fitzgerald's wife Zelda. The Jelly Bean is 21-year-old Jim Powell, who is immediately described as an unappealing character coming home from the war in trousers that are too short and too tight.

He is invited to a party with his childhood friend Clark Darrow. Clark has lived a full social life and is a sought-after commodity by the ladies, while Jim is completely stunted and detests girls just as he had as a boy before the war. At the party, Clark asks Jim if he thinks Nancy Lamar, a girl who does "crazy stunts" and is dating the son of the owner of a safety-razor company, looks beautiful.

Somehow, Jim and Nancy end up sharing some strong drinks and a chat later in the evening. It's not long before she kicks aside her chair and stands up to announce her devoted love to Jim Powell - whom she calls King of the Jelly Beans - to the entire party.

Well, Nancy is obviously very drunk and that's pretty much where her night ends. But Jelly Bean leaves the party and walks the streets thinking about a successful woman Nancy had told him about and how unmotivated he'd been so far in life. He later tells Clark that he has decided to stop being a bum, go fix up his aunt's farm, and start a family.

But just a little while later, Jim the Jelly Bean turns into a pool hall on Jackson Street "where he was sure to find a congenial crowd who would make all the old jokes - the ones he knew."

This is a pretty depressing story, but at the same time, it's a brilliant look into how delusional we can be. Moments of brilliance and great ideas often flash past us, but only the truly motivated people turn those moments into something substantial. The other people are, well, jelly beans, which I guess in Fitzgerald's world means the ordinary people who don't stand out in a crowd in any way and float through life as just another jelly bean in the jar.

**** out of ***** stars