American Culture 101
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut is the book I just read as part of my reading resolution for 2021. Yes, the photograph shows a different Vonnegut book, Slaughterhouse-Five. There’s a simple explanation: Slaughterhouse-Five was maybe the first Vonnegut book I read (notice the price of 95 cents in the upper left corner of the book). I read Cat’s Cradle over the past couple of days on my kindle, and a picture of my old copy of Slaughterhouse-Five looks more interesting than a picture of my kindle. I did have a hard copy of Cat’s Cradle, but sometime in the past 40 years, it got lost.
I started college in the fall of 1977. It seems like yesterday. I was so excited about going to college that I arrived on the first day the dormitories allowed students to move in, ten days before the semester started. That first day, I took off walking around the campus at the University of Texas, Austin wearing a brand-new polo shirt that had multicolored horizontal stripes and fit real tight because I thought I had some muscles to show off. I was as skinny as I am now and must have looked ridiculous. On a campus street headed back to my dorm, another kid walked up alongside me and started a conversation by saying, “nice shirt.” His name was Steve, and he was an erudite kid from New York who could throw a football pretty good and didn’t mind that I was a hick from South Texas and could only catch the football about 30% of the time. We became good friends. We spent much of those pre-class days playing football with other guys we met. And we spent our evenings at the student union where we had the sort of conversations college guys have – subjects changing rapidly between girls, exciting books and ideas, and back to girls. We never actually tried to talk to any girls directly, and I hadn’t read many books.
Steve introduced me to the books of Kurt Vonnegut, the music of Bruce Springsteen, and the satire of Saturday Night Live. I said I was a hick from South Texas, and I wasn’t kidding. My college education was taking off fast, and classes hadn’t even started.
Four years passed quickly. Steve went to Law School, and I went to Medical School. Forty more years went by, and one day I got a Facebook instant message asking if I was the same Monte that went to the University of Texas, Austin in the late 1970s? Yes, I am.
A character in Cat’s Cradle named Bokonon created a religion called Bokononism that he described as being based entirely upon lies. So, Steve, I can imagine a conversation we might have today about Bokonon and what he would think of social media. Your thoughts?
Monte
