Spy Mind
Mn
Monuments | 7 Oct 2007 | 0 Comments | Share this...
The date’s been set for the Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Celebration and Tribute!
Saturday, November 10th, 7pm-3am
Held at ”208”
135 Plymouth Street, Suite 208
Dumbo, Brooklyn
In Mother Night, Howard W. Campbell Jr, a fictional American playwright living in Germany is approached by the American government to infiltrate high ranks in the Nazi war machine as a propagandist. He delivers messages in code to the Americans through his broadcasts. He doesn’t consider himself a Nazi, but is eventually befriended by many of them becoming deeply entrenched in Nazi culture. For all intents and purposes, he is one of them. After the war, he flees Germany and no one recognizes him as an American spy, so he must stay in hiding.
In what ends up being a character study, Campbell refers to his ability to compartmentalize the various parts of his personality that allowed him to spew such inhuman rhetoric. The other isolated and more harmless areas of his consciousness were occupied by his pure love and affection for his wife. I’ve never understood how guys like this are capable of such despicable acts by day, followed by their commute home to make love to the wife. It’s scary how well we can keep the gruesome realities of our lives at arm’s length. It was one of the many reasons The Sopranos was so interesting. Tony can curb stomp a nemesis, and mildly shake a few gold teeth out of his pant cuff while eating dinner with his family.
Vonnegut’s self-proclaimed moral of the story: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
After American authorities begin closing in on Campbell who has been anonymously hiding out in a dank apartment in New York City for years after his escape, he ruminates on his life and his decisions (as he does throughout the book, which mostly looks back on his days as a Nazi from a jail cell in Israel):
---
“The Republic of Israel stepped up its demands for me, encouraged by rumors that I wasn’t an American citizen, that I was, in fact, a citizen of nowhere. And the Republic’s demands were framed so as to be educational, too - teaching that a propagandist of my sort was as much a murderer as Heydrich, Eichmann, Himmler, or any of the gruesome rest.
That may be so. I had hoped as a broadcaster, to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate. So many people WANTED to believe me!
Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.”
---
Such a brilliant insight - we are biologically programmed to imprint, to believe what we are told. In nature, it is a matter of survival. It’s how we learn to fly, to walk, to hunt, to escape predators (if you do it wrong, you could die, so you better follow instructions carefully). In fact, once it’s programmed, it’s fairly hard to change. The irony is that this biological paradigm - the calcification of our beliefs and perceptions embedded in our brains guides us through childhood, but may also be the agent of our own destruction. The ability to question one’s own beliefs within one’s life time is not really a necessary human survival instinct.
(Be sure to check the links about Heydrich, Eichmann, and Himmler, the real-life do-gooder engineers behind the holocaust. Interesting and terrifying.)
