The Trouble with Reunions

"The Trouble with Reunions" is an article that was published in a supplement to the October 4, 1999 edition of Forbes magazine called Forbes ASAP, subtitled The Big Issue IV: The Great Convergence. In addition to Vonnegut, it features articles by Arthur C. Clarke, Tom Wolfe, and Michael Moore, among others.

Summary

Community house on Yap with stone money on display, 1971

At the anthropology department at the University of Chicago immediately after World War Two, the only job opportunities were in island nations of the South Pacific that had recently come under the control of the United States. The idea was "to learn the customs and hopes and dreams" of the native population, which Vonnegut calls "a strikingly wise and humane thing for our government to do". However, instead of going to Yap, he and his family went to Schenectady, New York to work for General Electric instead. In 1986, Yap, Truk, Ponape, and Kosrae founded the sovereign Federated States of Micronesia, "a rare instance of a mutually respectful coming together of unlike societies with strikingly unlike cultures, one overwhelmingly powerful, the other pitifully weak". When the British took Tasmania in 1803, they drove the native inhabitants into hiding where they starved to death. Hitler's plan for the unlike culture of the Jews parallels what the Turks did to the Armenians and what the Serbs have recently done to the Kosovars.

In the past such horror was justified not by the clear land grab but because the victims weren't Christians. In Vonnegut's youth, Communist were the enemy with whom the United States "could never converge". When he was freed as a prisoner of war south of Dresden, a Germany soldier remarked that now the Americans would have to fight Communists. Vonnegut replied that instead, each would try to leave up to each other's avowed ideals—the United States would seek greater economic fairness while the Soviet Union would allow greater personal freedoms. An African American or Ukrainian could obviously point out the failures of each system, but the hope that the goals of the two nations would merge was aspirational. In the past half century, Americans of color through great struggle have won right previous reserved for whites. The Soviet Union is gone, but Russia currently has so many personal and economic rights that, just as in the United States, "they can even be gangsters and racketeers". What it lacks is the money to care for families, provide jobs, health care, education, or compete in the high tech global economy. In the closed economy of the Soviet Union, the currency was worthless outside, but at least it provided jobs, food, shelter, and health care domestically, even if lousy.

The Fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989

In the United States, such "enormous pockets of abject poverty" leave millions as badly off as many Russians, while corporate executives with stock options are rewarded by Wall Street for laying off employees. The situation of East and West Germany is unique in that two peoples united by a language and, until the Second World War, history were now "radically different cultures with respect to individual freedoms and what was to be done with money". Anthropologists should have been employed to help make "reunification for the East Germans... less meanly ridiculous" given the contempt held for them in the West. When Vonnegut visited Leipzig in the East the previous October, there was high unemployment as factories unprofitable in the modern technological economy were closed, but also "luxury shops such as one sees in Monte Carlo". He asked a local journalist why there were no satirists and comedians "jeering at such a sinister result". The journalist replied: "Don't you remember? We killed all our Jews".