Kurt Vonnegut invented the writer/character Kilgore Trout as a kind of Doppelgänger of himself. He appears in several of Vonnegut’s novels.
There’s one Trout story—I think it’s in Breakfast of Champions—that’s about a man who thinks he’s the only non-robot in the world. As a result, he feels very isolated. In the common parlance of today, I have to say, I feel that guy.
My corollary to that idea is, what the **** is wrong with people?
Let’s start with Republicans and Ukraine. Why have they become the Manchurian Candidates willing to do the bidding of their Russian puppet master? How does a political party go from, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!” to “We don’t need to support the people of Ukraine as Putin seeks to restore the glory of the Soviet Union.” (Yes, I admit, that second phrase is a bit of a paraphrase, or a stating of subtext.)
On a more local level, there are people who are related to one another for whom that relationship is not adequate to give them a bond. Sometimes their enmity is such that they don’t realize they’re just clones of each other. Or perhaps that’s what the cause of the friction or enmity is—we tend to find the greatest fault in others that in fact lies in ourselves (and which we refuse to admit is our fault).
I wrote the notes for the above two paragraphs in a particular moment of anger, frustrated that people just don’t seem to see what’s really going on a macrocosmic or microcosmic level around them. They pursue their own selfish interests, or just blithely go on with life, unaware of the effects they have on other people. I really wish they’d think these things through.
MUSOFYR 