From “America This Week,” the free transcript of this week’s story discussion. This week, “Harrison Bergeron” by the great Kurt Vonnegut:
Matt Taibbi: This week’s story is Harrison Bergeron, by Kurt Vonnegut, which has a lot of predictive power about a couple of things in modern society.
Vonnegut was always one of my favorites. I liked him as a kid, among other things, because he was easy to read. The paragraphs were small and separated. He drew pictures that were funny. He openly didn’t take literature seriously. He had a great sense of humor, and the message was, I always thought gentle, humanistic, encouraging, and optimistic, and the stories were great. But his short stories are not something that I ever really got into. So, this was interesting for me. What are your thoughts about Kurt Vonnegut?
Walter Kirn: I mean, to reintroduce him to maybe younger listeners or to people who weren’t fans, Kurt Vonnegut is an American novelist whose major works were produced in the sixties and seventies and the eighties to some extent, who was a World War II veteran, whose formative experience in life was being on the ground at the firebombing of Dresden in World War II. And so he experienced war at a level of horrific industrial incineration that was unique. And he came back to the United States. He’s originally from Indiana. He was from a commercial family in Indianapolis. They had a department or maybe a hardware store chain.
He went to work in upstate New York, maybe for General Electric or some big post-war company. And in this way he was like Joseph Heller. Heller and Vonnegut lived in some ways parallel lives. They both came back from terrifying experiences in World War II to try to join normie corporate America in the fifties. And they in some ways failed to bond and became satirical novelists whose target was what we might call the organization. The person who doesn’t ask questions whose identity is subsumed by some absurd either army or company or social scene. And for me, Vonnegut, you say he had a sense of humor. He almost had nothing but a sense of humor.
Matt Taibbi: I was going to say, he was also less vicious than Joseph Heller was in his caricatures.
Walter Kirn: Yes, and that probably has to do with temperament, but also may have to do with the fact that Kurt Vonnegut’s World War II was approximately 10,000 times more horrifying than Heller’s. He saw a major European city reduced to rubble and its population to body parts and scavenging animals almost, in the wake of this. And he was held prisoner there. In any case, his greatest book is probably his account of that bombing interspliced with a weird science fiction story called Slaughterhouse-Five.
Matt Taibbi: With a character named Montana Wildhack. I always thought that was a great name.
Walter Kirn: Montana Wildhack. So in Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut takes a character who was a fellow soldier of his, who he names Billy Pilgrim, who’s an American everyman. A simple, innocent American everyman. And in the spliced part of the novel, he imagines Billy Pilgrim becoming “unstuck in time” and becoming a zoo creature on another planet.
Matt Taibbi: Tralfamadore, that’s the name of the planet.
Walter Kirn: On a planet called Tralfamadore, where he’s caged with a porn star, an incredibly well-endowed porn star named Montana Wildhack. And the extra-terrestrials watch them cavort in the cage. And we understand this fantasy, high absurd Swiftian cartoon drama as the necessary psychic escape from the horrors of the Dresden bombing. He, in the book, enacts a psychic break in which the horrors of reality are poised against the weirdness of this notion that you can move around “unstuck in time” to other planets and become a zoo animal for the entertainment of other beings and so on.
But the thing that I think is important about Kurt Vonnegut vis-a-vis this story, Harrison Bergeron, is that he was a Midwesterner, and he came from a world that I know well because I grew up in it too, where everybody’s supposed to be nice to each other. And in the words of Garrison Keillor, “All the children are above average,” as he said, of Lake Wobegon. And it is not nice to be better than someone else, to put on airs, and to be stuck up. That’s the word we used to use in high school back in Minnesota. And this story is about a society in the future in which everybody is equal because everybody who exceeds the norm, whether it be in intelligence or beauty or athleticism, is handicapped such that they can’t stand out.
Matt Taibbi: I think the two big themes that he really nails in this story are the ideology of equity, and then there’s a lot about the internet and the mechanisms of evening things out that he approximates here. But he writes,
The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
Matt Taibbi: Of course, it’s amusing that that word would no longer be allowed if you were writing today, but that’s pretty much the story. It goes on from there and we’ll get into the specific plot points, but the idea is they were mandating that everybody no longer be better than anybody else in any way. The people who were had to walk around with weights around their necks. They had internal mechanisms that made their brains blast really unpleasant noises if they were smarter than other people and were tempted to have thoughts that raced them ahead of others. One of them described it as listening to a ball-peen hammer hitting a Coke bottle.
By the way: Vonnegut had, I always thought, a really great gift for capturing images in a sentence. He was very original in that way. He got you from A to B in a very creative way, but it wasn’t flashy. He always came up with something that was both simple and really, really creative.
Walter Kirn: Matt, I see a lot of Vonnegut in your writing. I really do.
Matt Taibbi: I wish! But thank you.
Walter Kirn: I think you absorbed and digested him and made him your own in some fashion. But back to the story.
Matt Taibbi: So, this is about a family, and it’s George and Hazel Bergeron, and these names, as you say, he’s a Midwesterner. A lot of his characters come from places like where was it? Ili New York? Was that one of them?
Walter Kirn: Which is a take on Troy, New York.
Matt Taibbi: Then a lot of them were from Indiana or Indianapolis. I think his best book, the one I enjoyed the most was Breakfast of Champions, which was, if I remember correctly, set in Indiana.
Walter Kirn: It’s about a car dealer from Indiana. Dwayne Hoover. Yeah. And his adventures in Holiday Inn ballrooms and car dealer offices and the most banal American settings imaginable.
Matt Taibbi: His unique trick as a satirist was, and the thing that he did really brilliantly through this character who reappeared in a lot of his books, Kilgore Trout, a science fiction writer who was a stand-in for Vonnegut himself, was he would describe the way people acted as if you were having to explain it to an alien civilization that had never heard of it before. And of course, if you do that, inevitably we sound like the most ridiculous people, the most ridiculous animals who have ever been created. And he was always very good at that.
And I thought Breakfast of Champions was terrific in the way it used that technique to take this totally banal part of America that you would never even want to visit and make it seem like the wildest, weirdest place in the world.
But anyway, once again, it seems like he’s taking Midwestern characters as this George and Hazel Bergeron, and George is smart, and he has to wear what they call a little mental handicap radio in his ear where, “Every 20 seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.”
While he’s hearing stuff in his head, Hazel is apparently not hearing this, but they’re in the same place because the government has successfully evened things out. And then there is a plot that develops about their son, Harrison. I think he’s 14.
Walter Kirn: I can’t remember his age. But I think that the reason this is apropos of what we were talking about before is that the story here occurs on television as the couple watches their son appear on a variety show. And on this variety show, there are ballet dancers, and the beautiful ones have to wear ugly masks. And the ones who are light on their feet have to wear extra heavy bags of lead shot or whatever to keep them earthbound. And onto the stage comes their son. They didn’t know he was coming because they live in a state of induced idiocy due to these ear devices they’re forced to wear.
They get about 20 seconds of consciousness, at which point they reset constantly. They’re like TikTok videos. And here comes their son onto the stage, they’re not expecting it. And he performs marvels of eloquence. He proclaims himself a great person, a great man. He takes one of the ballerinas in hand, and they dance in an extraordinary fashion. He so exceeds the median he so overcomes the average that he has to be actually killed on the air. So, the Handicapper in Chief or the Handicapper General, I forget her name, but it’s another great Vonnegut name…
