Reflecting on the Third Way
The Children's Crusades--Even on Veterans Day
Jeanne and I have been watching a lot of Star Trek (Original Series) lately. A minor star Redshirt is from my tiny home town in Indiana. He moved back there around 2010, I think it was. People in tiny dying towns look for any kind of life, any kind of life support, but I did not support exploiting the actor’s role, even perhaps as protector of a worthy enterprise. I kind of regret it now. He talked about how great “Bill and Gloria” were, real-life Captain Kirk and “Bill’s” real-life wife then, and Gene. Memories. More memories.
This is not the kind of thing you probably expected for an implied theme of Third Ways and Veterans Day. But around the same time that Our Very Own Redshirt veteran came back to town, I was touring the old part of the Veterans Administration facility in Marion occasionally.
The VA was planning to demolish several of the original 1890 buildings built back when it was an “Old Soldiers Home,” so they wanted to seem sensitive to the history that would be lost by offering artifacts to preservation groups. They ended this PR effort once they realized there was little backlash brewing. But they had hooked me.
The Old Soldiers Home had been located there in 1890 because of Northeast Indiana’s new and free natural gas. It immediately became a national tourist destination, fairly self-sufficient with a large farm and shops for the Civil War veterans to work in, and to work for. But there had been no love for it for several decades, because of the next war.
Memorial Day had been established for those lost in the Civil War, to remember and to honor them. The Marion facility was for the survivors that needed assistance, and was loved by the nation for what it provided to the veterans. Beauty, vocation, camaraderie, honor, making the best from the very worst—from a very avoidable situation. I won’t get into that heresy about avoidability today. Today is about Veteran’s Day.
Veteran’s Day comes from Armistice Day, that day in 1918, on November 11, at 11 AM, when WWI officially ended, another very avoidable situation which betrays simple explanations and clear blame—like children want but don’t actually need.
THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADES
Some of you will recognize a nod to Slaughterhouse-Five in that heading, because Vonnegut, a WWII veteran, included the alternative title in the book, which was The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. He was referring to an observation made by the wife of an army buddy, that they were but children in the war, and that his book would glorify them and war as is usually done, leading to increased likelihood of more wars.
The glorification of war is often given as a reason for both the Civil War and WWI, about both sides of both wars. It’s much more complicated than that, but it does seem to be one of many non-simple fractal factors.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. happened to be born on Armistice Day (which later became Veterans Day) in 1922. These kinds of coincidences get the attention of my imaginary friend, Bug Stu, because he can’t help but try and figure out what coincidences might be leading to a useful secret, and what convergences are happening now that might be leading to a useful outcome.
KVJ became one of Indiana’s best-known authors, often writing in cutely crude and anti-war themes, especially popular with the kids in 1969 due to his irreverence, anti-war stance, wit, and maybe inferred love.
I read/listened to Slaughterhouse-Five in 2019, fifty years later, out of duty and because I’d (reluctantly) started a big window restoration project and had lots of audiobook time. I liked it because KVJ’s absurd humor reminded me of my dad’s friends, mostly the farmers. Then I discovered there were Vonnegut fans all around me, a young colleague at MatchBOX, a young window client, and even an influential uncle or two—and their mother, my grandmother, the Star City one, was born exactly 11 years before KVJ, on 11/11/11.
I’m not sure why science-fiction isn’t called social-fiction, because it’s usually pertaining to big social questions more than science, the stuff that lasts does anyway. The first Star Trek series ran from 1966 thru 1969, and it was always asking the Big Questions, and often questioning the Big Answers that were trending then, which is something I only noticed lately. I was more interested in the aliens and phasers the first time around.
Children like the Big Answers. There are all kinds of Big Answers and all kinds of big children. And if you look into a children’s crusade you’ll find an older leader who wants a war or a revolution. Without the children, gullible, hungry for purpose, hungry for honor, hungry for love, etc., then their more clever but equally underdeveloped leaders, their peddlers, would just fade away. If that doesn’t sound nice, I don’t know what does. I’m not talking mainly about physical wars even, clearly.
My Vow of Ignorance, along with the ideas behind the Fellowship of the Dimly Lit, emerged after being kind of overwhelmed by the story behind Marion’s Old Soldiers Home. WWI had generated so much shell shock and other breakage that it became a psychiatric hospital and served that purpose from then on. There is no love for psychiatric hospitals. Wire mesh and steel grating went up on all the windows. It was a place of horrors and horror stories and horrible fights. It had been made into the worst from the best of another worst. A few years later, I’m pretty sure I was the last person in the building(s) before actual demolition. Obsession.
These were the Redshirts from missions and adventures of others. Most of us are Redshirts, too, in a different way. Most of us are not actual veterans from armed services, and that is what this day is about, honoring them. There is no particular honor for us other Redshirts, though I see people who try to give and to garner some, something which I think is a bad idea, because like Kurt’s army buddy’s wife said, it tends to glorify us and our mistakes, thereby glorifying that war and making it more likely to continue.
MAPS FOR TRANSCENDENCE AND THIRD WAYS
Third ways are not compromises, they are different paths, different roads, that allow us to see things from outside of the fray. Vonnegut sort of did this with Slaughterhouse-Five, partly by pointing out the absurdities but partly by rising above. But when he rose above, mostly through the alien Tralfamadorians and time travel, he brought along as much social underbelly as he could, which I would call a mistake—and just did, so a few people might call me out. [Maybe we’ll talk Friday.]
Rhettie’s Transcendent Triangle reminds me a little of something out of Star Trek, some strange structure representing a way to a different perspective, and not just for laughs and awkwardness.
There’s something bigger going on these days than emancipated irreverence and underbelly, partly because it’s been over fifty years since Slaughterhouse-Five, and over a century since Armistice Day. I am not a Trekkie, but I have been appreciating the plots which transcend human foibles, absurdities, and popular advocacies. The point is not to promote Star Trek even, it’s to explore transcending human foibles, absurdities, and popular advocacies.
Children don’t seem to be equipped for this, partly because there are too many potential peddlers ready to lure them in and out-think them. So any effort in this direction is a children’s crusade—it is for the children—but it cannot be carried out by children nor those clinging to childish things which have somehow become so precious in the last fifty years or so. Surely we wouldn’t have done this to our children, nor to ourselves.
Bug Stu sees patterns and maybe even convergences in these stories, even including The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, as I mentioned last time. Bug Stu goes beyond the wry nihilism and utopias and wars of the old sci-fi (social-fi) canon, and he does this through Rhettie Kovach, not me. That’s because I have too many windows to do, and too many books to listen to, like Slaughterhouse-Five, which I just re-heard today while working on windows, just like I did the first time. It struck me differently this time.
More Saturday. Maybe Rhettie’s rough draft map. Surely having a Redshirt from the Middle of Nowhere isn’t for nothing, I’m sure Stu would say. And how have the veterans fit into all this? That takes us back to 2014… (but for another time)
Thanks for reading : ).
Tim