Granfalloons, Toy Balloons, and American Flags

The tragic events
of Tuesday, September 11 have changed everything: things we took as
givens are now as distant as the careless days of summer. Our most
famous skyline has been chopped down; our impregnable Pentagon has
proved pregnable. With each roar of an airplane, we turn our eyes to
the skies in awe and fear. We pray and sing together in school, and
church and state prove closer than we thought. We realize we have more
friends than we thought, that we all have city folk to worry about.
Even our concept of time has shifted: in less than a week, I have aged
years.

The
day before Tuesday, I thought Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle was a book
about Hiroshima and absurdity. Now as I stumble towards the next
Tuesday, and our nation moves nearer to military retaliation, I
recognize Cat's Cradle is a statement about all wars, and that
absurdity is our reality. The sugar coating of Cat's Cradle has been
mercilessly sucked off, and I am left with the bitter sadness that
somehow Vonnegut is a cynical member of my own karass, which he defines
as someone you find your life tangled up with for no logical reason.

This
evening I ventured out into the world for the first time since Tuesday.
Not that I had consciously sheltered myself from reality: actually, I
had become addicted to National Public Radio and the New York Times.
But it was not until I ran through Birmingham, Michigan on a quiet
Sunday evening that I understood America's reaction to tragedy and war,
and what Vonnegut had meant about granfalloons. A man rode by on his
bicycle, a woman cut the grass with an old-fashioned push mower, and
children threw a football on the front lawn. Above all their heads,
rippling in the cool September breeze, were the stars and stripes of
American flags. I was running through the American Dream.

The
further I ran, the further out of place I felt: I was supposed to be
feeling a rush of pride when I saw Old Glory. I was supposed to feel
relieved at the strength of our military and the expediency of our
government in finding the terrorists. I was not supposed to shudder
under the weight of two fallen skyscrapers, five thousand deaths, and
impending war. I was supposed to picture the victory gardens and heroic
GIs of World War II, not the burning rice paddies and napalmed children
of Vietnam. I was supposed to feel proud of the way my fellow Americans
have come together in this time of crisis, not afraid for the safety of
my Muslim friends.

With
every step down Cranbrook Road, the words of Hazel Crosby in Cat's
Cradle resounded louder in my ears. "'My God,' she said, 'Are you a
Hoosier? * I don't know what it is about Hoosiers, but they've got
something. Whenever I meet a young Hoosier, I tell them, 'You call me
Mom'". John, our trusted narrator, explains her queer excitement
through the teachings of Bokononism:

Hazel's
obsession with Hoosiers was a textbook example of a false karass, of a
seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things
done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon. Other
examples of granfalloons are the Communist party, the Daughters of the
American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International
Order of Odd Fellows----and any nation, any time, anywhere.

As Bokonon invites us to sing along with him:

If you wish to study a granfalloon,

Just remove the skin of a toy balloon.

Just like that,
Vonnegut deflates patriotism. He tears off our rubber skins and tells
us we are full of hot air. He rips off our red-white-and-blue caps and
ribbons and tells us it's all a sham. Just when we were excited we
would not have to wait until the next Olympics to shout "USA!," just
when George W. gets to use his father's war lingo and "whip" the enemy,
Vonnegut tells us that our zeal is meaningless. He tells us that we are
not even members of the same karass, that our national pride is nothing
more than a common country on our passports. Vonnegut does all this
through sacred calypso songs that openly proclaim themselves to be
lies, and all the time we are laughing to ourselves that Hazel thinks
Hoosiers form a family. And all the time we thought we made an American
family.

With
every flag pinned to a lapel, I remember that our nation puts great
stock in symbolism; there is nothing stressed so much in high school
English classes or invoked more often by network sportscasters than
metaphor. As much or more than anyone else, I want to remember the
victims of Tuesday, mourn with their families, and to hope that they
did not die in vain. But I cannot shake the feeling that we cheapen the
finality and consequence of death by striking back and killing others.
American culture dictates that we must show our emotions through
symbols, but some meaning is lost in metaphor. How could a quiescent
ribbon possibly explain the turmoil I feel as I cling to hopes of peace
and remembrance in a nation careening towards war and hate?

The
Republic of San Lorenzo in Cat's Cradle is meant to be absurd, yet its
absurdities are not far from our own. The emperor Tum-wumba of San
Lorenzo ordered fortifications to be built, though "the fortifications
have never been attacked nor has any sane man ever proposed any reason
why they should be attacked". San Lorenzo is resourceless and
impoverished, and it is the act of building that Tum-wumba deems
important. Fourteen hundred people died building the unnecessary
fortifications, of which "about half are said to have been executed in
public for sub-standard zeal". My mind catches on the words
"substandard zeal," and I think of a world that offers bonus points for
enthusiasm and banners for congeniality. More troubling, I think of a
world where the Smiths are suspicious of their neighbors, the
Abdul-Shahims, because they do not have an American flag hanging over
the front porch. I think of a world, one that I hope will not come upon
us, where my male friends are accused of "substandard zeal" because
they do not want to be drafted, because they do not want to sacrifice
their lives in the name of Uncle Sam.

Some
of Vonnegut's words seem strangely prescient, especially the chapter
titled "Why Americans are Hated." Ambassador Minton recalls the mad
days of McCarthyism, and explains that "the highest form of treason is
to say that Americans aren't loved wherever they go, whatever they do".
Not only can we not swallow being despised, we cannot even accept not
being adored: "Americans, in being hated, were simply paying the normal
penalty for being people, and * they were foolish to think they should
somehow be exempted from that penalty". We are wildly patriotic, yet it
is a struggle to understand that the terrorists were extreme not only
in their violence, but also in their patriotism.

A
few days ago I received an e-mail from my friend Ljubica, whose family
fled from Bosnia eight years ago, and she sadly wrote, "I hope that you
learn from this and finally understand that America is not invincible
and never was. It was just lucky. But I liked and cherished its luck."
We truly did think we were invincible, that "this sort of thing"
couldn't happen on American soil. I think that feeling of
unconquerability has actually revived itself in the past few days; many
Americans are happy to fight a war, just as long as no innocent people
have to die. They ignore the reality of war: innocent people, even
Americans, are doomed to die.

In
the world since Tuesday, I have gone about my life. I eat my cereal in
the morning, I laugh with friends at lunch, and I do my homework at
night. But all of it has lost its sugar coating; all of my thoughts
carry a bitter taste. Cat's Cradle is not a book to read on a sunny day
and forget; it is another, darker perspective on the events that loom
before us. In the world since Tuesday, I cannot run through a suburban
neighborhood without thinking I might trip over an American flag. In
the world since Tuesday, I have discovered new members of my karass,
but I have discovered many more to be granfalloons. In the world since
Tuesday, I fear that there are other sorrowful Tuesdays to come.