Technology- The Curse!

I was having this hugely interesting conversation with my friend today this morning about ways to save the world. I've realized that anything we can do you save a part of the world, damages another part. For example: We don't burn our wastes to save the ozone layer but we put our wastes in land fills that pollute the dirt. [Think of it this way, girls pads is in those land fills....EW!] We don't pollute our water but we pollute our air so when we have rain, it all mixes to create acid rain which falls onto our soil where we grow our food which eventually gets sprayed with peptides which causes epidemics!

The reason my friend and I believed was the main source of our problems is technology! Okay so we can't live without our cell phones, our computers, a refrigerator, and electrical heat. But the demands of oil for our cars and oils to heat our homes and everything have gone so up that we are going to end up destroying ourselves! The manufacturing of these electronic devices are killing our ozone layer which in turn leaves the world able to rot. But we can't live without a refrigerator!

It also goes back to the newspaper article in the school's newspaper. We have such huge problems shoved at us when we all turn 18 and graduate college! Anyways this whole conversation reminded me of my book which satirizes the modern day world and how it seems that the everyday things, like war [which if you think about it, the war in Iraq is an everyday thing to us], is leading up to our self destruction. Vonnegut says: "This financial crisis, which could never happen today, was simply the latest in a series of murderous twentieth century catastrophes which had originated entirely in human brains. From the violence people were doing to themselves and each other, and to all other living things, for that matter, a visitor from another planet might have assumed that the environment had gone haywire, and that people were in such a frenzy because Nature was about to kill them all." [25]

Also I think it's interesting to point out that the story is pretty much told from the future reflecting back to the past [which is our present] and Vonnegut states that in the future time period, such things could never happen. And yet...the further we get into the future, the more worst off we become.

Hmm....

Galapogos

My next book is Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos.

From School Library Journal
YA Leon Trout, the ghost of a decapitated shipbuilder, narrates the humorous, ironic and sometimes carping decline of the human race, as seen through the eyes and minds of the survivors of a doomed cruise to the Galapagos Islands. Vonnegut's cast of unlikely Adams and Eves setting out in a Noah's ark includes Mary Hepburn, an American biology teacher and recent widow; Zenji Hiroguchi, a Japanese computer genius (who does not make it to the ship, although his language-translating and quotation-spouting computer does); his wife, Hisako, carrying radiated genes from the atomic bombs; James Wait, who has made a fortune marrying elderly women; and Captain Aolph von Kleist. Also included: six orphaned girls of the Kana-bono cannibal tribe, who will become the founding mothers of the fisherfolk after bacteria render all other women infertile. Serious fans of Vonnegut's wry and ribald prose will welcome this tale of the devolution of superbrained humans into gentle swimmers with small brains, but others may find this Darwinian survival tale too packed with ecological and sociological details that trap the story line in a series of literary devices, albeit very clever ones. Mary T. Gerrity, Queen Anne School, Upper Marlboro, Md.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
[Amazon.com]

So far I'm only on the second chapter and you can automatically tell the sarcastic remarks and that the story is saturated with satire. I think it's very interesting that the story starts off with a quote from Anne Frank: "In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart."

The story begins with a description of the island of Galapagos islands. Vonnegut says that "human begins had much bigger brains back then than they do today" [3] and goes to explain the crazy theories they had in explaining how animals got to those islands from the mainland.

The second chapter we are introduced to a con artist named James Wait. He is a man who feeds on pity. He is "prematurely bald and he was pudgy, and his color was bad, like the crust on a pie in a cheap cafeteria, and he was bespectacled, so that he might plausibly claim to be in his fifties, in case he saw some advantage in making such a claim. He wished to seem harmless and shy." [6]. He's had 17 wives and has emptied out each of their banking accounts. He's a criminal that no one has ever caught because the government thinks he's just 17 different faithless husbands when it is just one man.

Kind of funny to me.

Endings

I'm finally done with my first book. Everyone dies...well the important characters anyways. The ending interests me the most though. "Teddy surveyed his charges with pride and affection. It was by means of them that he hoped one day to restore Hetton the the glory that it had enjoyed in the days of his Cousin Tony." [308]

It was really ironic. This is because Tony adored his house and although he had previously agreed to divorce Brenda, he didn't when he found out he had to sell his beloved house. The ending seemed like it was hinting that Teddy [which is some distant relative of Tony's] was going to have the same story as Tony. It just seems like it was hinting [to me at least] that this was all a cycle. That's how life works most of hte time anyways. You are in a repeated cycle. You are born, you go to school, you make money for the government, you die. Then another kid is born and they go through the same thing. That's what I think was highly satirized in the ending.

On to the next book finally!