Voppenheimegut!

It's Oppenheimer + Kurt Vonnegut (no offense to Barbie implied)

It's 1992 and Kurt Vonnegut is in Sagaponack, Long Island, working on an essay called "The Last Tasmanian" while he and his wife, during a trial separation, try to decide if they are still in love with other.

It’s 2023 and the Middlebrow sits with his family in a movie theater to watch Christopher Nolan’s masterful Oppenheimer. What these two stories have in common is the immutability of the human experience.

Both Vonnegut’s essay and Nolan’s film deal with consequential and existential issues for humanity. Vonnegut muses about European imperialism, innocent victims of capitalism, ongoing environmental catastrophes and the possibility, explored in Vonnegut’s novel Galapagos that the sheer size and power of the human brain might be our downfall as a species. All of this shows up in Oppenheimer as well where the ability to grasp the relativistic and quantum structures of the universe almost immediately lead to the development of weapons that can unmake reality, or at least erase humans from it.

To Vonnegut, the surprise is how long it takes people to reach such levels of knowledge. Of European discovery of the new world, he writes that the date 1492 is something of am embarrassment, given how late it shows up in human in history: "Who couldn't have found half of a planet as small and navigable as this one is?" One could ask the same about the quantum structure of the atom, which we still don’t fully understand — how are we baffled by the very things we are made of?

Vonnegut also wonders, as Nolan does, why it is that humans are so eager to follow instructions, even to do horrible things. "When I consider the ghastly orders obeyed by underlings of Columbus, or of Aztec priests supervising human sacrifices, or of senile Chinese bureaucrats wishing to silence unarmed, peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square only three years ago as I write, I have to wonder if obedience isn't the basic flaw in most of humankind,” says Vonnegut. In Nolan’s film, J. Robert Oppenheimer has to wrestle with the same questions — to put his theories into practice, he must follow orders that defy his own conscience, and he doesn’t fully realize the consequences of that until it is far too late to mitigate the negative effects of his discoveries and innovations.

Of Christopher Columbus, who Vonnegut regards as uncommonly cruel, he writes with surprising charity: “Let us give poor old Columbus a rest. He was a human being of his times and aren’t we all? We are all so often bad news for somebody else. AIDs, I read somewhere, was probably brought into this country by a Canadian flight attendant on an international flight. And what had his crime been? Nothing but love, love, love. That’s life sometimes. And he is surely as dead as Columbus now. And I’m killing the world with garbage, three cans a week, sort of like Chinese water torture.”

If you’re wondering, when Oppenheimer made martinis, he first dipped the glass into a solution of lime juice and honey. Now that should have been the invention that made his reputation. h/t: https://www.insidehook.com/article/booze/oppenheimer-had-signature-martini-heres-make

When I consider Oppenheimer I realize that, yes, it is a story about a man who works with the government to use the secrets of the universe to build a weapon that threatens all of humanity to this day, but it is also just a story about people being people. For all its talk of atomic nuclei, black holes and the quantum behavior of light and electrons, it is a story about people dealing with each other the way people do in every relationship or workplace.

Robert Oppenheimer was a young Communist before the war and associated himself with American Socialists back when such people had the potential to influence society. He never fully extricated himself from those associations, which included close friendships and romantic relationships. Oppenheimer was also a womanizer, and in awe of his own genius (which allowed him to womanize). He was very clever and also very eager to be right, which means he offended people throughout his career and these things, including some very petty conflicts, all factored into how his life as a public figure emerged and eventually ended.

In the end, Nolan argues, Oppenheimer offended a particularly vengeful individual who devoted himself to revenge and the film is less about the atomic bomb or the hydrogen weapons that followed, than it is about honor and vanity. The irony of the film is that the really big issues of science and physics play distant second fiddle to petty vanities.

Speaking of petty vanities, Vonnegut writes about his friendship with Leonard Peltier, who was involved in a shootout with FBI agents on a Native American land in South Dakota back in 1975. Vonnegut is convinced that Peltier did not kill anybody and that the two life sentences that had kept him in prison for almost 50 years now were the result of malicious prosecution. Vonnegut's word is good enough for me, but Peltier has also been supported by Amnesty International, Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa and the Dalai Llama. He has been eligible for parole since 1993 and was last considered for clemency by President Barack Obama, who declined to grant it. So the continued incarceration of Peltier is another unsolved issue from way back in 1992, and hardly anybody seems to care about it now. Most of Peltier’s most influential supporters, including Vonnegut, are dead. Peltier's closest peer who could help him is running for president again. I call them peers because Peltier is 78 years old, two years younger than Joe Biden. It’s interesting that activism around Peltier is so much less common now than it was in the 90s — as if letting an injustice go on for too long makes people more tolerant of its continuance.

Heck, the nuclear threat to the world that’s been with us since the end of World War II has also been allowed to persist and we talk about it less and less, even as The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has set its doomsday clock at 30 seconds to midnight, the closest they believe we have ever come to self-inflicted apocalypse.

Vonnegut’s essay is a snapshot in time that proves not much has changed in the world. Oppenheimer is a period film, but starkly relevant today. The more things persist, the more they are allowed to. As Vonnegut would say, “so it goes.”