7 ms·

> While The Sirens of Titan was a deeply cynical view of war, GHQ is deeply uncynical. In fact, his own pitch letters note that Vonnegut thought GHQ would be an

> While The Sirens of Titan was a deeply cynical view of war, GHQ is deeply uncynical. In fact, his own pitch letters note that Vonnegut thought GHQ would be an excellent training aid for future military leaders, including cadets at West Point. How are modern audiences to reconcile those words from the same man who wrote Cat’s Cradle? As we all know, authors can only write things they themselves believe wholeheartedly, and veterans have uncomplicated relationships with war. In general, people only hold simple, consistent positions that are legible to others. That's especially true if those people are introspective, creative types. So I agree, and this is a head-scratcher for me just like it is to the author of the article.

robertlagrant 2y ago
It is Polygon, after all. But it's even worse than you say. A plot where a military is used deceptively doesn't invalidate the whole concept of a military.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
gweinberg 2y ago
I don't understand how a board game is supposed to be "uncynical" in the first place.
- vundercind 2y ago
  Monopoly is famously and on-purpose cynical, to pick a familiar example.
  - jhbadger 2y ago
    "The Landlord's game", the game that inspired (or some would say was ripped off by) Monopoly was cynical in that its designer Elizabeth Magie was a devotee of the the radical economist Henry George and the point was to teach why landlordism was bad. But there is no evidence that Charles Darrow, who designed Monopoly, was trying to make any sort of political point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game
    - pessimizer 2y ago
      Charles Darrow didn't design any part of Monopoly excepting the excellent graphic design that Parker Brothers went on to use. He used the same rules as the Quakers he learned it from, and had gone into business selling his very cool looking copies of it (assembled at his kitchen table iirc) at a time when everybody was making their own set. The Charles Darrow lie was a way to remove Magie from the game altogether (Parker Brothers purchased the game from Magie), and didn't start until after she was dead and couldn't complain about it. It's a classic theft. They tried to steal her game, got caught, bought it from her, and after she died pretended that the graphic designer was the author. edit: The Landlord's Game isn't one game, it's a class of games with a similar structure (read the two patents and watch how the details changed between them.) It has two halves, of which Monopoly is the first half. The second half is a cooperative game called "Prosperity" where players reach rough equity by changing the rules on land ownership, Henry George style. The first half is funner, because the second half is really a proof that the first half is no way to run a society. In the first half everyone starts off in the same place with the same resources, and through blind luck and minuscule skill differences, one player ends up owning all of the others. In the second half, Magie is telling us that society doesn't have to work this way. It's not "cynical", though, it's optimistic. It's not cynical to say a sick system is sick, it's cynical to say that systems must be sick.
      - wahnfrieden 2y ago
        Sounds like the plot of Megalopolis
      - wileydragonfly 2y ago
        I listened to a Drew Carey interview once.. the man is passionate about Monopoly. I don’t think there’s too much strategy there besides “don’t let property go unsold” and “hoard houses” but he disagrees.
        Chathamization 2y ago
        It depends on the people you’re playing with. With an active group there’s a lot of strategy that goes into the negotiations, and also a good amount of “push your luck” gameplay. In my experience, a lot of the game comes down to one or two extremely intense negotiation sessions that everyone at the table ends up jumping in on.
phmqk76 2y ago
When did snark replace thoughtful commentary?
- NeoTar 2y ago
  2014
- kortilla 2y ago
  Around the same time websites like polygon came to the forefront to produce rage bait for echo chambers rather than thoughtful articles.
QuesnayJr 2y ago
It's a long time since I read the book, but it strikes me as a bizarre misreading. The article quotes the guy who discovered the game as saying: > In Sirens of Titan, there’s this army of Mars which is really a joke. No one in the army, [not] even the officers, are really in charge of what’s going on. They’re all mind controlled. Nobody has any real free will. They’re just set up as a pawn to be sacrificed, to make Earth come together, kind of Watchmen-style. The effort of the officers in the book is meaningless, but it turns out the effort of all humanity for all of history is completely meaningless, because humanity is being manipulated by aliens to achieve a trivial purpose.
- Chathamization 2y ago
  Which part of that quote do you think is a misreading? That's exactly how I remember it unfolding in the book.
  - QuesnayJr 2y ago
    All of human history is manipulated by the Tralfamadorians to get a single piece of metal to Titan to repair the Tralfamadorian spaceship. The army officers, you, me, everybody, we are all the result of Tralfamadore's plan.
    - Chathamization 2y ago
      Right, but I don't see anything in the quoted text implying that's not the case: > In Sirens of Titan, there’s this army of Mars which is really a joke. No one in the army, [not] even the officers, are really in charge of what’s going on. They’re all mind controlled. Nobody has any real free will. They’re just set up as a pawn to be sacrificed, to make Earth come together, kind of Watchmen-style.
      - QuesnayJr 2y ago
        Because either the person quoted or the article itself wants to highlight an apparent contradiction between making a wargame and writing the novel. If the point is that war is meaningless, then maybe there's a contradiction, but if the point is that everything is meaningless, then there isn't any more of a contradiction than eating breakfast is a contradiction.
dkarl 2y ago
I don't think the author doubts the possibility, they are just curious about the details, and about how Vonnegut himself thought about it and what changes he went through (or didn't go through) on the journey to his later antiwar novels. That would be really interesting to have some information about. It appears there might not be any first-hand information, but maybe a Vonnegut scholar or enthusiast will read this article and connect it to other information that shows a change in Vonnegut's thinking about war. I just read a memoir by the Chinese short story writer and novelist Yu Hua. In the first three years of his career, he wrote stories were full of graphic violence and death. He also had constant nightmares in which he was hunted down and killed. After one such nightmare, he started thinking about the executions he witnessed during the Cultural Revolution as a child. He grew up in a fairly sleepy town, so the "trials" that were a regular occurrence during the Cultural Revolution were a can't-miss public spectacle. When someone was sentenced to death and taken away in a truck to be executed, he and his friends would race to the execution site, hoping to get there in time to see it happen. If they made it in time, they saw the accused executed with a rifle bullet to the back of the head, sometimes watching from just a few feet away. After the nightmares brought these memories back, he decided that if he wanted to stop this violence from being reproduced every night in his nightmares, he needed to stop reproducing the violence every day in his writing. So he stopped writing about violence, and his nightmares went away. If you only knew that he grew up in the Cultural Revolution, wrote incessantly about violence for several years, and then stopped, you could easily say that there was nothing strange about that, it's not a head-scratcher, but hearing the story as he tells it is much more interesting than simply saying "it's not strange." Raising this question about Vonnegut, even if it has been raised before, might eventually unearth some information that fleshes out his story.
- oorza 2y ago
  The same man who wrote Stranger In A Strange Land, arguably the best sci-fi novel ever written and an ode to free love and universal acceptance, also wrote The Fifth Column, where a bunch of white people create a fake religion so they can wholesale genocide every Asian person on the planet at once because that's how the US would eventually win if we lost WWII. People contain multitudes.
aprilthird2021 2y ago
This argument is wild to me because anti-war types and protestors aren't, largely, against the military existing or being effective or good at its job. They usually just disagree with the aims or conduct of a particular campaign, or disagree about the cost-benefit ratio. Most people know a military is essential and want it to function properly
zoeysmithe 2y ago
At the end of the day Vonnegut was a liberal not a leftist. A lot of that philosophy is more or less "I agree with protestors of the past but the current thing is 'complex." See democrats on gay rights, trans rights, anti-racist movements, etc. Chicago, perhaps historically the most liberal city, is deeply racially segregated by design. Remember 'liberal' California voted against gay marriage. Obama ran as an anti-gay marrige candidate in 2008. The dems today have hypocritical views on trans rights, migrants, the I-P conflict, etc. Vonnegut is a good everyday liberal (which is a big part of his commercial appeal imho, never overly challenging and fit in with the neolib NYTimes-style intelligentsia of the time) and good, if not great, writer, but people expecting him to be more to the left than that are just going to be disappointed. I'd even argue this game is a great example of liberal idealism. That is to say the problem is sort of distilled down and punched down to individuals (hey this game should be taught to soldiers) instead of punching up the dynamics that actually cause the suffering of war he's trying to address (capitalism, MIC, white supremacy, oil politics, racism, colonialism, xenophobia, etc). Or at least it leans far more towards the former than the latter. I think "war is sad and bad" is a far more marketable and acceptable view to liberal readers than "hey we will need to fundamentally revisit and reform or even replace things like capitalism, the modern world order, and even things you might personally benefit from if we want a peaceful world." These types of writers play up to middle-class moralism and liberalism, which is a big market, but never challenge it too much. Vonnegut wasn't a Chomsky or a Marx. He was an Anderson Cooper or an Obama or a Chris Christy.
- wildzzz 2y ago
  Obama wasn't necessarily anti-gay marriage, but like most liberals at the time (and like liberals for most issues), was sitting somewhere in the middle. He was in support of civil unions which would grant legal rights to gay partnerships but would leave the labeling of it as a marriage up to the states. A sort of "separate but equal" application to marriages. Did he actually believe this in his heart? Who knows, but that's what he said and did as a politician. It almost doesn't even matter what candidates say, they are looking to sway voters and donors, not actually make policies. You really just have to wait until a president's second term for progress to happen. The slow march of progress has to navigate what is politically acceptable for most people of the time these changes take place in. Obama put in two of the justices that granted gay marriage rights during his first term.
righthand 2y ago
Vonnegut was very sarcastic, to the point where his remarks often appear prejudicial. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a misinterpretation.
- jrockway 2y ago
  So it goes.
hammock 2y ago
Perhaps the expansion pack includes Ice-Nine
cookie_monsta 2y ago
> As we all know, authors can only write things they themselves believe wholeheartedly, and veterans have uncomplicated relationships with war. In general, people only hold simple, consistent positions that are legible to others. This is all sarcasm, right?
- krisoft 2y ago
  yes
- samatman 2y ago
  Twaddle, actually.
  - karaterobot 2y ago
    Antiphrasis, actually.
progmetaldev 2y ago
I think it's also somewhat useful to think about "the other side" when holding a certain position. Of course, it may not be based in reality, or be factually incorrect as to why someone else holds a different viewpoint. I believe it's still worthwhile as a thought experiment to try and understand an opposing point of view, even if you'll never agree with it. There can still be some compassion or common ground, especially when it comes to something so life-affecting as war. I do agree that authors can only write things they themselves believe, or at least are marked with their own way of thinking, even when trying to guess or infer the reasoning behind someone else's differing belief or opinion. When I get in a heated discussion online, and I can tell that someone is angered just from me stating my opinion, I've often tried this thought experiment to at least not take things personally if someone comes after me with violent or explosive language. I'm sure you've probably experienced it yourself, but some people online seem to hold their own beliefs as law, and will act out when challenged (even when your intention wasn't to challenge, but just to state your own opinion).

robertlagrant 2y ago

It is Polygon, after all. But it's even worse than you say. A plot where a military is used deceptively doesn't invalidate the whole concept of a military.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

gweinberg 2y ago

I don't understand how a board game is supposed to be "uncynical" in the first place.

vundercind 2y ago
Monopoly is famously and on-purpose cynical, to pick a familiar example.
- jhbadger 2y ago
  "The Landlord's game", the game that inspired (or some would say was ripped off by) Monopoly was cynical in that its designer Elizabeth Magie was a devotee of the the radical economist Henry George and the point was to teach why landlordism was bad. But there is no evidence that Charles Darrow, who designed Monopoly, was trying to make any sort of political point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game
  - pessimizer 2y ago
    Charles Darrow didn't design any part of Monopoly excepting the excellent graphic design that Parker Brothers went on to use. He used the same rules as the Quakers he learned it from, and had gone into business selling his very cool looking copies of it (assembled at his kitchen table iirc) at a time when everybody was making their own set. The Charles Darrow lie was a way to remove Magie from the game altogether (Parker Brothers purchased the game from Magie), and didn't start until after she was dead and couldn't complain about it. It's a classic theft. They tried to steal her game, got caught, bought it from her, and after she died pretended that the graphic designer was the author. edit: The Landlord's Game isn't one game, it's a class of games with a similar structure (read the two patents and watch how the details changed between them.) It has two halves, of which Monopoly is the first half. The second half is a cooperative game called "Prosperity" where players reach rough equity by changing the rules on land ownership, Henry George style. The first half is funner, because the second half is really a proof that the first half is no way to run a society. In the first half everyone starts off in the same place with the same resources, and through blind luck and minuscule skill differences, one player ends up owning all of the others. In the second half, Magie is telling us that society doesn't have to work this way. It's not "cynical", though, it's optimistic. It's not cynical to say a sick system is sick, it's cynical to say that systems must be sick.
    - wahnfrieden 2y ago
      Sounds like the plot of Megalopolis
    - wileydragonfly 2y ago
      I listened to a Drew Carey interview once.. the man is passionate about Monopoly. I don’t think there’s too much strategy there besides “don’t let property go unsold” and “hoard houses” but he disagrees.
      - Chathamization 2y ago
        It depends on the people you’re playing with. With an active group there’s a lot of strategy that goes into the negotiations, and also a good amount of “push your luck” gameplay. In my experience, a lot of the game comes down to one or two extremely intense negotiation sessions that everyone at the table ends up jumping in on.

phmqk76 2y ago

When did snark replace thoughtful commentary?

NeoTar 2y ago
2014
kortilla 2y ago
Around the same time websites like polygon came to the forefront to produce rage bait for echo chambers rather than thoughtful articles.

QuesnayJr 2y ago

It's a long time since I read the book, but it strikes me as a bizarre misreading. The article quotes the guy who discovered the game as saying: > In Sirens of Titan, there’s this army of Mars which is really a joke. No one in the army, [not] even the officers, are really in charge of what’s going on. They’re all mind controlled. Nobody has any real free will. They’re just set up as a pawn to be sacrificed, to make Earth come together, kind of Watchmen-style. The effort of the officers in the book is meaningless, but it turns out the effort of all humanity for all of history is completely meaningless, because humanity is being manipulated by aliens to achieve a trivial purpose.

Chathamization 2y ago
Which part of that quote do you think is a misreading? That's exactly how I remember it unfolding in the book.
- QuesnayJr 2y ago
  All of human history is manipulated by the Tralfamadorians to get a single piece of metal to Titan to repair the Tralfamadorian spaceship. The army officers, you, me, everybody, we are all the result of Tralfamadore's plan.
  - Chathamization 2y ago
    Right, but I don't see anything in the quoted text implying that's not the case: > In Sirens of Titan, there’s this army of Mars which is really a joke. No one in the army, [not] even the officers, are really in charge of what’s going on. They’re all mind controlled. Nobody has any real free will. They’re just set up as a pawn to be sacrificed, to make Earth come together, kind of Watchmen-style.
    - QuesnayJr 2y ago
      Because either the person quoted or the article itself wants to highlight an apparent contradiction between making a wargame and writing the novel. If the point is that war is meaningless, then maybe there's a contradiction, but if the point is that everything is meaningless, then there isn't any more of a contradiction than eating breakfast is a contradiction.

dkarl 2y ago

I don't think the author doubts the possibility, they are just curious about the details, and about how Vonnegut himself thought about it and what changes he went through (or didn't go through) on the journey to his later antiwar novels. That would be really interesting to have some information about. It appears there might not be any first-hand information, but maybe a Vonnegut scholar or enthusiast will read this article and connect it to other information that shows a change in Vonnegut's thinking about war. I just read a memoir by the Chinese short story writer and novelist Yu Hua. In the first three years of his career, he wrote stories were full of graphic violence and death. He also had constant nightmares in which he was hunted down and killed. After one such nightmare, he started thinking about the executions he witnessed during the Cultural Revolution as a child. He grew up in a fairly sleepy town, so the "trials" that were a regular occurrence during the Cultural Revolution were a can't-miss public spectacle. When someone was sentenced to death and taken away in a truck to be executed, he and his friends would race to the execution site, hoping to get there in time to see it happen. If they made it in time, they saw the accused executed with a rifle bullet to the back of the head, sometimes watching from just a few feet away. After the nightmares brought these memories back, he decided that if he wanted to stop this violence from being reproduced every night in his nightmares, he needed to stop reproducing the violence every day in his writing. So he stopped writing about violence, and his nightmares went away. If you only knew that he grew up in the Cultural Revolution, wrote incessantly about violence for several years, and then stopped, you could easily say that there was nothing strange about that, it's not a head-scratcher, but hearing the story as he tells it is much more interesting than simply saying "it's not strange." Raising this question about Vonnegut, even if it has been raised before, might eventually unearth some information that fleshes out his story.

oorza 2y ago
The same man who wrote Stranger In A Strange Land, arguably the best sci-fi novel ever written and an ode to free love and universal acceptance, also wrote The Fifth Column, where a bunch of white people create a fake religion so they can wholesale genocide every Asian person on the planet at once because that's how the US would eventually win if we lost WWII. People contain multitudes.

aprilthird2021 2y ago

This argument is wild to me because anti-war types and protestors aren't, largely, against the military existing or being effective or good at its job. They usually just disagree with the aims or conduct of a particular campaign, or disagree about the cost-benefit ratio. Most people know a military is essential and want it to function properly

zoeysmithe 2y ago

At the end of the day Vonnegut was a liberal not a leftist. A lot of that philosophy is more or less "I agree with protestors of the past but the current thing is 'complex." See democrats on gay rights, trans rights, anti-racist movements, etc. Chicago, perhaps historically the most liberal city, is deeply racially segregated by design. Remember 'liberal' California voted against gay marriage. Obama ran as an anti-gay marrige candidate in 2008. The dems today have hypocritical views on trans rights, migrants, the I-P conflict, etc. Vonnegut is a good everyday liberal (which is a big part of his commercial appeal imho, never overly challenging and fit in with the neolib NYTimes-style intelligentsia of the time) and good, if not great, writer, but people expecting him to be more to the left than that are just going to be disappointed. I'd even argue this game is a great example of liberal idealism. That is to say the problem is sort of distilled down and punched down to individuals (hey this game should be taught to soldiers) instead of punching up the dynamics that actually cause the suffering of war he's trying to address (capitalism, MIC, white supremacy, oil politics, racism, colonialism, xenophobia, etc). Or at least it leans far more towards the former than the latter. I think "war is sad and bad" is a far more marketable and acceptable view to liberal readers than "hey we will need to fundamentally revisit and reform or even replace things like capitalism, the modern world order, and even things you might personally benefit from if we want a peaceful world." These types of writers play up to middle-class moralism and liberalism, which is a big market, but never challenge it too much. Vonnegut wasn't a Chomsky or a Marx. He was an Anderson Cooper or an Obama or a Chris Christy.

wildzzz 2y ago
Obama wasn't necessarily anti-gay marriage, but like most liberals at the time (and like liberals for most issues), was sitting somewhere in the middle. He was in support of civil unions which would grant legal rights to gay partnerships but would leave the labeling of it as a marriage up to the states. A sort of "separate but equal" application to marriages. Did he actually believe this in his heart? Who knows, but that's what he said and did as a politician. It almost doesn't even matter what candidates say, they are looking to sway voters and donors, not actually make policies. You really just have to wait until a president's second term for progress to happen. The slow march of progress has to navigate what is politically acceptable for most people of the time these changes take place in. Obama put in two of the justices that granted gay marriage rights during his first term.

righthand 2y ago

Vonnegut was very sarcastic, to the point where his remarks often appear prejudicial. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a misinterpretation.

jrockway 2y ago
So it goes.

hammock 2y ago

Perhaps the expansion pack includes Ice-Nine

cookie_monsta 2y ago

> As we all know, authors can only write things they themselves believe wholeheartedly, and veterans have uncomplicated relationships with war. In general, people only hold simple, consistent positions that are legible to others. This is all sarcasm, right?

krisoft 2y ago
yes
samatman 2y ago
Twaddle, actually.
- karaterobot 2y ago
  Antiphrasis, actually.

progmetaldev 2y ago

I think it's also somewhat useful to think about "the other side" when holding a certain position. Of course, it may not be based in reality, or be factually incorrect as to why someone else holds a different viewpoint. I believe it's still worthwhile as a thought experiment to try and understand an opposing point of view, even if you'll never agree with it. There can still be some compassion or common ground, especially when it comes to something so life-affecting as war. I do agree that authors can only write things they themselves believe, or at least are marked with their own way of thinking, even when trying to guess or infer the reasoning behind someone else's differing belief or opinion. When I get in a heated discussion online, and I can tell that someone is angered just from me stating my opinion, I've often tried this thought experiment to at least not take things personally if someone comes after me with violent or explosive language. I'm sure you've probably experienced it yourself, but some people online seem to hold their own beliefs as law, and will act out when challenged (even when your intention wasn't to challenge, but just to state your own opinion).