Because of tangential temptations, King’s is a useful device: the narrator is under pressure to tell the story in a quite limited amount of time, so readers might forgive him for omissions and vagueness.
Aside from the intentional breakdown of language at the very end— ( as the narrator starts to fade in Chapter 8, he spells ‘raise’ as ‘raze’ and ‘time’ as ‘thyme’ and ‘hook and crook’ as ‘hoof and croof’ and then breaks further down to an infantile affection for his brother Bobby)—- the writing seems better in the last 2 or 3 chapters.
It’s interesting to hear King’s fictionally retrospective references (from the early or mid 1980s) about events in 1997 or 2003. I’ve dabbled in fictionally retrospective commentary about, for example, the 2030s when some socieies of the world convulsed with mass killings of sexual minorities.
I was writing in 1999 to sort thru my queer fears, at least partly drawn from my father’s basement of Holocaust literature. Dystopic martyr complex or not, historically unsound extrapolation or not, reading King’s story makes me want to retry fiction writing as an exercise in imagination. Thanks to CU, I’ve already dabbled in satire to remedy the activist propensity for being too earnest.
Though some of us in the pot-smoking, class-skipping set back in the mid 80s liked his and other horror and fantasy writing, this is the first of any of King’s work I’ve read.
To me, this story is sketchy on details. We get a vague idea that Bobby and Howie do something to the water that makes humans less prone to war and other violence, but which also has the side-effect of causing humans to become extreme imbeciles. Perhaps King could have developed the idea into a cautionary tale against Big Pharma which critics say plays down dangerous side-effects to make huge profits from a chronically medicated and under-informed population 🙂
But, back to the actual story, the narrator, Howie, doesn’t explain much and King’s fictional retrospection about political and military conflict seems rather tame, given that it was published at a time when the Reagan administration was aiding the Contras in Nicaragua in ways that some way was unconstitutional. I’m not sure how Omni readers received it in 1986, but to me it’s not a challenging work of sci-fi horror.
That aside, The End of the Whole Mess somehow calls to mind Vonnegut’s novel, Galapagos in which the ghostly narrator Leon Trotsky Trout declares “the only true villain in my story: the oversized human brain.”
This, in turn, is related to my own and likely others’ critique of anarcho-primitivists’ claim that civilization has been the downfall of the human species; and the claim, by folk such as Derrick Jensen, that the only way to stop ecocide is to “bring down civilization.” (See his books, Endgame, Parts 1 and 2)
A coupld years back, someone published an article in Adbusters about how the human species woud be better if we didn’t use written language and other abstract symbols, but instead relied on the oral and the physically demonstrative transimission of knowledge.
This theme also calls to mind the ultimate contradiction we face if we adopt the perspective, (such as that in the last writings of Mark Twain, assuming he wasn’t being slyly satirical) of the “damned human race.” If ‘man’s inhumannity to man’ is what makes us so digusted with people in general, we contradict ourselves, because we wouldn’t be upset in the first place if we didn’t care so much.
Observing my history buff father’s negatiev views of what he referred to as the “most destructive animal” I got the sense that many of us who believe that “people are no damned good” generally don’t apply it to our friends and family. But that lack of faith in human beings concerns me because it detracts from our ability and willingness to engage in our communities and in political processes. When people withdraw, it creates a political vacuum that’s filled by the abuse of power.
But as for anarcho-primitivism, and how it relates to King’s story you linked me to and to Vonnegut’s Galapagos, it seems there’s no way for that extreme of a strain of the return-to-nature ‘ideal’ to become reality without changes to the neocortex. Again, Vonnegut’s narrator in Galapagos: “the only true villain in my story: the oversized human brain.”
Nuclear annihilation of humanity wouldn’t work as an ecological solution. Obviously, it will take much or all of the rest of the life on Earth down the cosmic drain with us. Where’s that leave us? Absent genetic engineering on a grand scale or brain surgery on more than 7 billion homo sapiens , that leads some of us to ideas about continued human evolution, which I’ve encountered among some fellow vegans.
Of course, there’s always realism, whereby we honestly assess our species and, to quote Teddy Roosevelt, “do the best where we’re at with what we got.” This is where I tend to focus (or so I’d like to think.) It involves using science to study the human capacity for empathy and compassion so as to further develop it, making the best of an imperfect situation in light of our apparent limitations. That applies to veganism. I can’t imagine being vegan in arctic regions.
Of course not all vegans believe our efforts are part of human evolution. Some of us profess anarcho-primitivist views, or simply don’t delve into eco-philosophies, perhaps defaulting to consumerist veganism, via which we over-estimate the morality of buying our food from this or that business that sells and serves dead plants (and some living ones for raw foodist enjoyment).
But vegan or not, some folk believe the human species will further evolve so that we meet our needs while being significantly less destructive to the Earth and less exploitative toward each other and other species.
This mentality at least does not involve the idea that written language and using other abstract symbols was our species’ fall from grace. Instead, it involves building on those human features so as to become, as a species, less violent and more empathic and compassionate.
One vegan suggested that human beings are indeed different from pigs, chickens, cows and other animals most of us currently consume. But she said we should build on that difference so as to find ways to do less harm, not cite it as an excuse to inflict on nonhumans suffering most of us would find reprensible if inflicted on fellow humans.
She was referring to the naturalistic argument that human exploitation of nonhumans is justified given that lions, sharks, tigers, wolves and many other animals hunt and kill their prey and even torture them for amusement (ie how some cats torture mice or baby rabbits before killing them, often without eating them). According to her, if indeed our human brains make us different from those animals, we aren’t justified in emulating their predatory behavior.
Well, at any rate, like the narrator in The End of the Whole Mess, I’m out of time. So I’ll end by saying I didn’t sneak all this vegan talk into a post about Stephen King. Instead I included it because his story, albeit sketchily, involves the question of how to address what many throughout the millennia have regarded as the destructive nature of human beings. When it comes to that, I can think of no other relatively modern movement that poses a greater challenge to human self-understanding than veganism.
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