Hand over the Reins: Vonnegut and #MeToo

In 1987, my all-time favorite author, Kurt Vonnegut, published one of his best novels, Bluebeard. The novel was a critical success but falls, popularly, far under his most famous works like Slaughterhouse Five, Cat's Cradle and Sirens of Titan. To me it stands second only to Slaughterhouse Five. It is the story of a fictional abstract expressionist painter named Rabo Karabekian, who, like the character Bluebeard, spends much of his time trying to understand the relationship between men and women. The plot set aside. Vonnegut presents two startling ideas that dovetail into today's world perfectly. The first concept is that no art is permanent, that perhaps very little of what we do will last even beyond our own lifetime, but what does survive is going to be our best work. When he was younger Karabekian experimented with a new type of paint that enhanced the effect of his photo-rrealistic paintings. But the pigments in the paint break down after thirty years, so every single work begins to disintegrate right on the canvas and Karabekian has to come to grips with impermanence. He then pours his heart and soul into one final work, the secret locked in his studio barn. It is the only work that he himself feels has 'soul.' And it is that enormous painting that creates the greatest message of our age, or more precisely, its title. Thirty-one years ago Vonnegut told us men to make room, to let go, to hand over the reins, to admit we haven't done such a fabulous job running the world. See the 5,219 battered people, the child Karabekian among them, left behind in a valley by the Nazis as they fled the end of the war, protected not by soldiers because there weren't any to protect them, not by any men because there were none to protect them. Five words that could become the new anthem of our #MeToo era, courtesy of one of the greatest writer of the past century: “Now It's the Women's Turn.” Mark well, and remember.