Vonnegut's Apocalypse

"I'm Jeremiah, and I'm not talking about God being mad at us," novelist Kurt Vonnegut says with a straight face, gazing out the parlor windows of his Manhattan brownstone. "I'm talking about us killing the planet as a life-support system with gasoline. What's going to happen is, very soon, we're going to run out of petroleum, and everything depends on petroleum. And there go the school buses. There go the fire engines. The food trucks will come to a halt. This is the end of the world. We've become far too dependent on hydrocarbons, and it's going to suddenly dry up. You talk about the gluttonous Roaring Twenties. That was nothing. We're crazy, going crazy, about petroleum. It's a drug like crack cocaine. Of course, the lunatic fringe of Christianity is welcoming the end of the world as the rapture. So I'm Jeremiah. It's going to have to stop. I'm sorry."

For the most part, this sort of apocalyptic attitude is to be expected from Vonnegut, who, after all, in his futuristic novel Cat's Cradle (1963) created Ice-Nine, a substance with the capacity to obliterate the Earth incrementally, like the "great door of heaven being closed softly." The naive protagonist of the novel -- a character named John/Jonah -- actually struggles to write a book titled The Day the World Ended. (Cat's Cradle also includes a hilarious faux religion known as Bokononism, whose religious texts carry the warning "All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.") In the interview collection Conversations With Kurt Vonnegut, he even dismisses the notion that his fourteen novels, six essay collections and dozens of short stories have a long shelf life, saying, "Anybody with any sense knows the whole solar system will go up like a celluloid collar by-and-by." Add to that doomsday scenario Vonnegut's notorious bouts of chronic depression, daily doldrums and suicidal longings, and you get a literary Cassandra of the first order.

Later, remembering his hyperagitation about global warming, I telephoned him at his Long Island summer cottage, curious about whether he saw Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth. "I know what it's all about," he scoffed. "I don't need any more persuasion." Not satisfied with his answer, I pressed him to expand, wondering if he had any advice for young people who want to join the increasingly vocal environmental movement. "There is nothing they can do," he bleakly answered. "It's over, my friend. The game is lost."