Dan Kempner
Editor, Legacy Magazine
Editorial
One of my literary heroes, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., once wrote a novel about loneliness called Slaptick subtitled Lonesome No More.
The main character, a 2-meter-tall troglodytic Harvard physician named Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, was elected president on an anti-loneliness platform. Using the slogan Lonesome No More! he tapped the enormous well of isolation and need to belong, which swung the election to him.
His solution was a scheme he and his equally monstrous twin sister had conceived as children: to group everyone into large, artificial families by giving them new middle names. These would consist of a hyphenated noun and number and would be selected at random by computer. All those with the middle name Peanut, for example, would be cousins and, if their numbers also matched, they’d be siblings. In this way, Swain asserted, no one need ever be lonely again.
Of course, the twins also cooked up a scheme to alter gravitation, which later leads to Earth’s gravity becoming as unpredictable as the weather, among other things. Only the ridiculously fertile and childlike imagination of Vonnegut could have cooked this stuff up. But even the roving Chinese ambassador, just a few inches tall, who once visited Swain told him, “now this” – tapping the middle-name manuscript – “this is truly childish.”
But was it?
Are we actually part of such a scheme in different guise? Could it be that men’s teams serve the same function, and in almost the same way? A man joins The Garrison, say, or Dragon Slayers, and suddenly all the men with the same team name – somewhere between six and a dozen –are his brothers. Those teams with the same Division names are now his cousins, and so on.
Have we simply dusted off Vonnegut’s kooky concept and worn it under the banner of MDI?
Consider this: in Slapstick, local groups ofWatermelon-8s and Mollusk-4s gather and meet. They check in on one another, to make sure they’re okay. They accompany each other on scary trips to the dentist. They also hold one another accountable at these meetings, and ask what happened if one of them has done something wrong. And so on.
I mean… it reads like an MDI men’s team to me.
We can’t, it is true, do anything about gravity, and no one is monkeying with our middle names. But we can do something about men’s isolation, our tendency to go it alone, do it alone, and fight our battles alone.
For that – Vonnegut’s concept of artificial families, extra brothers, rafts of cousins offering guaranteed support, accountability, and comaraderie – is exactly what is on offer. Lonesome No More! could almost be MDI’s rallying cry.
