The Rise of Christian Gangs

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Destroying the environment.

KURT VONNEGUT: Yes. And I wrote a poem about that-- which was published, incidentally, by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation on their cover. But the poem goes, "The crucified planet earth. Should it find a voice? And the sense of irony might now well say of our abuse of it. Forgive them father, they know not what they do. The irony would be that we know what we're doing. And when the last living thing has died on account of us, how shapely it would be, how poetical if the Earth could say in a voice floating up, perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon; It is done.

People did not like it here. And they don't and they shouldn't.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: If we're despoiling our surroundings, it must mean that we don't respect it.

KURT VONNEGUT: No. We don't. And I think most people have an awful time here. And, I have said on behalf of all animals, is life is no way to treat an animal. It hurts too much.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Mr. Vonnegut, how does a man stay funny when he thinks the world stinks like this?

KURT VONNEGUT: He smokes.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Is that the secret to humor?

KURT VONNEGUT: Yes. Yeah, it helps a lot.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Well, I want to ask you about this. You ask in the book a question that actually you don't answer so I want to -

KURT VONNEGUT: I'm old.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: But I want to-- think about answering this one. You write "what can be said to our young people now that psychopathic personalities — which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame — have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and made it their own?" What can we say to younger people who have their whole lives ahead of them?

KURT VONNEGUT: Well, you are human beings. Resourceful. Form a little society of your own. And, hang out with them. Get a gang.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: You're preaching getting into gangs?

KURT VONNEGUT: Yes. Well, look, it's--

DAVID BRANCACCIO: A good gang.

KURT VONNEGUT: Look, I don't mean to intimidate you, but I have a master's degree in anthropology.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: I'm intimidated.

KURT VONNEGUT: From the University of Chicago-- as did Saul Bellow, incidentally. But anyway, one thing I found out was that we need extended families. We need gangs. And, of course, if they're tribes and clans and so forth have been dispersed by the industrial revolution by people looking for work wherever they can find it. And a nuclear family, a man, a woman and kids and a dog and cat is no survival scheme at all. Horribly vulnerable.

So yes, I tell people to formulate a little gang. And, you know, you love each other. ~ PBS, Oct. 2005


Kurt Vonnegut, a kind of 20th century Mark Twain, died at age 84. I remembered seeing him interviewed about his last book, and the above is the excerpt I thought was interesting.

Kurt didn't have a lot of hope for the survival of the human race, and he came from a family prone to suicide. He described himself as what I would call a dyed-in-the-wool humanist.

His prescription for individual survival was "join a gang." Coming from a trained anthropologist, this would be the way people always survived, by forming small communities. Take the Hell's Angels, for instance.

But it is an interesting solution to surviving in an apocalyptic world, and in a world that has lost community. Increasingly, people live in digital communities, connected by cell-phones and the Internet; but find themselves isolated and disconnected from families.

I remember the hippy communes of the sixties that typically failed. But they were not galvanized, perhaps, by a need to survive apocalypse. And the way to survive, anyway, does not work well around free sex and drugs. Orders of monks, though, have historically done quite well.

Hillary Clinton famously said, "It takes a village to raise a child." (I think she was referring to what it takes to parent a two-year-old.) Maybe we should think about amending that idea to "It takes a village to survive."

The gang that comes to my mind these days is the M-13 that started in L.A. Whenever these guys are jailed and fill up a penetentiary, we have shipped them off to other countries, where they became a global gang, and basically took up the mantle of the old Mafia.

But perhaps Christians should form gangs of their own. It's a thought.