Using Mother Night to Understand Elon Musk

 

Thanks to Cold War Steve

 Some years ago, I reviewed Kurt Vonnegut's story Mother Night. I won't rehash what I said then, I'd just like to bring up that one of the points I was keen to emphasise is that the book is one of the few that deserves the cliché "More timely now than when it was written". I'm not sure if Mother Night is my favourite of Vonnegut's works, but it is the one I come back to most.

I don't think I need to introduce Elon Musk, even if this is the first blog post you've read. There have been much commentary on his Nazi salutes and boosting of Nazi sympathisers on his platform Twitter. The thesis of Mother Night is summed up in the phrase "You should be careful about what you pretend to be, because in the end you are what you pretend to be". 

I don't think Elon Musk is a Nazi in his heart and mind, his temperament isn't a good fit for the mindset. But, this is irrelevant compared to the material impact of his actions and his conscious attempts to emulate the Nazis as much as the circumstances and his own talents will allow. It doesn't matter that he's not a Nazi, because in the end of the day he is pretending to be one. 

He shares some things in common with Howard Campbell Jnr, the protagonist of Mother Night. Howard, like Musk was a bit of an outsider, Howard was an American but raised in Germany and spoke German as a first language, and like Musk Howard was a Nazi, that's why he's in a cell in Israel when the story starts. He was a prominent official working under Goebbels. He was also a spy for the Allied cause and is credited by his handler with bringing the Allied victory sooner than expected. 

  So, what's Howard's problem? Well, in a nutshell, Howard can't reconcile his idealised version of himself with the material reality of his existence. In order to become a good spy he had to win over the Nazi government, in order to do that he had to be useful to them. During the War Howard spent his time crafting propaganda for the Axis powers, radio broadcasts to the US Army denouncing Roosevelt, plays and other antisemitic propaganda. All of which he personally ridiculed as insane drivel. At no point in the narrative are we given any suggestion that Howard was remotely close to the Nazi ideology, he was just very good at both of his jobs.

This fact haunts him, time, and again he is confronted with the toxic impact and festering legacy of his work. His father-in-law a brutal Nazi police officer who enslaved dozens of Slav women to work on his estate thanks Howard personally for convincing him of the righteousness of the cause. In a horrifically beautiful passage, the father-in-law unknowingly twists a knife in Howard's insides by confiding that there was a time when he had doubts about this whole Greater Germania and master race thing, but it was Howard's propaganda that corrected him. 

In yet another example, after the War, Howard runs into the American Neo-Nazi fringe. This is a tiny movement led by decrepit cranks and a dozen or so angry, alienated young men. The whole "movement" is a sad bunch of losers, but their guns still work, and they've been using bootleg recordings of Howard's old racist ranting speeches for succour and to maintain morale. Even after the War has ended, the seeds he planted are still sprouting.

Still, Musk and Howard are not completely alike, Howard is torn apart about the evils he aided, whereas Musk seems positively giddy about them and frustrated that he can't go further. In the end if Musk teaches us anything, it's that Vonnegut was right. We are who we pretend to be.