Mankind is in Denial of their Stupidity

“I bought myself a job, just the way you bought yourself a tomcat husband, just the way Newt bought himself a week on Cape Cod with a Russian midget!” (pg 243)

I thought this passage from the book really laid out what Kurt Vonnegut was trying to say. And to put it simply mankind is stupid. The worst of it is that mankind constantly refuses their stupidity, which in the end will lead to downfall or the end of the world in Angela, Frank and Newt’s case. Angela was an awkwardly tall and not so pretty girl; she used ice-nine to buy herself a husband. Her husband could care less about here; Newt says that he would come home late at night with lipstick on him. Angela refuses to see anything wrong with that, she refuses her stupidity of buying her husband with ice-nine. Frank got mixed up in problems and fled the country. He ended up at San Lorenzo and bought himself a job with ice-nine. I do not think that when he gave Papa a sliver of ice-nine that he would be in turn ending the world but that comes with stupidity. And then we have little Newt who may have not given Zinka ice-nine directly but she got it from him. He was intoxicated by her sexiness and in the end was too stupid to realize that she was just after ice-nine and did not really care for him. Each of the characters symbolizes mankind as a whole. We are in constant denial of our stupidity which in the end may lead to the world ending. This novel may be a satire but it could also be prophetical.

Another way to see is this is stupidity in general with technology. Not knowing how to use a certain remote control, a nuclear plant, etc. This stupidity could end in self-destruction. Most of us are only considering ourselves and our advances, not taking in what could happen by our choices. Just like Frank, he needed a job so he gave ice-nine to Papa. He probably didn’t think that it would end the way it did. He wasn’t concerned at the time with the consequences of his actions; he was just interested in having a job.

Also I can’t help but wonder if Angela, Frank and Newt knew what would happen if ice-nine got out. Did they know what it was capable of doing? They were, in a sense, too stupid to be in control of ice-nine. In the book it says that their dog had a bit of ice-nine, so they must have had an inkling of what it could do. They may have not known that it could freeze the entire Earth but they saw what it did to their dog. Wouldn’t they have realized what they had? If they did realize this, why would they give it away? And if they didn’t realize, would they have done the same things if they did know?