Mother Night 
by 

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

 

Spotting Fake News

Fake news did not arise with Donald Trump’s tweets. Propagandists of the Left and the Right have used it since before there was a Left and Right. America has always had a fascist edge. 19th century Nativists, Know-Nothings, Klansmen, Red Shirts, White Leaguers, and Constitutional Unionists invented fake news long before the John Birch Society, Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs or the alt-Right of Steve Bannon claimed that mass media routinely hide the truth about immigrants, Jews, and Blacks. Fake news has been an American tradition since the first Federalists attacked Thomas Jefferson as a dupe of French radical revolutionaries.
 
Vonnegut's Mother Night is about fake news from the inside, and what it does to the insides of the man on the inside. Howard J. Campbell, a writer born in America, wrangles himself a job as chief copy-writer for Joseph Goebbels's Nazi Propaganda machine. His American-grown copy about the inhumanity of Jews impresses his boss because it goes beyond even what Nazi ideology had to say about Jewish perfidy. He is promoted to the position of lead radio-broadcaster of the Reich, and therefore tagged as a war criminal after the war, wanted by the Israelis.

But Campbell is a double agent, recruited by the Americans to relay secret messages hidden in his propaganda broadcasts. So, he is protected after the war but not acknowledged for diplomatic reasons. Returned to the United States, Campbell lives for fifteen years an open but shabby life in New York City on a private soldier's salary. Outed by a Soviet agent, he is targeted not just by the Israelis, but also by old soldiers who can't understand what they fought and suffered for but believe that Campbell is the cause of their distress.

Campbell realises that his participation in the creation of fake news requires a certain form of schizophrenia. Therefore, he recognises somewhat too late, one must be very careful about what one pretends to be. He equates his condition to the defective mechanism of the "cuckoo clock from hell". The clock occasionally tells the truth, but only unpredictably as its gears with missing cogs speed up or stop the works. 

This mechanical analogy, Campbell says, refers to a mental illness, one which is passed from generation to generation. He's right of course. The fascist tendency is a familial and widespread cultural tradition which has power because it has persisted at least as long as the American republic. There aren't just precedents, there are statutory requirements to support the idea of the conspiracy of the world against the American Way: The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the Jim Crow laws of the American South, the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1918. 

It seems like the prototype of every American right wing populist lunatic from Huey Long to Father Coughlin finds his place somewhere in Mother Night. Groups like The Iron Guard of the White Sons of the Constitution and Moral Rearmament would be ludicrous if they didn't exist. But they do exist at precisely the nexus of religion and right wing ideology, with a little help from the Russians, that Vonnegut foresaw over a half-century ago. Today, these groups, as well as the Russians, seem to be in the ascendancy in the United States from the North Carolina Tea Party to the Neo-Nazi Montanans, and not forgetting the Republican Party.
 
Campbell finds a kind of salvation in his own disillusionment. One can only hope for similar personal revelations to the mass of Americans who have fallen for the latest version of fake news. But this seems unlikely to Campbell, who notes that:

"The dismaying thing about the totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined."

Check out Trump next time he smiles.