Hummingbirds

I take coffee with my copy of Slaughterhouse-Five beside me. I flip through the book wondering where in the plot this page-turning will land me. I plan to read the first passage I see, suspecting that it will shed light on the present moment. I treat Kurt Vonnegut’s novel like the I Ching.

I find this on page 118:

They could tunnel all they pleased. They would inevitably surface within a rectangle

of barbed wire, would find themselves greeted listlessly by dying Russians who

spoke no English, who had no food or useful information or escape plans of

their own.

On the front page of today’s newspaper is a picture of the ruins of an apartment building in Gaza City. I cannot tell the difference between it and photographs and television images of Baghdad, Sarajevo, Oklahoma City, even Vonnegut’s Dresden. The difference, of course, is not in the rubble but the people: their complexions, the languages they speak, and how they dress. But there is no human in this picture. 

When certain people get shot and specific cities bombed, the prevailing opinion in print and on television is that someone must have triggered such a forceful reaction. In Gaza, there are hundreds of secret tunnels. The media tell us that these are considered dangerous enough to justify airstrikes and missile attacks. What I want to know is where these tunnels lead. Do they end at the Jordan River or far out in the Mediterranean Sea? Are there any tunnels that touch the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, or is only Gaza hived with them? And if so, why is that?

Here is Vonnegut again on page 210:

Nothing happened that night. It was the next night that about one hundred and thirty people in Dresden would die. So it goes. Bill dozed in the meat locker. He found

himself

engaged again, word for word, gesture for gesture, in the argument with his daughter with which this tale began. 

Last night on the news, I heard a ten-year-old girl standing in front of a ruined building say to a television camera, “I just want to be a doctor or anything to help my people but I can’t. I’m just a kid.” The bombs keep her out of school, but she insists that nothing will stop her from studying.

I finish my coffee and look out the window. A chickadee is drinking from the hummingbird feeder. It is no fluke: he keeps coming back for more sugar water instead of seeds. I love hummingbirds and have filled my yard with trumpet flowers to attract them. They are the only birds that fly forward and backward, and their wings make a droning sound. 

Recently, our neighbors received a package delivered by a commercial drone. Where I live, retailers use these machines to deliver payloads of dish soap, coffee, breakfast cereal, and toilet paper. Of course, when I hear the word drone, I now think of war and not honeybees, the way I used to. Some years ago, public radio broadcast a program about Pakistani villagers whose kin kept getting killed by unpiloted planes. The men in the village said the attackers were not manly because they refused to come to the villages to fight. Personally, my only direct experience of drones is watching them deliver cardboard boxes containing big bags of walnuts and chocolate-covered pretzels. 

Vonnegut never witnessed drones; Billy Pilgrim does not leap forward to a time like ours. The word drone is onomatopoeia, a poetic device where a word is formed from a sound. Drones do make a droning sound, as do some people, such as Buddhist monks chanting the OM. Does the ringing sound of an explosion in a survivor’s ears remind them of a droning in nature? I don’t know because I have never met anyone I could ask.

Here on my street, the haze of late spring skies fills with the music of small birds chirping and unpiloted aircrafts dropping packages on doorsteps. People love drones because they make shopping so convenient. For the first time, I can imagine Vonnegut writing a story about where I live.

In “Dronetown,” homeowners plant store-bought Bodh trees in their gardens and sit beneath them in their activewear, chanting the OM. When people meditate, they gain visions of the specific brands on which to spend their spondulicks. A neural microchip relays these mental pictures to retailers who promptly fill orders. In an instant, fleets of mechanical hummingbirds span out, delivering goods to sedate neighborhoods. In every yard, small solar charging stations hang from the trees so the birds can pause to fill their batteries. 

The plumage of the hummingbirds is very important: their color indicates how much money the buyer spent. Market watchers patrol suburban streets with binoculars, spotting consumer spending habits. The birds for the lower-end orders are gray, while a mid-range purchase gains a green bird. But for those who make premium purchases, hummingbirds with ruby throats arrive. It is a spectacle that confirms the teachings of gurus like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, who always insisted that the complexity of the marketplace mirrored spendthrift nature. 

In a world governed by the power of people to spend, some birds serve caviar while others drop bombs. It depends on your zip code or place of origin. But what each bird has in common is the sound they make announcing a delivery:

Po-Tee-Weet?