People in the northern United States will not soon forget this orange-sky summer. The Canadian wildfires causing it are still burning, just one of many simultaneous conflagrations across the continent and the world. After multiple deadly wildfires in California over the past decade, after the huge deadly fires in Greece and Australia, and now with the wildfire in Maui, we have entered the Red Flag Age, where fire weather warnings are as everyday as humidity, barometric pressure, and dewpoint.

The sense of everything being combustible is not confined to climate. The Russian war on Ukraine has generated daily explosions since February 2022. In June, I remember reading of a deadly apartment building explosion in Paris alongside a deadly explosion of a barbecue restaurant in China. In August, there were stories of houses in various parts of the United States (Pennsylvania, Tennessee) spontaneously exploding. Right now it feels like everything can go up in a plume or come down in one, like Putin’s dead man walking, Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose plane exploded midair.

After Americans voted to throw out Donald Trump in 2020, he tried to steal that right from us. The system prevailed, and he withdrew to Florida for his malingering as the law put together charges of wrongdoing on various fronts. Now he is running for president to do it all over again. There is nothing he wants to build or make even though those were his two big words in 2016. He wants to stay in power to enrich himself and his family and avoid going to jail. But he also wants is to destroy things—laws, norms, society, civic life, government itself—with a scorched-earth policy of really sticking it to his enemies.

Trump is not alone in his thinking—at least not according to academic authors of a 2020 paper inspired by a line spoken by Alfred the butler (Michael Caine) in The Black Knight: “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” “Some people may be motivated to seek out chaos because they want to rebuild society,” they write, “while others enjoy destruction for its own sake. We demonstrate that chaos seekers are not a unified political group but a divergent set of malcontents.” People “high in Need for Chaos,” they explain, have different motivations for inflicting it, whether they desire a new beginning, the destruction of established structures, or the upsetting of established order. “Chaos-seekers,” they conclude, “whether they like destruction for the sake of destruction or not, may be motivated by a sense of marginalization and grievance that exists at high levels in Western society today.”

Surveying an earlier paper on Americans’ “need for chaos” by some of the same authors, Thomas B. Edsall of the New York Times cited the authors’ description of “chaos incitement” as a “strategy of last resort by marginalized status-seekers.” Before social media, Edsall explained, chaos seekers “willing to adopt disruptive tactics . . . were on outer edges of politics, unable to exercise influence.” Now, these digital platforms have given marginalized status-seekers “a bullhorn to disseminate false news, conspiracy theories and allegations of scandal to a broad audience.”

Whether they seek chaos for political ends or as revenge for feeling marginalized, these populist/anti-establishment nihilists have government itself in their sights. An interesting embodiment of the former is a woman from northwest Georgia profiled by Washington Post reporter Stephanie McCrummen in June 2022. Angela Rubino is a Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene activist known online as “Burnitdown.” A married forty-something mother of two who had worked in restaurants and flipped houses for a living, she believes that the 2020 election was stolen and has committed her life to taking power back from “RINOs and Democrats.”

McCrummen visited when Rubino was hosting a gathering of fellow activists in her front yard to strategize about next moves to control voting in Georgia. “She hooked up a loudspeaker she’d bought for the occasion. She built a roaring bonfire, and now smoke and Aerosmith were drifting into the blue spring sky. . . . She looked around at the people warming their hands over the fire, ready for action.”

Rubino told McCrummen that she was frustrated since childhood at being unable to understand the point of life. “What are we doing any of this for if we’re just going to die? You die, and it’s over. So, what’s the point? I felt afraid.” According to McCrummen, Trump “was the first politician to give voice to [Rubino’s] private thoughts about what America was becoming, which made her feel recognized and even important. She had never voted before, never felt herself mattering as a citizen until Trump came on the scene.”

This woman had two children; she owned property. What was it she hated and feared so much about America? It’s hard to see how a man who talks only about carnage and destruction could be her answer to the cruelty of mortality and life seeming to have no point. But then if the chaos researchers are correct in thinking that chaos seekers are motivated by grievance, maybe their grievance is with the whole of modernity, a world where science and technology have made belief in God and eternal life impossible.

I can’t help thinking of Burnitdown and those like her in the context of Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel about many things but especially his experience as an America POW in Dresden when the city was firebombed by the Allies in 1945. It took him twenty years to confront the terror of that experience. The intensity of the bombing triggered a firestorm, which creates and sustains its own wind system. This self-sustaining inferno tore through the city, killing at least 25,000 people and leveling buildings over four square miles. All you could see was charred rubble. There’s a famous photo of the bombed and burned city by Richard Peter Sr., a German photojournalist, taken from behind a statue near the clock tower of city hall. The figure seems to be a grieving angel or saint or perhaps a deity itself, looking out on the self-destruction humans had wrought.

After being billeted as a POW in the Alter Schlachthof (Old Slaughterhouse), Vonnegut survived the bombing by taking refuge in a meat locker three stories underground. After the attack, he and other POWs were immediately put to work excavating bodies from the rubble. Vonnegut’s novel has the POW Billy Pilgrim and his fellows do the same until the Germans expedite matters by cremating the bodies with flamethrowers. Slaughterhouse-Five involves time travel and abduction by aliens lightyears away, but the firebombing of Dresden that Billy survives is the central trauma of his life and the book. His experiences lead him to question Christianity and free will to the degree that he finds life meaningless . . . just like Burnitdown in fact.

The big difference is that Billy doesn’t want things destroyed and people killed. The trauma has made him a pilgrim seeking moral clarity, a way to endure a cruel and violent world—a world that has lost its mind. He struggles with not having a way to express the scale of tragedy he witnessed. When he is kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians (which might be all in his head), he becomes “unstuck in time” and can travel into the past and the future. This enables him to tell the story of the firebomber sortie completely backwards, beginning with “American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England.” And ending here:

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

Vonnegut’s novel doesn’t just provide a logical counterpoint to anyone lusting after large-scale incineration; he seems in 1969 to understand and anticipate the world that gave us the Trump voter. Americans, he writes,

will not acknowledge how . . . hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.

The World War II generation constituted the last time in American history that people of different social classes lived and worked (if you can call combat a job) alongside each other at such scale. Granted, it was mostly men, but we don’t pay enough attention to the fact that people like Kurt Vonnegut, who would otherwise have gone to college, survived the dire straits of warfare with a random cross-section of Americans from every walk of life. This didn’t happen with Vietnam or the Gulf Wars; the democratizing aspect of the draft made the society more aware of who made up the country. This doesn’t mean that this generation was any more tolerant, but it allowed breadwinners to see how people’s social station affects their choices and behaviors.

The Washington Post article doesn’t give a clear picture of Angela Rubino’s financial outlook at the time the article appeared in 2022. My guess is that it’s not too good, that perhaps she “will not acknowledge how . . . hard money is to come by,” and that maybe she is terrified of being part of the “mass of undignified poor.” The Dark Knight researchers argue that chaos seekers have very different motivations. But if these seekers find solidarity in their marginalization and grievance, a lot of that has to be about money and the precarity of standing within their community.

I often wonder if beneath all the MAGA conspiracies there lies a realization about various truths—about America’s worsening economic inequality, about our prostration before the ruling class, about our burning planet. Trump’s followers can’t bear these truths, and they hate the established order for not fighting them as their own instinct tells them to. Like all of us, they physically inhabit a world that is relatively small. I think the difference between them and the rest of America is that, sadly, the world of their imagination is exactly the same size as the world they inhabit.

Vonnegut’s way of dealing with his own PTSD and the hypocrisies of war was his imagination and sense of humor: he wrote science fiction about our galaxy and many beyond, always attuned to human absurdities. “Life is rare,” Carl Sagan said of the lessons learned from exploring space. I think that even with his traumatic experience of people burning as easily as flowerboxes, Vonnegut would agree. There is no logic in Burnitdown wanting to destroy the government because she has finally found a leader who talks openly about her own secret hatreds. In Vonnegut’s time, the absurdity lie in systems, institutions, and governments. In our time, it lies in us. §