hearts of darkness

This afternoon, e-mailing to Natalie, I ended up explaining that I hide out in [comparatively distant] history and in literature at least partly because I can't deal with the real world. How presceient of me. N. persuaded me to go over to a friend's house tonight. It was horrible. My pathological social ineptness aside, we watched Earth, which, as more of you probably know than I did, is about the Partition of India in 1947, and the ensuing Muslim-Hindu violence.

"This is a movie even you will like, Lydia," they said. "It's not trashy; it's really good and Deep and deals with Serious Issues." But I don't actually like movies like that -- I don't know where this misconception comes from. I tend to only watch frivolous movies. This is because Good movies are too painful, and I am a wimp. Reading is one thing, and watching a play is one thing, but a movie plays out more like reality. Even if I can know intellectually that this particular person on the screen isn't really dying, or that one doesn't really have leprosy, or that child didn't really watch his mother raped and murdered in front of him, I still feel that these things are happening, really. And I cannot deal with them. I cannot cope with these things that are so horrible. I know that I can't. I've known since third grade, maybe earlier. Maybe I was sheltered too much, and still, at 19, am sheltered. I can only look at the statistics, and the figures, and the general picture. I don't know what to do when I see the individuals depicted.

I didn't even watch the worst parts of this movie: I looked away. But what am I supposed to do now? I can't go back to joking, obviously; I can't make light of it, or of anything, really, and I don't understand how everyone else was able to. There is clearly some sort of reflective response that would be required, but what? What does it serve to watch people burned alive and torn in half, or to see boxcars full of corpses and women being raped?

Is it so that this will not be forgotten and so will not happen again? But it has happened. And to say that one should watch the horrible consequences of intolerance to learn not to instigate it seems to me to be like the 17th and 18th century practice of taking one's children to public executions to teach them to obey the law.

Is it so that I will understand the more general lesson: that irrational ethnic or religious or cultural divisions, even when they seem benign and insignificant compared to shared values, are easily inflamed to atrocity? What am I to think now, then? That it could happen here. That humans are basically evil. That good people cannot prevent themselves from becoming monsters. And so what is there to do but slit my wrists tomorrow before I wake up one day to find my neighborhood burning and my friends being slaughtered?

I know there is reason to know these things, and to understand how horrible they are, but it is lost on me, I think. My reaction is to shrink away and try to forget it. Keeping a running chant of "don't think about it. don't think about it" in my head, if necessary. That isn't a good thing, is it? The more I am exposed to recent history and to current events, the more apathetic I become.

unjust war

I can't stand the local paper. The editorial page may be getting slightly less hardcore Republican, but the letters to the editor (which, granted are probably selected for their inflammatory content) and the columnists seem to be getting worse. If, heaven forbid, the governor tries to get the legislature to, say, actually fund the STATE Universities, we get a million complaints about how Arizona is turning into a communist state, and the next thing you know, we'll all have to stand in lines just to get bread. And then there was the kerfluffle about Sears making PA announcements in English and Spanish (the solution is to boycott this "treasonous" department store). Not to mention the proposed lynchings of Hillary Clinton and John Murtha which seem to show up every couple of days. And so Clay Thompson's Valley 101 column ends up being the most reasonable thing in the entire section:

( this speaks to my inner Anglophile )

David Brooks was his usually disgusting self today, arguing, although not actually coming out and saying, even though it was clear what he meant, that the only way to "win" Iraq for the population of basically decent Iraquis is to let our soldiers commit whatever atrocities are needed in order to get the job done:

Similarly, in our debates at home we are searching for ways to exercise enough power to defeat the insurgents while still behaving in accordance with our national conscience. We are seeking a sweet spot that satisfies both the demands of power and of principle. But it could be that given the circumstances we have allowed the insurgents to create, that sweet spot no longer exists.

* * * * *

One of the paradoxes of this war is that when U.S. forces commit atrocities, we regard it as a defeat for us because we have betrayed our ideals. When insurgents commit atrocities, it is also a defeat for us because of our ineffectiveness in the face of the enemy. Either way, morale suffers and the fighting spirit withers away.

And so the hunger to leave Iraq grows. A dissenting minority is furious that so many Americans are willing to betray the decent Iraqi majority in order to preserve some parlor purity. And the terrorists no doubt look at our qualms not as a sign of virtue but of weakness, and as evidence that savagery will lead to victory again and again.

What the hell? I've been making fun of the "refresher course in ethics" that the army is sending its soldiers through in the wake of Abu Ghraib and Haditha. But maybe it's actually needed. Since when are human rights and human decency "some parlor purity." Or does this mean that moral behavior is the privelege of the Enlightened West? Either way: OH MY GOODNESS DAVID BROOKS WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?