haunted monday, marchipelago 20, 41 a.b. ...
 

so: my fear of fear has become or been replaced by a hate of hate.

how lovely....

hate and fear are probably closely related.  after all, is it possible to hate that which we do not fear?  can we really hate the taste of liver or broccoli without also fearing that we might have to eat these foods again someday?  we don't, after all, hate the taste of dirt - at least not quite the same way, do we?  even though dirt might carry with it dangerous microbes or toxins or heavy metals; and even though liver and broccoli might actually be good for us.  in fact, when you think about it, there are many, many things that probably taste much worse than liver or broccoli, but we don't waste energy on hating them because it's extremely unlikely that these worse things will ever be set down in front of us by even the wackiest aunt.

but i digress....
 

i read another online journaller's entry yesterday.  about spanking.  and it reminded me that i didn't really mind being spanked as a child.  what i minded was being spanked by a hateful, enraged, self-righteous beast i'd mistaken for a loving parent.  and what bothered me wasn't the pain of the spanking (although considerable, given that it was administered on bare legs and bottom with a yardstick-like piece of raw wood) but the uncontrollable, unreasonable, apocalyptic fury behind it.

there was a day when faced with that fury and a third story window overlooking a concrete sidewalk, i almost chose the sidewalk....
 

whatever childish trangressions may have sparked such fury, it's clear to me today that it was that fury itself which was by far the worse sin....
 

so - taking a moment to connect the dots....  i woke up afraid on saturday.  i realized that i was afraid because of a lot of bizarre things that are going on today in our criminal justice system and elsewhere.  and as i came to understand my own fear, i wondered what in the world was behind the fears of others which was driving them to overreact in these ways.  and then what really got me to worrying was the frightening hatred such fears can give rise to - and how often such hatred gives rise to truly monstrous behavior....

for example: the boisterous crowds which sometimes gather outside a prison and gleefully celebrate an execution.

i am not convinced that the death penalty ought to be banned everywhere and for all time and in all circumstances.  but i am pretty sure that celebrating its being carried out is a frightfully sick thing to do.  no execution undoes the crime which merited its imposition, after all.  at best - at best - an execution is a terrible and profound confession of failure.

the failure of the executed to choose legal over dreadfully illegal actions.  the failure of the executed's victim(s) to avoid whatever fate befell him/her/them.  the failure of society to come up with a better solution than execution. the failure of society to adequately safeguard its innocent members.  the failure of whatever genes and circumstances gave rise to a capital offender.  the failure of nature/the universe/god to create a perfect arena for unending happy, healthy life....

those who celebrate executions seem to collapse all these failures into one simple little ball which they posit in the heart of the condemned.  they seem to think that when that heart is then destroyed, all these failures are, too.

time to do the Happy Dance?

only if you're deluded.

and history shows that such delusion has lead to some of the worst crimes of all time....
 

my newspaper recently ran an in-depth article on a certain turn-of-the-20th-century commonplace.

the lynching postcard.

yes, it seems many lynchings came complete with photographers so that people could show distant relatives just how they were spending their days.

it was not uncommon for people to have their little girls and boys pose just so, next to the strung up, mutilated body of The Evil One - who may well have been guilty of nothing worse than having been in the wrong place at the wrong time....

if anyone - man, woman, or child - failed to say "cheese" because they were too busy vomiting at the time or applying for asylum in a sane country, it was not recorded in this article....
 

the mind self-defensively wants to believe such a sane country exists somewhere.  it wants to say, "well, these postcards were made a long time ago in a part of the country far away where the people are different - they're just museum pieces with no more relevance to the here and now than the racks of the Inquisition or the stakes of Vlad the Impaler...."

and yet my mind, at least, does not succeed.

these postcards resonant too deeply with some of the things on my saturday list, as well as with those Midnight Prison Gate Dancers and... other things....
 

almost 5 years ago now, the 50th anniversary of the bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki was observed in the media.  then, and in the year that followed, several people dared to express the opinion in print that maybe nuking civilian populations wasn't the best or most noble idea america has ever had.

the vehemence with which this opinion was attacked shocked me.

personally, i still can't decide if those bombings were the best option in a very bad situation or not.  it's possible that a simple blockade of japan would have ended the war.  it's possible that the soviet declaration of war against japan between the two bombings is actually what prompted japan to surrender.  then again, it's possible that america's willingness to use atomic weapons on japan made them less likely to be used in the cold war that followed....

two things seem clear, however: this is an issue that we should be able to analyze and debate rationally; and - however that debate goes - incinerating tens of thousands of human beings is one of the worst things other human beings can do even if - in some terrible way - justifiable.

well, i was hard pressed to find either of those two clear things expressed in print.

instead, i read the words of person after person who basically said "the japanese bombed pearl harbor and got exactly what they deserved in response, dammit, so shut up."

pearl harbor apparently absolved the US of all possible guilt.  pearl harbor apparently entitled the US to incinerate every man, woman, and child in japan if that's what it took to win the war.  case closed.

coming shortly after all the trauma and angst produced in americans by the oklahoma city bombing, the views being expressed about hiroshima seemed... bizarre and obscene.

i mean, the deaths of about 168 people in oklahoma city produced a deep and lasting scar on the national psyche.  the deaths of tens and tens of thousands of japanese civilians, on the other hand, was  - what?  a Good Thing Above Any And All Criticism??

apparently many americans are quite easily and "infallibly" able to distinguish Good Dead Babies from Bad Dead Babies.

that scares the hell out of me....
 

one needn't go back as far as the 1940s to detect curious double standards and blind spots in many americans' sensitivity to death and destruction.  while a single lost US air force pilot might merit hours of TV coverage, many, many pages of print, and untold angst among the masses, the deaths of tens of thousands of other people caused by american pilots frequently go virtually unremarked upon.

i can still clearly recall the days of the Gulf War when CNN among other sources revealed in passing that thousands of entrenched iraqi soldiers were being buried alive by US bulldozers while many others were being hit with B-52 bomber strikes capable of creating a pressure shock wave powerful enough to suck a man's lungs right out his mouth.

when i mentioned this to friends and asked for their reactions... well, i'm convinced that no good german in nazi germany asked about auschwitz could have shown less concern, interest, or curiosity....

that's not to say that my friends were nazis.  and it's not to suggest that the united states of 1991 and the germany that sent millions of people to the gas chambers are morally equivalent.  but it does suggest to me the extent to which the human mind - even the vaunted american human mind - is capable of extinguishing all concern and even interest in other human beings who have been labeled "the enemy" ...

this scares the hell out of me, too....
 

and of course the Gulf War was no isolated incident.

the fact remains that while we have as a country spent many years now lamenting and grieving for the 50,000 names on the vietnam memorial wall, we have spent considerably less time reflecting upon the over 2,000,000 deaths american actions directly caused among the vietnamese....

the fact remains that while americans were obsessed for over a year with the health and safety of the americans taken hostage in iran in 1979, most were considerably less interested in what the secret police of the shah that america had installed back in the '50s had been doing to iranians for the preceding two decades....

the fact remains that for decades, the US built and was constantly ready to use thousands upon thousands of nuclear weapons on civilians around the world if, ummmm, circumstances warranted....
 

where does all this leave me tonight?

it leaves me feeling pretty insecure, to be sure.

and it leaves me more allergic than ever to those who "love the smell of napalm in the morning" whatever country they happen to be part of.

and it makes those days when the long-dead body of oliver cromwell was exhumed by the restored british monarchy in 1661, and its hated head cut off and displayed on a pole for over 20 years, seem very, very close.

and it leaves me reflecting upon the words of rafael perez, the LA cop who recently revealed shocking levels of corruption and brutality among his fellow officers.  he said, "whoever chases monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster himself."

if that doesn't quite say it all, it at least says enough for this haunted monday....
 
 

a light ~n~ fluffy alternative entry

back

home

forward