"We must carry each other..."

“We must carry each other. If we don’t have this, what are we? The spirit in the body is like wine in a glass; when it spills, it seeps into air and earth and light… It’s a mistake to think it’s the small things we control and not the large, it’s the other way around! We can’t stop the small accident, the tiny detail that conspires into fate: the extra moment you run back for something forgotten, a moment that saves you from an accident – or causes one. But we can assert the largest order, the large human values daily, the only order large enough to see.”

from Anne Michael's Fugitive Pieces (p. 22)

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IMAGES
1: Lodz Ghetto, child deportation (Wikipedia)
2: Nazi soldier laughing at Jews (United States Holocaust Memorial online archive)
3: "Austrian Nazis and local residents watch as Jews are forced to get on their hands and knees and scrub the pavement" (The History Place)
4: "Child prisoners at Auschwitz just after its liberation in 1945" (Source unknown, probably a Google image search)
5: Nazi soldiers, "Laughter lines the faces of camp staff as they prepare for a sing song" (United States Holocaust Memorial online archive)

Not such a wonderful wizard

I'm reading Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water for my English class. Today I went through it and looked up a bunch of the names and events that it references.

By way of the Wikipedia articles on Sitting Bull and the massacre at Wounded Knee I was led to this:

"The proud spirit of the original owners of these vast prairies inherited through centuries of fierce and bloody wars for their possession, lingered last in the bosom of Sitting Bull. With his fall the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are. History would forget these latter despicable beings, and speak, in later ages of the glory of these grand Kings of forest and plain that Cooper loved to heroism."

"The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extirmination [sic] of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies future safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past."

Who wrote the above?

L. Frank Baum, the author of the Wizard of Oz books.

Are you wondering what I'm wondering?

Can a good thing be "tainted"? A "bad person" (what does the term really mean though - is anyone ever wholly "bad"?) can create "good" art. But if the artist is racist and cruel can those aspects of their character "infect" their art? Without our realizing it? And even if the art is free of the unsavory aspects of the creator's character, is it wrong for us to enjoy it? Should we dismiss it completely as an unacceptable product of a "bad person"?

If Hitler had written great children's' books would we be reading them to our children today?

How much consideration should we give to the moral character of the author of a piece of art?

This could obviously be taken to extremes (and already is).

Should we start banning The Wizard of Oz? Should it join Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret on the list of books that have already been banned for their supposed moral offensiveness?

Or should we perhaps preface our reading of The Wizard of Oz to children with a comment about the author's hatred for Native American people so that they're provided with a greater awareness of the complexities of life?

Its a quandary.

In any case, I've never really liked The Wizard of Oz much...

Elizabeth: The Golden Age
"the heart and stomach of a man"

"My loving people,

We have been persuaded by some that are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit our selves to armed multitudes, for fear of treachery; but I assure you I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people. Let tyrants fear. I have always so behaved myself that, under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good-will of my subjects; and therefore I am come amongst you, as you see, at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live and die amongst you all; to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust.

I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.

I know already, for your forwardness you have deserved rewards and crowns; and We do assure you in the word of a prince, they shall be duly paid you. In the mean time, my lieutenant general shall be in my stead, than whom never prince commanded a more noble or worthy subject; not doubting but by your obedience to my general, by your concord in the camp, and your valour in the field, we shall shortly have a famous victory over those enemies of my God, of my kingdom, and of my people.

Following the speech, news came that the Armada had been driven from the Channel. The Queen left her bodyguard before the fort at Tilbury and went among her subjects with an escort of six men. Lord Ormonde walked ahead with the Sword of State; he was followed by a page leading the Queen's charger and another bearing her silver helmet on a cushion; then came the Queen herself, in white with a silver cuirass and mounted on a grey gelding. She was flanked on horseback by Lord Leicester on the right, and on the left by Lord Essex. Sir John Norreys brought up the rear."

The above quotes are from Wiki, but there's also a great essay on Elizabeth here.

I wonder if they'll have her give the full speech above or a trimmed version in the movie. Based on the trailer (which gives me tingles) and the super-interesting (that's an academic term, of course) events that I know took place during this part of Elizabeth's reign, I'm very excited about seeing it! And it comes out on my birthday so that's a good omen, right?

However, I do really hope the moviemakers will attempt to be more historically accurate than they were with the first movie.

Miscellania

Quite a few people liked Apocalypto after all, which I think justifies my growing desire to see it!

Among them, one critic made the interesting point that Mel Gibson always makes movies about cultures/civilizations on the brink of extinction. Which I think is a pretty neat theme to tackle from a movie vantage point. Some days I wish I was a film student...

Anyhow, it seems that directors who repeatedly make movies with similar themes are called auteurs. (And the fact that 'auteur' was a word I didn't know again leads my mind on another dumb tangent of wondering how large my vocabulary is supposed to be by now and whether I'm ahead or behind... )

Of course, as it goes with the Net, one link leads to another and soon I was reading about Leni Riefenstahl who created documentary propaganda films for the Nazis and is still renowned as a director despite the extremely controversial nature of her work. At one point, she was accused of using concentration camp inmates - who some claim were later killed - on her sets. She was brought to trial in France but professed her innocence and naivety and, ultimately, the accusations against her didn't stand up in court.

I'm not exactly sure how anyone in such close contact with Hitler could convincingly profess their innocence in not knowing that the Nazis were up to something that was purely evil or at the very least, not good. Especially this coming from a woman who sent Hitler the telegram:

"Your deeds exceed the power of human imagination. They are without equal in the history of mankind. How can we ever thank you?"

The Wiki article concludes that "Riefenstahl suffered from a deep denial of her actual culpability, to the point that she even began to believe her own lies regarding her innocence."

I find that extremely disturbing - the points to which we can go in deceiving ourselves, I mean. It seems like self-deception should be a contradiction in terms and therefore impossible.

I think I'd have to argue that in almost every case (except perhaps cases of extreme mental... illness? but maybe not even then), an individual always knows what they are doing and always knows their own motives. Whether they'll acknowledge that they do is another story, but that doesn't change the fact that the worst should always be assumed.

Hmm.


Now for something that made me laugh, check this out.

I love this story...


The most visible action of CORE in the movement was the Freedom Rides, designed to test the federal law prohibiting discrimination on interstate public transportation. Small interracial groups boarded Greyhound and Trailway buses, beginning in Washington, D.C. They found that the "colored" and "white" signs had been removed in the bus stations of Virginia and they encountered no problems until they crossed into Alabama.

In Anniston, Alabama, their bus was fire bombed and the riders were beaten with sticks and had rocks thrown at them as they tried to get off. One sixty-year-old man went into cardiac arrest. When the riders were taken to the hospital, no one would treat them. The hospital demanded that they leave, but this seemed impossible because an angry crowd surrounded the building. Fortunately for the riders, a caravan of fifteen cars, led by Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth of Birmingham, showed up to rescue them.

As Hank Thomas, one of the Freedom Riders recalled "everyone one of those cars had a shotgun in it. And Fred Shuttlesworth had got on the radio and said – you know Fred, he's very dramatic – 'I'm going to get my people… I'm a non-violent man, but I'm going to get my people!"

The issue of armed self-defense highlighted one of the many differences in approach among those committed to non-violence. CORE and SCLC members were always unarmed during demonstrations and actions. Some like King and Lawson were committed to principles of non-violence as a way of life. Others like Shuttlesworth were committed to non-violence as a tactic, but reserved the right of self-defense. For hundreds of participants in demonstrations, non-violence was a useful and pragmatic tactic. Ernest Green pointed out the logic of non-violence in his situation as one of nine black high school students daily surrounded by hundreds of potentially hostile Whites – police and parents, as well as the other students at Little Rock's Central High. The white South had always held the upper hand in terms of guns and arms. To respond in kind would have been disastrous. Furthermore, the unarmed presence of demonstrators revealed the violence inherent in maintaining white supremacy. When dogs and fire hoses were turned on praying people in Birmingham, it was clear to even casual observers who the aggressors were. Or as King wrote in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," "we who engage in non-violent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive."

from Chapter 11 "The Civil Rights Movement: Participatory Democracy and Nonviolence in Action" in the book The Missing Peace: The Search for Nonviolent Alternatives in United States History

Did you know that of the original, ancient Seven Wonders of the World, only the Pyramid of Giza remains?

Did you know that there's a competition under way to choose the new 7 Wonders of the World?

Go here to cast your vote!

'Breathe slowly ... it's going to be OK'

Sometimes I imagine what it would have been like to live through WW2. When I do so, I generally take the day that 9/11 happened and multiply by a thousand.