From December 6, 2009
I was reading a National Geographic and I came across an ad for the touch faucet. It showed a lady’s arm, her hand covered in dough, gently touching the faucet with her clean wrist, and water coming out. The design of the faucet was sleek and beautiful.
I took the ad to Zac and without any introduction, I declared, “This is what we need.” Some might argue with my choice of the word “need.” Clearly, on a list of needs, a touch faucet ought to be far near the bottom, perhaps just above hot tub. But Zac and I were at the beginning of remodeling our kitchen, and we’d already turned down the salesman from Sears who claimed the faucets in his brochure cost $500. We would need a new faucet anyway…well, we needed a new sink, an under-mount, and when you’re spending so much money on a new kitchen anyway, it’s easy to justify a new faucet too. Especially if it’s a touch faucet.
We looked it up on the internet, and after watching a demo video, we found it was sold at Lowe’s for about $350 dollars. On our next trip to Lowes, we checked it out. To be fair, we made ourselves look at all the other faucets, determining that the touch faucet clearly beat all of them. The switch for toggling between sprayer and jet streams was on the back, so it wasn’t visible. The nozzle that came down was held in by a magnet, so the nozzle wouldn’t, after wear and tear, dangle. It had a sleek yet highly functional design and wasn’t that much more expensive than regular ones.
We bought it right then. It was the first time I can remember being directly influenced by an ad. I’m sure I had been subliminally or subconsciously influenced by many ads, but this is the first time I can recall seeing an ad for something I had never seen before and then almost immediately rushing out and buying it. But my brother always says, “You vote with your money” and I wanted to vote yes for great ideas combined with great design.
It was about two months later that the faucet was finally installed. Our kitchen had a new floor, with tile and grout instead of three layers of dated, torn linoleum. We had a new quartz counter top that replaced our wood-grained, early-eighties countertop with shiny metal strips in the joints. In those two months, we’d also had our yard completely landscaped. Those projects had been bigger and far more expensive, yet it was the faucet that gave me the most joy.
It worked perfectly. With the regular handle, I could set it to the desired temperature and pressure, and then every time I touched it, it came back at that setting. Being one who still washes dishes by hand, this was a significant convenience. After just a couple of days, I could barely take it anymore. The faucet was too good, too perfect. “Zac, we went down on Madonna too soon, too soon!” I lamented. (Click here for the lyrics to the Dan Bern song in order to get this reference). “We’re never going to be satisfied with another faucet. We’ll have to install it in every future house of ours.”
A day or two later, we were at the annual dinner for our Peace Corps Association, and Zac got to talking with some ladies who worked at RTI, a big company that does lots of international work. One of them mentioned to him a GIS contract in Zambia. We’d always thought of moving abroad again, having loved living in Namibia and China and always feeling wistful while just traveling through countries as mere tourists. Maybe this was the world calling again, saying “Come, there is more to explore, don’t settle for your quiet street in Cary (5th safest metro area in the nation, number one on a list of smartest cities) and your great job at that school (ranked somewhere between 20th and 34th best school in the nation)—isn’t it too easy? Aren’t you bored? You’re not even miserable enough to write anything anymore.” I got that glint in my eye, the glint that had taken us to Namibia and then to China. Zac said, “This would be good for my career.”
Then I thought of my faucet—my beautiful, perfect, touch faucet. I also thought of my tile floor and my quartz counter top, and my yard that now had grass and clearly defined islands, but mainly I though of my faucet—perfection of design and innovation married and installed in my kitchen, turning on and off with just a touch. I also remembered what I had hated about Africa: always being white, never fitting in, being stared at, being begged from, being unable to find chips and salsa. Our faucet in Namibia had been fine enough, except that sometimes, for a few hours or a few days, no water came out of it.
The next day, even with the wine worn off, Zac was still thinking of the five-year GIS contract in Zambia. I said, “What about our faucet?” He said, “It runs on batteries, we’ll take it with us.”
While doing laundry, I started to remember what I had loved about Africa: the challenge, the beauty, the chaos, the tenacity of the people. I remembered all that I experienced there that didn’t happen here where everything functioned so well: having chickens, hitchhiking, random luck, stunning nature…
Within a few days, Zac and I were living happily in Zambia. I was running a colorfully painted hostel, where the foreigners who came through participated in “culture corners” where they chatted with the locals and maybe even some more formal classes in English for the kids. I was still working out the details of the classes. The travelers could leave behind their stuff, which was then sold, thrift shop style, with the money going to local groups supporting orphans. I had kids too. My job running the hostel was flexible enough, and the labor was cheap enough to hire plenty of helpers. We bought watermelon juice at Shoprite and I learned to make homemade salsa. I ordered tortilla chips online or had friends ship them. There were also cooking classes offered to the tourists by local women. My hostel helped the economy and promoted cultural exchanges. I had forgotten all about my touch faucet in the same way that I completely forgot dishwashers existed while I was in Namibia.
Zac sent his resume to the woman. She replied saying she would hang onto it, but the details of the project were uncertain. They were not even sure if it would be an expat position—they would probably try to hire Zambians first.
With a tap on the touch faucet, Zambia ran through my fingers and down the drain.
06 June 2010
Complex: What Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Electra Can Teach Us about Ourselves and Our Wars
I love the story of Oedipus, although Oedipus himself is not a particularly likeable character. He is egotistical: When confronted with the suffering of his subjects at the beginning of the play he declares, “I know how cruelly you suffer; yet, though sick, not one of you suffers a sickness half as great as mine. Yours is a single pain; each man of you feels but his own. My heart is heavy with the city’s pain, my own, and yours together” (50). He is pompous in his empathy and selfish in his solution. When he accepts the charge of finding the former king’s murderers in order to end the blight, he readily admits, “The man who murdered him might make the same attempt on me; and so, avenging him I shall protect myself” (53).
He is also a braggart: When he first appears in response to the lamentations he says, “I myself am come who fame is known to all—I, Oedipius” (49). In twelve words he refers to himself four times. There is a bit of dramatic irony here as well, since the audience knows the real reason for his lasting infamy. But his hamartia is really shown when he doubts Teiresias’ prophetic abilities and brags about his own cleverness: “When the Sphinx chanted her music here, why did not you speak out and save the city? …You were no prophet then; your birds, your voice from Heaven, were dumb. But I, who came by chance, I, knowing nothing, put the Sphinx to flight, thanks to my wit—no thanks to divination!” (61). As Albert Camus comments, his emphasis on man’s ability to solve problems without the help of the gods reflects the paradigm shift occurring in Athens at the time: a transition from “a sacred society [to] a society built by man.” However, even atheists such as myself might still feel that Oedipus’ harangue against Teiresias is a bit overdone.
Oedipus is also unlikable because his anger so quickly turns to violence: When he is fleeing Thebes, he has a right-of-way skirmish with another carriage, and in a fit of road rage his kills his father and his father’s entourage (although he does not know their identity as such), ending his account of the incident with the unapologetic statement, “I killed them all” (75). Later on his journey to self-discovery, an elderly Theban shepherd refuses to answer Oedipus’ questions. Oedipus suggests torturing the answer out of him: “Here, someone, quickly! Twist this fellow’s arms!”(88). A moment later he threatens, “Die you shall, unless you speak the truth” (88).
He is also quick to accuse others: When the blind seer, Tieresias, tells him he is the cause of the plague, he refuses to listen and instead accuses Tieresias of being a crony of his brother-in-law Creon, whom he suddenly thinks is trying to overthrow him. He also jumps to conclusions when his wife, trying to protect him from the true knowledge of his birth and relationship to her, pleads “Seek no more! ….O may you never learn what man you are!” (85). Oedipus misunderstands and thinks she is afraid of learning that he is of lowly birth. Oedipus declares “My birth, however humble, I am resolved to find. But [Jocasta], perhaps, is proud, as women will be; is ashamed of my low birth. But I do rate myself the child of Fortune, giver of all good, and I shall not be put to shame” (85). Again, dramatic irony is employed here, because we know that he is the child of his wife, which is a great misfortune.
Thanks to Freud, most people associate Oedipus with a son desiring to sleep with his mother. However, Oedipus ends up sleeping with his mother precisely because he is trying to avoid sleeping with his mother. He doesn’t know his adoptive parents are not his biological parents, so when an oracle tells him the prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother, he immediately runs away from Corinth so that he doesn’t murder Polybus and sleep with Merope. It is in fleeing Corinth that he runs into his father at the place where three roads meet, slays him, then proceeds to Thebes where he solves the Sphynx’s riddle and wins marriage with the queen (his mother) as his reward. In running from the prophecy, he runs straight into it.
If you focus only on the murderous, incestuous parts, it would be easy to dismiss this story as merely an ancient Greek tragedy set in the days before it was regarded as important to let children know they are adopted and when gods controlled your fate. But I think Oedipus’s real problem was not sexual in nature, as Freud’s co-opting of the name would have us believe. His real problem was that he failed to see that he was the cause of the problem because he was so quick to accuse and blame everyone else. In this sense, we all have an Oedipus complex.
In the beginning, Oedipus sends Creon to Apollo to find out the cause of the plague, and Creon returns with this message: “There is pollution here in our midst, long-standing” (51) because the murderer of king Laius has not been found. There is no way Oedipus could know that it was him, at the point. But shortly after Creon’s report, Tieresias tells Oedipus point blank that he is “the man whose crimes pollute our city” (60). As Oedipus’ insolence makes Teiresias angrier, Teiresias says, “You have your sight, and yet you cannot see where, nor with whom, you live, nor in what horror” (62).
It’s a bit cryptic, and you can’t entirely blame Oedipus for not understanding. But what we can blame him for is that he doesn’t even try. He immediately starts accusing Creon of hiring Teiresias to say this about him, in order to usurp the throne. It is only when Oedipus sees for himself that he is the cause of the pollution that he finally believes it. Of course, we’re not all failing to see that we are living in incest. But we’ve all, I’m sure, failed to see that we are the problem. We are quick to blame others, as Oedipus blames Creon and Tieresias, and this clouds his ability to understand what they are telling him.
This crops up frequently in my own life, in fairly innocuous ways. I’ll get done doing the laundry and come up one sock short, and I’ll immediately think Zac has put it in his sock drawer by mistake, or that it’s lost under his pile of clothes. I generally blame Zac, silently, for anything that goes missing because I am the neat organized one who never loses things, just like Oedipus clings to the fact that he saved Thebes from the Sphynx, so surely he couldn’t also be the one bringing ruin to the city. But I’ll find the sock behind the hamper a week or two later, where I didn’t think of looking because I was so sure someone else had lost it, not me. At a restaurant the other day, we were dividing up the check, but ended up with $10 dollars too much. I had been collecting money and making change, and I was sure someone else had put too much in. Of course, when I finally demanded a reenactment of the monetary transaction, it was revealed that I was the one who had mistakenly put in the extra ten bucks. “Hah,” I said. “I’m like Oedipus. I’m blaming others for the problem and it turns out it is me.” Oedipus is really about seeing things clearly.
Freud also co-opted Electra from Sophocles, to name the lesser-known Electra Complex: When a girl, in love with her father, wishes to kill her mother. This one is a little more aptly named at least, as Electra does seem rather obsessed with her father, Agamemnon, and openly wishes for the death of her mother, Clytemnestra, and her step-father, Aegisthus. It should be noted, though, that most of the time she is pining for her beloved brother, Orestes, to return from exile and slay her mother and step-father, who are responsible for the murder of her father. It is her brother who actually kills their mother, as retribution for the murder of their father, which seems to fly in the face of Freud’s Oedipus Complex.
Electra can also teach us a few things, but not necessarily about matricide. Rather, it is a story about longing for revenge. The chorus counters Electra’s grief by reminding her that although her father is dead, and that’s a bad thing, “he has gone to the land to which we all must go” (107). Still, Electra feeds her sorrow and lusts for retribution. She sees it as a daughter’s duty. Her mother points out that she killed Agamemnon as retribution for Agamemnon’s murder of their daughter. Electra counters that Agamemnon had to kill the daughter, as Artemis was holding their ship hostage until she received retribution for a stag that Agamemnon had killed. We see the cycle of revenge that has led to this moment, and we are given a hint of the cycle of revenge that will continue. After Orestes successfully slays his father’s murderers, we can imagine that now Aegisthus and Clytemnestra’s children will be obligated to slay Electra and Orestus as retribution for their parent’s murder. So the moral, really, is don’t kill one of Artemis’ deer, her (read as Gollum would say it) precious.
When reading Electra, you want to root for the protagonist; you want to want Lady Clytemnestra to die, as Electra’s grief is poignant and she is treated no better than a slave. As a foil, Electra’s sister is also mad about their father’s murder, but she pleads with Electra: “Why do you indulge this vain resentment? I am sure of this: Mine is as great as yours. If I could find the power, they soon would learn how much I hate them. But we are helpless; we should ride the storm with shortened sail, not show our enmity when we are impotent to do them harm” (113). While yielding one’s principles in the face of obstacles is not very noble, Electra’s obsessive and excessive longing for revenge isn’t to be emulated either.
Sophocles’ Electra ends rather abruptly, after all her whining and pining, with her gleefully hearing her mother’s last wails, followed shortly by her step-father’s demise. I don’t find it the cathartic ending promised by Greek tragedy. Electra’s cruelty as she savors their deaths is not something you can or should identify with. At the end of Oedipus, you can pity him, because for all of his faults, he was not to blame for his crimes. He was an unfortunate, albeit egotistical, plaything of the gods. They made a prophecy, and any student of Greek mythology knows that the prophecies always come true. However, Electra and Orestes were not fulfilling any pre-ordained prophecy, but rather a man-made code that calls for blood retribution. At Clytemnestra’s death, the chorus proclaims, “The cry for vengeance is at work; the dead are stirring. Those who were killed of old now drink in return the blood of those who killed them” (149). This provides comfort for Electra, but for those of us who believe the dead stay dead and are no longer sentient, we know the dead can gain no additional comfort from vengeance. In a modern, secular society, we know man-made codes can be changed and adapted to avoid fates that only vengeful gods could foist upon us.
After Clytemnestra’s death, Aegisthus returns and Orestus takes him inside the house to murder him, explaining, “Go in, and die on the same spot on which you killed my father” (152). Orestus wants Aegisthus to die in the same way his father died, without realizing that he is therefore making himself the same as the aggressor he hates. The oppressed is now becoming the oppressor. Aegisthus has children of his own, who may one day kill Orestes in the same spot that Orestus killed their father. Orestus, unlike our modern superheroes that always show restraint and stop short of murdering the villains, crosses a line and forfeits any moral superiority that he might have had.
As a country, we have done the same thing time and time again. The hypocrisies are endless: We fought the oppression of the British empire, only to oppress slaves and native Americans. We defeated Hitler while being allies with Stalin and putting Japanese-Americans in internment camps. During the cold war, the US government, led by senator McCarthy, employed many of the same tactics against its own citizens that the communists were using against theirs. In fighting the enemy, we emulated the enemy.
Similarly, in our current war on terror, we have become terrorists. We violate human rights, kill innocent civilians, squash dissent, and endorse torture. We are Electra and 9/11 is our Agamemnon. Or maybe, more comparably, we are Artemis and the WTC is our stag. We demand an excessive recompense: toppling two sovereign governments and wreaking havoc on untold numbers of non-terrorists, which touched off a cycle of revenge and violence that has no foreseeable end. While the terrorist attacks were cruel and tragic, the victims have only gone where we are all going, where numerous Americans go every day due to other causes that we do not condemn as vehemently.
In going to these extremes to fight our “enemy,” we eliminate the moral superiority that separated us from our enemy. We are Orestus—feeling quite justified stepping into Aegisthus’ position and mimicking his murder, without seeing clearly that doing so eliminates the moral distinction between “us” and “them.” Being the victim of an injustice does not make us morally superior—it is only in our response to the injustice that we can show our integrity. Like Oedipus, our national narrative is pompous and egotistical, focusing on the good we have done, to the extent that we are blind to the sins we commit. Our anger, our fear, and our sense of superiority are faulty justifications for the perpetration of violence. The problem is as Aegisthus points out shortly before he is killed: “This house of Atreus must, it seems, behold death upon death, those now and those to come” (152).
Work Cited:
Sophocles. Antigone, Oedipus the King, Electra. Trans. H.D.F. Kitto. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.
He is also a braggart: When he first appears in response to the lamentations he says, “I myself am come who fame is known to all—I, Oedipius” (49). In twelve words he refers to himself four times. There is a bit of dramatic irony here as well, since the audience knows the real reason for his lasting infamy. But his hamartia is really shown when he doubts Teiresias’ prophetic abilities and brags about his own cleverness: “When the Sphinx chanted her music here, why did not you speak out and save the city? …You were no prophet then; your birds, your voice from Heaven, were dumb. But I, who came by chance, I, knowing nothing, put the Sphinx to flight, thanks to my wit—no thanks to divination!” (61). As Albert Camus comments, his emphasis on man’s ability to solve problems without the help of the gods reflects the paradigm shift occurring in Athens at the time: a transition from “a sacred society [to] a society built by man.” However, even atheists such as myself might still feel that Oedipus’ harangue against Teiresias is a bit overdone.
Oedipus is also unlikable because his anger so quickly turns to violence: When he is fleeing Thebes, he has a right-of-way skirmish with another carriage, and in a fit of road rage his kills his father and his father’s entourage (although he does not know their identity as such), ending his account of the incident with the unapologetic statement, “I killed them all” (75). Later on his journey to self-discovery, an elderly Theban shepherd refuses to answer Oedipus’ questions. Oedipus suggests torturing the answer out of him: “Here, someone, quickly! Twist this fellow’s arms!”(88). A moment later he threatens, “Die you shall, unless you speak the truth” (88).
He is also quick to accuse others: When the blind seer, Tieresias, tells him he is the cause of the plague, he refuses to listen and instead accuses Tieresias of being a crony of his brother-in-law Creon, whom he suddenly thinks is trying to overthrow him. He also jumps to conclusions when his wife, trying to protect him from the true knowledge of his birth and relationship to her, pleads “Seek no more! ….O may you never learn what man you are!” (85). Oedipus misunderstands and thinks she is afraid of learning that he is of lowly birth. Oedipus declares “My birth, however humble, I am resolved to find. But [Jocasta], perhaps, is proud, as women will be; is ashamed of my low birth. But I do rate myself the child of Fortune, giver of all good, and I shall not be put to shame” (85). Again, dramatic irony is employed here, because we know that he is the child of his wife, which is a great misfortune.
Thanks to Freud, most people associate Oedipus with a son desiring to sleep with his mother. However, Oedipus ends up sleeping with his mother precisely because he is trying to avoid sleeping with his mother. He doesn’t know his adoptive parents are not his biological parents, so when an oracle tells him the prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother, he immediately runs away from Corinth so that he doesn’t murder Polybus and sleep with Merope. It is in fleeing Corinth that he runs into his father at the place where three roads meet, slays him, then proceeds to Thebes where he solves the Sphynx’s riddle and wins marriage with the queen (his mother) as his reward. In running from the prophecy, he runs straight into it.
If you focus only on the murderous, incestuous parts, it would be easy to dismiss this story as merely an ancient Greek tragedy set in the days before it was regarded as important to let children know they are adopted and when gods controlled your fate. But I think Oedipus’s real problem was not sexual in nature, as Freud’s co-opting of the name would have us believe. His real problem was that he failed to see that he was the cause of the problem because he was so quick to accuse and blame everyone else. In this sense, we all have an Oedipus complex.
In the beginning, Oedipus sends Creon to Apollo to find out the cause of the plague, and Creon returns with this message: “There is pollution here in our midst, long-standing” (51) because the murderer of king Laius has not been found. There is no way Oedipus could know that it was him, at the point. But shortly after Creon’s report, Tieresias tells Oedipus point blank that he is “the man whose crimes pollute our city” (60). As Oedipus’ insolence makes Teiresias angrier, Teiresias says, “You have your sight, and yet you cannot see where, nor with whom, you live, nor in what horror” (62).
It’s a bit cryptic, and you can’t entirely blame Oedipus for not understanding. But what we can blame him for is that he doesn’t even try. He immediately starts accusing Creon of hiring Teiresias to say this about him, in order to usurp the throne. It is only when Oedipus sees for himself that he is the cause of the pollution that he finally believes it. Of course, we’re not all failing to see that we are living in incest. But we’ve all, I’m sure, failed to see that we are the problem. We are quick to blame others, as Oedipus blames Creon and Tieresias, and this clouds his ability to understand what they are telling him.
This crops up frequently in my own life, in fairly innocuous ways. I’ll get done doing the laundry and come up one sock short, and I’ll immediately think Zac has put it in his sock drawer by mistake, or that it’s lost under his pile of clothes. I generally blame Zac, silently, for anything that goes missing because I am the neat organized one who never loses things, just like Oedipus clings to the fact that he saved Thebes from the Sphynx, so surely he couldn’t also be the one bringing ruin to the city. But I’ll find the sock behind the hamper a week or two later, where I didn’t think of looking because I was so sure someone else had lost it, not me. At a restaurant the other day, we were dividing up the check, but ended up with $10 dollars too much. I had been collecting money and making change, and I was sure someone else had put too much in. Of course, when I finally demanded a reenactment of the monetary transaction, it was revealed that I was the one who had mistakenly put in the extra ten bucks. “Hah,” I said. “I’m like Oedipus. I’m blaming others for the problem and it turns out it is me.” Oedipus is really about seeing things clearly.
Freud also co-opted Electra from Sophocles, to name the lesser-known Electra Complex: When a girl, in love with her father, wishes to kill her mother. This one is a little more aptly named at least, as Electra does seem rather obsessed with her father, Agamemnon, and openly wishes for the death of her mother, Clytemnestra, and her step-father, Aegisthus. It should be noted, though, that most of the time she is pining for her beloved brother, Orestes, to return from exile and slay her mother and step-father, who are responsible for the murder of her father. It is her brother who actually kills their mother, as retribution for the murder of their father, which seems to fly in the face of Freud’s Oedipus Complex.
Electra can also teach us a few things, but not necessarily about matricide. Rather, it is a story about longing for revenge. The chorus counters Electra’s grief by reminding her that although her father is dead, and that’s a bad thing, “he has gone to the land to which we all must go” (107). Still, Electra feeds her sorrow and lusts for retribution. She sees it as a daughter’s duty. Her mother points out that she killed Agamemnon as retribution for Agamemnon’s murder of their daughter. Electra counters that Agamemnon had to kill the daughter, as Artemis was holding their ship hostage until she received retribution for a stag that Agamemnon had killed. We see the cycle of revenge that has led to this moment, and we are given a hint of the cycle of revenge that will continue. After Orestes successfully slays his father’s murderers, we can imagine that now Aegisthus and Clytemnestra’s children will be obligated to slay Electra and Orestus as retribution for their parent’s murder. So the moral, really, is don’t kill one of Artemis’ deer, her (read as Gollum would say it) precious.
When reading Electra, you want to root for the protagonist; you want to want Lady Clytemnestra to die, as Electra’s grief is poignant and she is treated no better than a slave. As a foil, Electra’s sister is also mad about their father’s murder, but she pleads with Electra: “Why do you indulge this vain resentment? I am sure of this: Mine is as great as yours. If I could find the power, they soon would learn how much I hate them. But we are helpless; we should ride the storm with shortened sail, not show our enmity when we are impotent to do them harm” (113). While yielding one’s principles in the face of obstacles is not very noble, Electra’s obsessive and excessive longing for revenge isn’t to be emulated either.
Sophocles’ Electra ends rather abruptly, after all her whining and pining, with her gleefully hearing her mother’s last wails, followed shortly by her step-father’s demise. I don’t find it the cathartic ending promised by Greek tragedy. Electra’s cruelty as she savors their deaths is not something you can or should identify with. At the end of Oedipus, you can pity him, because for all of his faults, he was not to blame for his crimes. He was an unfortunate, albeit egotistical, plaything of the gods. They made a prophecy, and any student of Greek mythology knows that the prophecies always come true. However, Electra and Orestes were not fulfilling any pre-ordained prophecy, but rather a man-made code that calls for blood retribution. At Clytemnestra’s death, the chorus proclaims, “The cry for vengeance is at work; the dead are stirring. Those who were killed of old now drink in return the blood of those who killed them” (149). This provides comfort for Electra, but for those of us who believe the dead stay dead and are no longer sentient, we know the dead can gain no additional comfort from vengeance. In a modern, secular society, we know man-made codes can be changed and adapted to avoid fates that only vengeful gods could foist upon us.
After Clytemnestra’s death, Aegisthus returns and Orestus takes him inside the house to murder him, explaining, “Go in, and die on the same spot on which you killed my father” (152). Orestus wants Aegisthus to die in the same way his father died, without realizing that he is therefore making himself the same as the aggressor he hates. The oppressed is now becoming the oppressor. Aegisthus has children of his own, who may one day kill Orestes in the same spot that Orestus killed their father. Orestus, unlike our modern superheroes that always show restraint and stop short of murdering the villains, crosses a line and forfeits any moral superiority that he might have had.
As a country, we have done the same thing time and time again. The hypocrisies are endless: We fought the oppression of the British empire, only to oppress slaves and native Americans. We defeated Hitler while being allies with Stalin and putting Japanese-Americans in internment camps. During the cold war, the US government, led by senator McCarthy, employed many of the same tactics against its own citizens that the communists were using against theirs. In fighting the enemy, we emulated the enemy.
Similarly, in our current war on terror, we have become terrorists. We violate human rights, kill innocent civilians, squash dissent, and endorse torture. We are Electra and 9/11 is our Agamemnon. Or maybe, more comparably, we are Artemis and the WTC is our stag. We demand an excessive recompense: toppling two sovereign governments and wreaking havoc on untold numbers of non-terrorists, which touched off a cycle of revenge and violence that has no foreseeable end. While the terrorist attacks were cruel and tragic, the victims have only gone where we are all going, where numerous Americans go every day due to other causes that we do not condemn as vehemently.
In going to these extremes to fight our “enemy,” we eliminate the moral superiority that separated us from our enemy. We are Orestus—feeling quite justified stepping into Aegisthus’ position and mimicking his murder, without seeing clearly that doing so eliminates the moral distinction between “us” and “them.” Being the victim of an injustice does not make us morally superior—it is only in our response to the injustice that we can show our integrity. Like Oedipus, our national narrative is pompous and egotistical, focusing on the good we have done, to the extent that we are blind to the sins we commit. Our anger, our fear, and our sense of superiority are faulty justifications for the perpetration of violence. The problem is as Aegisthus points out shortly before he is killed: “This house of Atreus must, it seems, behold death upon death, those now and those to come” (152).
Work Cited:
Sophocles. Antigone, Oedipus the King, Electra. Trans. H.D.F. Kitto. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.
08 December 2009
My Precious Snowflake
My cat, whom I affectionately call “Piggy” and ironically call “my precious snowflake” but who is really named Ekulo, jumps onto my desk and curls up on the midterm exam I’m preparing for my freshmen, as if to say, “Don’t work so hard. Take a break. Pet me.” I pet her and her damp fur tells me it has started to rain outside. I press my ear close to her body to hear her purring and I whisper, “Piggy, Piggy” and I ask her where her sister is. She licks her paws. I look at her beautiful black face, her shiny whiskers, and her dense yellow eyes. While lost in the beauty and simplicity of a mere house cat, obtained from neighbor girls who were walking down the street with a cage full of “Free Kittens”—it was fate that brought us together—I think to myself, “If I died and my flesh were cooked and thrown to her on the floor, she’d eat me without a second thought.” I put her on my lap and go back to working on the midterm.
14 July 2009
Time, and why Eternal Life wouldn’t work for me.
As a teacher, I have a weird life—no nine-to-five job for me. I work all day, I work evenings, I work weekends, then suddenly, for two glorious months in the summer, I have no work. During the school year, I look forward to summer as the time when I can do everything I want to do but have no time for during the school year: clean out and organize my files, read copious amounts of books, explore new recipes to cook, purge my iTunes of songs I hate, research my retirement plan and develop a better investment strategy, exercise daily, complete projects around the house, clean the bathtub regularly, go to community events, read the entire newspaper, write…
Now that it is actually summer and I’ve been free for a month, here is what I have done: read one book (Ethan Frome, which is very short), caught up on the last 5 months of The Atlantic, exercised haphazardly, vacuumed out the car, read slightly more of the newspaper, played soduku when it was easy or medium, spent copious amounts of time petting the cats while listening to NPR, written some—but not as much or as profoundly as I had hoped, packed and unpacked for weekend trips, spent way too much time mindlessly surfing the internet, taken many naps, stared out the window, wondered why I have so many pens but can never find the right pen, etc… Not exactly the most productive use of time. I think I save up my laziness all year and then spend it during these two summer months.
So eternal life would be bad for me. I need stress and deadlines in order to get anything done. It’s like this: When I was a kid, I could spend a lot of time playing in the pool or the lake. Then one day, I joined swim team and it consumed my life for the next 6 years. While swimming endless laps, I always thought about how fun it would be to just play around in the water without having to work on endurance, speed, or technique. Yet when I was faced with a pool or lake without lane ropes and denuded of my cap and goggles, I was at a loss for what to do. I was bored. I needed a structured workout. Alas--I have spent so much of my life in school and doing homework, as a student then as a teacher, that when I am faced with vast amounts of free time, I inevitably squander it. It is a curse. I know once I’m back in school, like once I was back in the lanes, I’ll wish I’d made better use of this freedom.
Now that it is actually summer and I’ve been free for a month, here is what I have done: read one book (Ethan Frome, which is very short), caught up on the last 5 months of The Atlantic, exercised haphazardly, vacuumed out the car, read slightly more of the newspaper, played soduku when it was easy or medium, spent copious amounts of time petting the cats while listening to NPR, written some—but not as much or as profoundly as I had hoped, packed and unpacked for weekend trips, spent way too much time mindlessly surfing the internet, taken many naps, stared out the window, wondered why I have so many pens but can never find the right pen, etc… Not exactly the most productive use of time. I think I save up my laziness all year and then spend it during these two summer months.
So eternal life would be bad for me. I need stress and deadlines in order to get anything done. It’s like this: When I was a kid, I could spend a lot of time playing in the pool or the lake. Then one day, I joined swim team and it consumed my life for the next 6 years. While swimming endless laps, I always thought about how fun it would be to just play around in the water without having to work on endurance, speed, or technique. Yet when I was faced with a pool or lake without lane ropes and denuded of my cap and goggles, I was at a loss for what to do. I was bored. I needed a structured workout. Alas--I have spent so much of my life in school and doing homework, as a student then as a teacher, that when I am faced with vast amounts of free time, I inevitably squander it. It is a curse. I know once I’m back in school, like once I was back in the lanes, I’ll wish I’d made better use of this freedom.
13 July 2009
Movie Review: Eraserhead
I watched the 1977 David Lynch film, Eraserhead, last night. If you have seen the movie, that first sentence alone should be enough to bring back nightmarish memories of the baby, the chicken dinner, the woman in the radiator, and the titular scene where Henry has a dream that he is decapitated and a core of his head is used to make pencil erasers. (If you haven’t seen it, I recommend reading the plot summary on the wikipedia entry to get some context.)Eraserhead is the type of movie that is not enjoyable to watch. It doesn't make sense, in the traditional sense of the word sense; the images are claustrophobic or grotesgue; there is barely any dialogue; the special effects are rudimentary; and it is difficult to identify with any of the neurotic characters. And yet, the movie is brilliant precisely because it gives you so much to think about without steering you towards right answers. It’s unsettling—but it is by being unsettled that we are provoked to think. It is a movie that perhaps reveals more about the viewer than the creator of the film.
On the surface, it was Kafkaesque. It also reminded me of Little Otik as a movie about the fear of parenthood, the fear of having a child that ruins your life. It could also be compared to such recent films as Knocked Up and Juno as exploring the effects of an unwanted pregnancy on the dysfunctional couple involved. Maybe it is the male version of The Yellow Wallpaper: in Eraserhead the woman walks out and leaves the man to be slowly driven mad by the mutant baby's cries. Maybe it is a pro-abortion film, suggesting that fetal termination would have been a far better option than having the sickly mutant child later murdered by its deranged father.
Or maybe it is a treatise on the futility of enforcing the societal mold of the nuclear family in a post-nuclear age. The meet-the-parents scene in this movie is even more absurd and awkward than in the more recent movie Meet the Parents. The mother confronts Henry about having "sexual intercourse" with her daughter and insists that since an offspring has been produced, they must now get married. This, despite their dysfunctional relationship (perhaps literally embodied by the mutant baby?) and despite the parents’ lack of marital bliss. Babies and marriage must go together despite the fact that the marriage would be dysfunctional and the baby is not even a human baby.
Maybe Eraserhead is a comment on the perception of free will. Is the man in the moon pulling the levers just a man-behind-the-curtain that really has no power, or is he the embodiment of fate, really controlling the lives below? Henry and Mary certainly seem to be submitting to their fate--except when Mary has had enough of the mutant baby's cries and leaves. Although she seems crazier than Henry, maybe it is like in Catch-22 where going insane is actually the sane response to living in a dreary one-room apartment in a bleak, post-apocalyptic industrial town with a mutant baby that cries all night and a husband that is little more than flesh and frizzy hair. She is driven insane by her situation and gets out of it. Why does Henry stay? Even his tepid murder of the baby seems accidental--not like a conscious decision. Does he believe the man controlling the levers is really in control and he is just along for the ride?
This movie was also unique in that it was filled with sperm imagery. We are all used to phallic imagery, but how often do authors or directors go to the source and focus on those little spermies? An argument can be made (one must use passive voice when discussing these things) that the film is highlighting the disparity between the sex drive--that primordial urge--with it's evolutionary purpose--procreation. Who is actually thinking of cute cherubic babies (the epitome of sweet innocence) while doing the nasty (many sexual euphemisms actually reveal the societal view that sex is somehow "dirty"). This movie takes this contradiction and shows what would happen if society wasn't capable of doublethink. The "cherubic baby" is a horrific mutant--it is what the result of "doing the nasty" should look like. The societal attitudes towards sex have been manifested physically in the baby.
Then there is the fascinating relationship Henry has with the seductive girl-next-door. It is she who begins the limited dialogue of the movie by informing Henry that he got a phone call and is supposed to go to Mary's house for supper. So immediately we see him trapped between the sexy woman who clearly lusts for him, and his duty to his more homely girlfriend. He goes to the girlfriend’s, eats an awkward dinner, learns she had a baby prematurely and they must get married, they get married, she moves in, mutant baby cries, wife leaves and then--much time has passed since the initial encounter--the sexy neighbor shows up on the premise that she locked herself out of her apartment.
They make out for a while and presumably have sex, even although the sexy neighbor is clearly distracted by the crying mutant baby. The implication is clear: having a baby is a major impediment to hot sex. But, our recent viewing of sperm imagery must not let us forget that baby and sex are intricately linked. When the hot neighbor looks at the crying baby, is she wondering if she'll end up with something like that as a result of this encounter? She must--because she doesn't seem as interested in kissing Henry anymore, once reminded of the ultimate consequence. Henry, however, is in some sort of denial of the relationship between the baby and sex, or, he has compartmentalized it to where the freak baby is only a result of his sex with his deranged girlfriend, and this woman, being sexier, would not give him a child. Thus he has drawn distinctions, perhaps, between different types of sex. Madonna-whore complex, perhaps.
This was the only party of the movie where it seemed that Henry was being assertive and controlling his fate--he turns her face back towards him and continues to emphatically kiss her--clearly controlling her will and thwarting her urge to leave. It can be inferred that Henry’s sex drive is the only thing that can override his apathetic approach to life and his submission to his fate.
Later, Henry sees the sexy neighbor woman entering her apartment while making out with an older, ickier man. You can see Henry's disgust: of course he had somehow imagined he was special, not that she was a whore. Now he views her as a whore, but in doing so, he is now shown with a head that resembles the sperm imagery--but it also kind of resembles the head of the mutant baby. This blurring of images--sperm and baby--shows the biological relationship between the two entities. Furthermore, by replacing the protagonist’s head with this blurred image, we realize that he is really just a sperm-baby himself, while at the same time, he is viewed by the woman as being a sperm-baby. Babies are pure Id, and so is he, in that moment of hatred, jealousy, and disgust.
But hasn't he been Id all along? Doesn't society, with all its rules, just help us to hide (or repress, Freud would remind us) our Id among all our social conventions, particularly marriage. And isn’t marriage really just a way to legitimize--while at the same time separating--the connection between sperm and baby. When married couples have a baby, they're having a family. It's normal, natural, expected. In our minds, we think: they're married, they had a baby. We don't have to think about the fact that they had sex to have the baby. When an unmarried woman has a baby, we are forced to think about the fact that she had sex (since we don't have the word "married" to stand in) which makes us uncomfortable, and therefore she must wear the scarlett letter so that she too feels uncomfortable.
Now, what about the title and his dream where his head is used for erasers? On the one hand, I think it just means his head was soft, rubbery, not much in there. We hardly see any evidence of a personality or intellect throughout the whole movie. But there’s got to be something to the fact that it is being used for erasers, not just rubber bouncing balls or pillow stuffing. Is his head turned into an eraser because that is what we do with out superior intellect—use it to erase things, to choose what to block out and forget—such as the connection between sex and babies?
25 June 2009
Marriage is like Homeownership
I spent the eve of my 7th wedding anniversary sitting grumpily in the Boston airport. To pass the time, while my husband stoically waited in line to question our flight options at the Delta desk, I read an article from the July/August edition of The Atlantic entitled “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” by Sandra Tsing Loh. The article, in the books section, was promoted on the cover as “The Case Against Marriage” and the subtitle on page 116 was “The author is ending her marriage, isn’t it time you did the same?” All in all, a great article to read the day before my own marriage entered the ill-reputed 7th year. I would also like to note that I puked up my anniversary dinner. So if in retrospect I want to look for ill-omens, they have been dutifully recorded here.
Marriage is a tricky issue to discuss. I don’t want to write about my own or those of my friends and family, yet these are the very marriages that have informed my opinion and attitude towards marriage in the same way that Sandra Tsing Loh’s pessimistic outlook appears to have been influenced by her own marriage and those of a few of her friends. I did a cursory search of stats and info on the web on divorce and marriage, and the data appears to be in a muddle, depending who is twisting it which way. So I can’t really take that approach either.
So I’m going to use the following analogies to discuss the issue:
Marriage = homeownership
Living Together in a Long Term Relationship = Condo/Townhome
Dating = renting
Hookups = camping
Nothing = living at home
Marriage = homeownership
Like home ownership, marriage is not for everyone, although it is marketed as the ideal that everyone should achieve. It’s a big responsibility and takes a lot of work, but can be very rewarding if you like that sort of thing. People put a lot of work into their homes precisely because they own them. Similarly, marriage provides the stability of property ownership: people are inclined to work at it precisely because it increases in value, and the value helps them. A good marriage is a good thing. A bad marriage, like a poorly-maintained, falling apart house, is simply a drain of resources.
Living Together in a Long Term Relationship = Condo/Townhome
This works well as a middle ground between dating and marriage. You get to try out what it’s like to be married without quite all the responsibility. You don’t have to deal with the landscaping and the leaking roof.
Dating = Renting
People generally don’t put as much effort into their apartment because it is not theirs, and it is regarded as temporary. In a lot of cases, this is a good thing. It frees people up to spend more time on other endeavors that they find more valuable or interesting. The downside, especially if you're sharing an apartment with roommates, is the tragedy of the commons. Because the space doesn’t really belong to you, you’re less likely to take care of it. The upside is that if you don’t like it or it gets too run-down, or your tastes change, you can simply move on. You have more mobility, more freedom. You don’t have to wait to put the house on the market (ie—go through tedious divorce proceedings).
Hookups = camping
Being a very naïve, innocent person, I don’t know much about these. But I imagine they are like camping. Really fun and interesting for a short while, especially when you’re young, but definitely not sustainable. And you get a little dirty. It seems most would grow tired of it eventually and desire a little more stability. But for those who don't, camp on.
Nothing = living at home
And of course, there are those people who are just better off living in their mother’s basement playing video games. Nothing wrong with that.
My main point is simply that marriage is a really good thing for some people, and not so much for others. The problem is that when society, or culture, or religion, or parents, or peers, pressure people in to getting married (buying a home) as the norm, when in reality, there are many benefits to just dating (renting). People need to figure out what arrangement fits them. As home foreclosures and divorce rates show, marriage is not for everyone. But that doesn’t mean we need to get rid of it all together.
Click here for an article from The Atlantic making the case against homeownership.
Marriage is a tricky issue to discuss. I don’t want to write about my own or those of my friends and family, yet these are the very marriages that have informed my opinion and attitude towards marriage in the same way that Sandra Tsing Loh’s pessimistic outlook appears to have been influenced by her own marriage and those of a few of her friends. I did a cursory search of stats and info on the web on divorce and marriage, and the data appears to be in a muddle, depending who is twisting it which way. So I can’t really take that approach either.
So I’m going to use the following analogies to discuss the issue:
Marriage = homeownership
Living Together in a Long Term Relationship = Condo/Townhome
Dating = renting
Hookups = camping
Nothing = living at home
Marriage = homeownership
Like home ownership, marriage is not for everyone, although it is marketed as the ideal that everyone should achieve. It’s a big responsibility and takes a lot of work, but can be very rewarding if you like that sort of thing. People put a lot of work into their homes precisely because they own them. Similarly, marriage provides the stability of property ownership: people are inclined to work at it precisely because it increases in value, and the value helps them. A good marriage is a good thing. A bad marriage, like a poorly-maintained, falling apart house, is simply a drain of resources.
Living Together in a Long Term Relationship = Condo/Townhome
This works well as a middle ground between dating and marriage. You get to try out what it’s like to be married without quite all the responsibility. You don’t have to deal with the landscaping and the leaking roof.
Dating = Renting
People generally don’t put as much effort into their apartment because it is not theirs, and it is regarded as temporary. In a lot of cases, this is a good thing. It frees people up to spend more time on other endeavors that they find more valuable or interesting. The downside, especially if you're sharing an apartment with roommates, is the tragedy of the commons. Because the space doesn’t really belong to you, you’re less likely to take care of it. The upside is that if you don’t like it or it gets too run-down, or your tastes change, you can simply move on. You have more mobility, more freedom. You don’t have to wait to put the house on the market (ie—go through tedious divorce proceedings).
Hookups = camping
Being a very naïve, innocent person, I don’t know much about these. But I imagine they are like camping. Really fun and interesting for a short while, especially when you’re young, but definitely not sustainable. And you get a little dirty. It seems most would grow tired of it eventually and desire a little more stability. But for those who don't, camp on.
Nothing = living at home
And of course, there are those people who are just better off living in their mother’s basement playing video games. Nothing wrong with that.
My main point is simply that marriage is a really good thing for some people, and not so much for others. The problem is that when society, or culture, or religion, or parents, or peers, pressure people in to getting married (buying a home) as the norm, when in reality, there are many benefits to just dating (renting). People need to figure out what arrangement fits them. As home foreclosures and divorce rates show, marriage is not for everyone. But that doesn’t mean we need to get rid of it all together.
Click here for an article from The Atlantic making the case against homeownership.
24 June 2009
From the Archives: September 11, 2001
Back before I had a blog, I just typed my thoughts into a journal I titled "Is it morning or is it death?" after something I mumbled one time when I was half asleep. Here are, unedited and unabridged (except for a few names which are now represented by first initials), my entries for September 11 and September 12 of 2001:
September 11, 2001
There were four plane crashes this morning. Two into the world trade centers, one into the Pentagon, and one somewhere in Pennsylvania. The trade centers collapsed, the Pentagon doesn’t quite have 5 sides anymore. Debris is all that remains of the plane that crashed in PA.
I woke up this morning around 8:30am, at Z’s. He’d left for work already. I was listening to the news on NPR and working on my webpage. A little before 9, right at the end of Morning Edition, the guy said something about a plane crashing into one of the world trade centers. Then he said it was a perfectly clear day. By the time I thought to turn on the news on TV, thinking this might be something that video footage actually would enhance, a second plane had crashed into the second trade center. The tops of both buildings were billowing smoke. I still just felt numb and confused, nobody knew what was going on. I kept watching, not knowing what to think. Then, one of the towers collapsed. Right on the screen, in real time, I saw the building collapse. It was gut-wrenching. I imagined all those people careening to their death. I tried to call Dad, no answer. I called mom, and I choked up and cried. It was so awful. I can remember watching the challenger explode on TV with mom when I was very little, and I remember her crying and not understanding why. To me it was just another explosion on TV. Now I understand. Despite all the building explosions you see in movies, when it’s real, it’s real.
Later, I watched the second building collapse. When this happens, what good are words? I only felt things, I felt awful, I felt sad, I was horrified. All those people were just going to work, doing their job. But most of all, I thought of the fire-fighters and rescue workers who were now buried in 6 stories of ruble. I cannot recreate the feeling I felt when the buildings collapsed. And words are no help either.
Then the cameras suddenly switched to Washington where smoke was billowing out of the Pentagon. It took a couple of minutes, but finally eye-witness reports confirmed that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon. I was alone with the tragedy to feel the full weight of it. Later, when A joined me, and D came over, and Z came back from work, the tragedy was weakened, was spread out among us, we could joke about some of the camera footage. It didn’t feel real anymore. After I saw the building collapse a dozen times, from all different angles and with different commentary, what could I feel anymore? It had become like a realistic movie where you keep rewinding one part. By this point, the people were dead and faceless, it was just a collapsing building.
The reporters talk about the symbolism of the world trade centers and the Pentagon, they talk about failure of intelligence. They say we were prepared for chemical or biological warfare, nobody expected the classic plane hijacking strategy. They say we failed, we weren’t prepared. But how could we be? A country, with open skies, is not invincible. But we think we are. We delude ourselves into thinking we are. But I know we are not. The US forgot about determination, about people’s passion. They think nobody can hurt us, but they can. It is a lesson we needed to learn. But what have we learned? They will heighten airport security, they will allocate more money for defense spending. They will try really hard to make us believe we are invincible. But it’s like life, you see. You can take all the precautions, do every right thing, but one day you can just go to work and have a plane crash into your building. That is the risk of being alive. To remove that risk is to end truly being alive.
The terrorists have succeeded. They have induced terror. Downtown Columbus shut down. Gas lines are out into the street. People are scared, and acting stupid, thinking stupid things. Their precious, safe existence has been disrupted. People are afraid of planes, of anyone that is a stranger. Terrorists do not play by the rules. Attacks can come from anywhere. People are terrified. CNN boasted the caption “America Under Attack.”
They’re calling for retaliation, the euphemistic word for revenge, for blood. Because no one can attack the U.S. and get away with it. But how many times do we bomb Iraq, and it hardly makes the news? And who are we going to bomb? I secretly hope the U.S. doesn’t find out who did it, so they won’t bomb anybody. But that won’t happen. Somebody will be blamed for this. But can the bombs be smart enough to attack precisely the people responsible? No, it will hit innocent civilians, who made no decision to attack the US, but are just going to work, doing their jobs. Just like the people in the trade centers, who made no decisions to hurt the people who evidently felt the need to hurt the US. It’s a vicious cycle. Blood calls for more blood, but we all bleed the same blood.
Maybe, because I am sitting here in my safe little room, and nobody I know has just died, it is easy for me to be calm. It is easy for me to view the casualties as the result of some new natural disaster. Maybe it is just easy for me not to hate the enemy, to not call it evil, to not desire revenge. Until it happens to me, I cannot ethically judge. But I can say this: I feel no hate, no anger. Only sadness.
The people who directly caused the crashes, they are dead. But the numbers don’t add up. Not enough of “them” have died to compensate for those of “us” who have died. The country rallies together, political differences are pushed aside, we must unite against the enemy. That is the mentality anyway. But you know, I think people secretly like this sort of thing. It brings a country together, gives people something to talk about, everybody will remember right where they were when it happened. Our country has never been so patriotic as we are today. But at the heart of patriotism I see not love of one’s own country, but hatred of an enemy. It is just a separation of “us” and “them,” “good” and “bad.”
I think maybe Nietzsche would say having an enemy is good, it keeps one on one’s toes. It gives you something to strive against, someone to show you your weak points.
I do not rejoice in the terrorist attacks. I am horrified. But maybe this will show President Bush that his anti-ballistic missile defense system is ridiculous. I know it is naïve and idealist of me, but I think a better preventative measure would be to reconcile with our “enemies.”
What final words can I type about this National Tragedy? I cannot comprehend the immensity of it. All the people whose world has just crumbled…The families disintegrated in the rubble…The love torn asunder…The agony…The heartbreak…All the frantic words that cannot contain the frenzy. We have lost our invincibility, and our innocence.
September 12, 2001
It is morning and it is death. I think everybody was hoping to wake up this morning and realize the attacks were just a bad collective dream. But they are very real and full of death. Right now it is 8:58 a.m. 24 hours have passed since I first heard that a plane crashed into the World Trade Centers. The crisis is already starting to be reduced to numbers. They can tell you how many planes, how many people on the planes, the times they left, the times they crashed, and we’re all waiting in anxious fear for the death toll to emerge. They will tell us the number of casualties, the number of injuries, but the numbers cannot begin to describe the tragedy.
So far, I am impressed with our country. The politicians may call for retaliation, but the Red Cross calls for blood donations. People are flocking to the blood banks all over the U.S., willing to give their own blood to help. People are flocking to churches, synagogues, mosques, to pray for the victims. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe this unity our country feels isn’t just hatred of the enemy, maybe it is real love and concern for our fellow man. I was too cynical perhaps. We share a common fear, but we also share a common love. I remember S saying that the one good thing about wars is that they bring people together and give us a purpose—even if it’s protesting the war, like in Vietnam. Things like this test a country’s mettle. So far, we have been acting with fear, but also with dignity. I am afraid some overly patriotic psychopaths may try to harm or vandalize Muslim/Arab communities, but so far nothing like that has happened, that I know of. As to the fear, gas prices jumped sharply and gas lines are out into the street. I’m now going to Kroger to buy some newspapers, so I’ll see if there’s any food left on the shelves. People tend to panic.
I was wrong. Plenty of food, no newspapers.
It is afternoon now. More talks of retaliation. The attacks have been deemed an “act of war” by Bush. Secretary of State Colin Powell, whom I have much more faith in than Bush, has confirmed that this is being viewed as war. The weird thing is, right now it is still war against a nameless enemy, although everyone names Osama Bin Laden. The suspicions are toward Afghanistan, which is accused of harboring him. OBL himself denies that he did it, but he congratulated whoever did. I don't have an opinion on who did it, our government has too many secrets for me to really surmise anything. But I pity the people accused of doing this, all hell will break loose against them. Now they’re getting NATO involved: most countries, hold Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan, are supporting the U.S. I know to maintain our political and military might, we must retaliate. But I still wish we wouldn’t. At least not on the large scale they’re discussing.
In movies, you can tell when the scary part is coming by the music. Life imitates art. NPR has been playing scary music all today and yesterday, in the interludes between the news. The news is something else all together. It has finally become real, not a calculated performance of the day’s events and issues. Now, people interrupt each other to cut to late breaking news, people are asking more questions than they’re answering, and for some reason, genders keep getting confused. Yesterday, a news clip of the street near the disaster showed a cop yelling at people to “go fucking home.” He was saying it again and again. Now how often will that happen on TV? That was only the first time though. From then on, when the clip was shown, there was no sound. I just love it when people are caught off guard like that though. Suddenly life becomes real, and not just a performance.
Bryan Michael Jenkins: “there is no x-ray for the soul.” I just heard this quote on the radio, referring to the discussions about increased airline security. I think it sums it up: we can never be 100% safe. People have free will.
Another thing I worry about is how fair and ethical the FBI is being in the investigation. The FBI has been under a lot of criticism lately, with spies found in its ranks and a botched case against Wen Ho Li. Will they do this right? Maybe I’m just suspicious but I fear they may frame a group for this crime. Maybe they won’t go that far, but they will no doubt interrogate and intimidate innocent people. In war, there is no fair trial. The innocent are condemned right along with the guilty.
September 11, 2001
There were four plane crashes this morning. Two into the world trade centers, one into the Pentagon, and one somewhere in Pennsylvania. The trade centers collapsed, the Pentagon doesn’t quite have 5 sides anymore. Debris is all that remains of the plane that crashed in PA.
I woke up this morning around 8:30am, at Z’s. He’d left for work already. I was listening to the news on NPR and working on my webpage. A little before 9, right at the end of Morning Edition, the guy said something about a plane crashing into one of the world trade centers. Then he said it was a perfectly clear day. By the time I thought to turn on the news on TV, thinking this might be something that video footage actually would enhance, a second plane had crashed into the second trade center. The tops of both buildings were billowing smoke. I still just felt numb and confused, nobody knew what was going on. I kept watching, not knowing what to think. Then, one of the towers collapsed. Right on the screen, in real time, I saw the building collapse. It was gut-wrenching. I imagined all those people careening to their death. I tried to call Dad, no answer. I called mom, and I choked up and cried. It was so awful. I can remember watching the challenger explode on TV with mom when I was very little, and I remember her crying and not understanding why. To me it was just another explosion on TV. Now I understand. Despite all the building explosions you see in movies, when it’s real, it’s real.
Later, I watched the second building collapse. When this happens, what good are words? I only felt things, I felt awful, I felt sad, I was horrified. All those people were just going to work, doing their job. But most of all, I thought of the fire-fighters and rescue workers who were now buried in 6 stories of ruble. I cannot recreate the feeling I felt when the buildings collapsed. And words are no help either.
Then the cameras suddenly switched to Washington where smoke was billowing out of the Pentagon. It took a couple of minutes, but finally eye-witness reports confirmed that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon. I was alone with the tragedy to feel the full weight of it. Later, when A joined me, and D came over, and Z came back from work, the tragedy was weakened, was spread out among us, we could joke about some of the camera footage. It didn’t feel real anymore. After I saw the building collapse a dozen times, from all different angles and with different commentary, what could I feel anymore? It had become like a realistic movie where you keep rewinding one part. By this point, the people were dead and faceless, it was just a collapsing building.
The reporters talk about the symbolism of the world trade centers and the Pentagon, they talk about failure of intelligence. They say we were prepared for chemical or biological warfare, nobody expected the classic plane hijacking strategy. They say we failed, we weren’t prepared. But how could we be? A country, with open skies, is not invincible. But we think we are. We delude ourselves into thinking we are. But I know we are not. The US forgot about determination, about people’s passion. They think nobody can hurt us, but they can. It is a lesson we needed to learn. But what have we learned? They will heighten airport security, they will allocate more money for defense spending. They will try really hard to make us believe we are invincible. But it’s like life, you see. You can take all the precautions, do every right thing, but one day you can just go to work and have a plane crash into your building. That is the risk of being alive. To remove that risk is to end truly being alive.
The terrorists have succeeded. They have induced terror. Downtown Columbus shut down. Gas lines are out into the street. People are scared, and acting stupid, thinking stupid things. Their precious, safe existence has been disrupted. People are afraid of planes, of anyone that is a stranger. Terrorists do not play by the rules. Attacks can come from anywhere. People are terrified. CNN boasted the caption “America Under Attack.”
They’re calling for retaliation, the euphemistic word for revenge, for blood. Because no one can attack the U.S. and get away with it. But how many times do we bomb Iraq, and it hardly makes the news? And who are we going to bomb? I secretly hope the U.S. doesn’t find out who did it, so they won’t bomb anybody. But that won’t happen. Somebody will be blamed for this. But can the bombs be smart enough to attack precisely the people responsible? No, it will hit innocent civilians, who made no decision to attack the US, but are just going to work, doing their jobs. Just like the people in the trade centers, who made no decisions to hurt the people who evidently felt the need to hurt the US. It’s a vicious cycle. Blood calls for more blood, but we all bleed the same blood.
Maybe, because I am sitting here in my safe little room, and nobody I know has just died, it is easy for me to be calm. It is easy for me to view the casualties as the result of some new natural disaster. Maybe it is just easy for me not to hate the enemy, to not call it evil, to not desire revenge. Until it happens to me, I cannot ethically judge. But I can say this: I feel no hate, no anger. Only sadness.
The people who directly caused the crashes, they are dead. But the numbers don’t add up. Not enough of “them” have died to compensate for those of “us” who have died. The country rallies together, political differences are pushed aside, we must unite against the enemy. That is the mentality anyway. But you know, I think people secretly like this sort of thing. It brings a country together, gives people something to talk about, everybody will remember right where they were when it happened. Our country has never been so patriotic as we are today. But at the heart of patriotism I see not love of one’s own country, but hatred of an enemy. It is just a separation of “us” and “them,” “good” and “bad.”
I think maybe Nietzsche would say having an enemy is good, it keeps one on one’s toes. It gives you something to strive against, someone to show you your weak points.
I do not rejoice in the terrorist attacks. I am horrified. But maybe this will show President Bush that his anti-ballistic missile defense system is ridiculous. I know it is naïve and idealist of me, but I think a better preventative measure would be to reconcile with our “enemies.”
What final words can I type about this National Tragedy? I cannot comprehend the immensity of it. All the people whose world has just crumbled…The families disintegrated in the rubble…The love torn asunder…The agony…The heartbreak…All the frantic words that cannot contain the frenzy. We have lost our invincibility, and our innocence.
September 12, 2001
It is morning and it is death. I think everybody was hoping to wake up this morning and realize the attacks were just a bad collective dream. But they are very real and full of death. Right now it is 8:58 a.m. 24 hours have passed since I first heard that a plane crashed into the World Trade Centers. The crisis is already starting to be reduced to numbers. They can tell you how many planes, how many people on the planes, the times they left, the times they crashed, and we’re all waiting in anxious fear for the death toll to emerge. They will tell us the number of casualties, the number of injuries, but the numbers cannot begin to describe the tragedy.
So far, I am impressed with our country. The politicians may call for retaliation, but the Red Cross calls for blood donations. People are flocking to the blood banks all over the U.S., willing to give their own blood to help. People are flocking to churches, synagogues, mosques, to pray for the victims. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe this unity our country feels isn’t just hatred of the enemy, maybe it is real love and concern for our fellow man. I was too cynical perhaps. We share a common fear, but we also share a common love. I remember S saying that the one good thing about wars is that they bring people together and give us a purpose—even if it’s protesting the war, like in Vietnam. Things like this test a country’s mettle. So far, we have been acting with fear, but also with dignity. I am afraid some overly patriotic psychopaths may try to harm or vandalize Muslim/Arab communities, but so far nothing like that has happened, that I know of. As to the fear, gas prices jumped sharply and gas lines are out into the street. I’m now going to Kroger to buy some newspapers, so I’ll see if there’s any food left on the shelves. People tend to panic.
I was wrong. Plenty of food, no newspapers.
It is afternoon now. More talks of retaliation. The attacks have been deemed an “act of war” by Bush. Secretary of State Colin Powell, whom I have much more faith in than Bush, has confirmed that this is being viewed as war. The weird thing is, right now it is still war against a nameless enemy, although everyone names Osama Bin Laden. The suspicions are toward Afghanistan, which is accused of harboring him. OBL himself denies that he did it, but he congratulated whoever did. I don't have an opinion on who did it, our government has too many secrets for me to really surmise anything. But I pity the people accused of doing this, all hell will break loose against them. Now they’re getting NATO involved: most countries, hold Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan, are supporting the U.S. I know to maintain our political and military might, we must retaliate. But I still wish we wouldn’t. At least not on the large scale they’re discussing.
In movies, you can tell when the scary part is coming by the music. Life imitates art. NPR has been playing scary music all today and yesterday, in the interludes between the news. The news is something else all together. It has finally become real, not a calculated performance of the day’s events and issues. Now, people interrupt each other to cut to late breaking news, people are asking more questions than they’re answering, and for some reason, genders keep getting confused. Yesterday, a news clip of the street near the disaster showed a cop yelling at people to “go fucking home.” He was saying it again and again. Now how often will that happen on TV? That was only the first time though. From then on, when the clip was shown, there was no sound. I just love it when people are caught off guard like that though. Suddenly life becomes real, and not just a performance.
Bryan Michael Jenkins: “there is no x-ray for the soul.” I just heard this quote on the radio, referring to the discussions about increased airline security. I think it sums it up: we can never be 100% safe. People have free will.
Another thing I worry about is how fair and ethical the FBI is being in the investigation. The FBI has been under a lot of criticism lately, with spies found in its ranks and a botched case against Wen Ho Li. Will they do this right? Maybe I’m just suspicious but I fear they may frame a group for this crime. Maybe they won’t go that far, but they will no doubt interrogate and intimidate innocent people. In war, there is no fair trial. The innocent are condemned right along with the guilty.
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