Protesting, Week 11 – or the Delusions of Thinking You Know Where You Are
Another week. The Saturday protest always seems to close out the prior week, but I’m writing this today, on Monday, a holiday, Memorial Day. Am I wrong, or does it seem that there are more exhortations to remember wars and soldiers, and less on wearing white sandals and summertime? Microsoft News offered dos and don’ts for honoring the day. The NYT did give a summer reading list, but the books that were described seemed so obviously a lobbied-for product placement, that whatever curiosity one might have felt was displaced by a sense of bludgeoning by a being-told-what-to-do sales pitch. But – all the mentions of war, soldiers – appropriate for the day, yes, but – maybe somewhat surprising? Or are we being readied for war, slowly? Frogs in the pot, some of the political commentators say, when speaking of this county’s slide towards authoritarianism. You’d be foolish to think there was no fire under the pot we are in. But if we are alternately heated and cooled, shocked and reassured, distracted, guided – the electricity created by so many different paths is enough warmth and light to make one wonder why we are being strung and danced like the old marionette puppet I used to have. They are expecting our faces to be equally wooden and well-behaved. But if I wake up in the middle of the night, and find I’ve been coerced into a certain position, or that my sense of well-being has been replaced by intermittent fevers…
I’m a woman, so naturally I’m used to being gaslit. Anyone who works with mediocre men who bow and scrape before those on the higher levels, while asking you to put in a work order to get the sink in the men’s toilet fixed, because they are too busy, may know the feeling. The feeling you get when you gently correct their errors, and are told that they knew that, and were referring to something completely different. The stories of not being listened to, or believed. A world of Cassandras, you might think. Why does this matter? Because we all have been trained to have a sense of our place in the world, in society. Different countries and areas do have variations, but generally those who are believed are treated to a view of the world that is quite different from those who are rarely believed or listened to. Were you taught that respect was earned? I was. I suppose we are lucky, in one sense, to be living in a time where it is made crystal clear that respect can be purchased. Or that a story can be repeated, and an image widely disseminated, to enough people without the ability, or it must be said, the desire, to question what they are told, and suddenly it is true. And you are the one who is wrong. The one who is not respected. The one who isn’t seeing the complete picture.
What has this got to do with protesting, or Memorial Day? Firstly, think of the discordances we are treated to. A man who disparaged veterans is the commander in chief – lower case intentional. A man, or a pretense of one, who never served because he bought his way out, who didn’t go to a memorial service for veterans in Europe because it was raining – remember that? – who used a war cemetery illegally for a campaign video. Who claims to want to stop war, but has been stringing people along with leadership by tweets, which the press jump upon and claim they mean something. They mean time wasting. Now he gives the graduation speech at the foremost military academy in the USA, West Point. He rambles about businessmen and trophy wives and those who want to believe, say that he was talking about “momentum,” the New York Times, never one to miss a chance to sane wash, said that he was “stressing a new era.” He did not shake the hands of graduates, as did Biden the year prior, and is usually the tradition. But did you forget his dislike of human touch? He told the graduates not about their mission, or their hopes, but that their job was to “bring democracy at gun point.” That they no longer had to be burdened with drag shows. We arrest people that throw paint at great works of art in order to bring attention to climate change and irrevocable damage to the planet. We do nothing to a man and his group – because he is, as someone said, just the delivery agent, not the source, of all this disruption, who has already destroyed the dignity of the office, the faith of those who thought this country meant something, and perhaps sadly, most important of all, disrupted financial solidity and trust in a way that will affect most of us, as most of us aren’t billionaires, criminals, or grifters. To what extent our daily lives will be disrupted is as yet uncertain.
Where are we on the temperature scale? There is a quote – “In economics, things take longer to happen than you think they will, and they happen faster than you thought they could.” – Rudiger Dornbusch, Ph.D. Economics from the University of Chicago. Paul Krugman used this quote in one of his posts recently.
You don’t have to be a weatherman, or an economist to tell which way the wind is blowing. Artists always seem to be able to take the temperature of a time:
Ernest Hemingway’s wrote in the 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises:
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
That book also has:
Going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.
and
It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.
Clearly, I need to re-read it. I will take slight issue with the moving to another country not making a difference. In my experience, it does make a difference. But you’re still facing yourself at 4am no matter where you are.
Like Cassandra, the 4am thoughts don’t receive a warm welcome. Do you accept the warm lies over the cold truth? Reach for coffee and look at the day, waiting for light and caffeine to chase away the demons?
Most people have had experience of military service or wars or both. Americans don’t have the same sense of WW2, as it was not, aside from Pearl Harbor, fought here. I had a number of ancestors, distant and close, who fought in wars. The nearest relations were my uncle and my grandfather in WW2. A Marine and a Lieutenant Colonel.
But I listened to people who had more direct experience. Stories shared with me, that I was privileged to hear, included a grandmother who lost all her childhood friends in the East End of London in one bomb blast that took out the other side of her street. She described this to me while making chip butties for me and her grandson, not more than a couple of miles from where this childhood tragedy had happened. In Paris, a man showed me his tattoo from the concentration camp he survived, but said little else. I learned from his son that he had been deported from Hungary, and somehow he and his sister had survived – but no one else. I heard about a man who fled Germany with his inventions and abilities, who tried to get people to leave with him, before it was too late. That story was told to me by his son. Both parents refugees, in a sense. How do you rebuild when you have been forced to leave everything behind?
I think about all these stories. These lives. Their direct impact upon their descendants, the choices they made, the lucky escapes that still left lasting scars. What I learned. How a small tattoo can be a permanent photographic memory. How you can admire someone you never met. How you revise the history you were taught in the face of the truth.
We fought WW1 – the war to end all wars. WW2 – to remove the fascist dictator and end his crimes against humanity.
And now we are here. Memorial Day may be a time to remember ideals, and not sell them for bitcoins.
This poem was taught in UK schools. Does the USA teach this?
Dolce Et Decorum Est – Wilfred Owen
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
