Life seems to go on
Jul. 24th, 2005 10:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pameladeanYesterday I was going to post a cute bit about the weather, which has been fairly freakish for non-tornadic values of freakish. The news from Egypt pretty much put paid to that, for the moment. The ruminations that follow are not particularly profound or original; they are notes to myself, and you need not choose to overhear them if you have had a surfeit of such things already.
Life does go on. If one is grown up, or has moments of being so, one knows that one day one will be the person without whom it is going on. One knows too, at least intermittently, the truth that anything that can happen can happen to you. (People who wish to point out querulously that their chromosomal makeup or subsequent physical alterations make it impossible for them to die in childbirth, or that chronological considerations prevent them from discovering oxygen or a new species of jellyfish, will kindly hush for the moment.) I've known this for a long time; every once in a while I sit down and look it in its rueful face and learn the fact all over again.
The unsettling thing about the past five years has been the degree to which sitting down, in my privilege and insulation, and looking at the alarming face of that fact, has become unnecessary. I realized while thinking of the people killed in Egypt, the tourists walking about because it was so hot, the workers having their coffee, people sleeping and people talking and people working, that the reason this ritual is no longer necessary is that I feel consigned, by the entire apparatus of the people in power in this country, to the other side, to the side to whom such disasters just naturally happen. The Bush Administration is exceedingly good at declaring anybody who annoys them at all, anybody who is an example counter to their beliefs, anybody they don't want to think about, to be Not One Of Us. I don't personally annoy them; there is no real sense in which they know that I exist. But they have already consigned people like me to the pits of hell. They haven't come along to toss me in yet, but I have no confidence at all that, should they decide in their freakish, for extremely tornadic values thereof, paranoia and self-justification that it's time, they will do it. I'm not even talking about my political opinions or my contributions to organizations like the ACLU, which this administration is investigating with finite resources that they might as well have used up in making paper dolls and then burning them. I'm just talking about being a woman and not defining that fact in the mingy miserable cramped-up second-class way that they do.
It's always hard to tell whether Bush is saying what he seems to be saying or is just demonstrating general linguistic ineptitude. But he talked about the bombs in London as if the deaths they caused were not significant except to bolster his idiot assertions about how well his plans are working; those deaths were there, not here, so all was well. I don't know what he has said about Egypt, if anything, but I assume it's more of the same. It seems to me that, as far as he's concerned, a huge swathe of people here are, to all intents and purposes, really there. Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame are there, and everybody mistakenly or cravenly swept up in Iraq and put into Abu Ghraib or Guantanomo Bay is doubly there, there squared, twice removed from anyplace that matters. Gay people are there, and non-Christians, by another mingy miserable cramped-up definition of Christian. Most urban populations are there, but especially the population of New York City. Scientists who tell the truth are there; so are poor people and non-white people and anybody who has ever been injured by a doctor or a corporation. Schoolchildren are there, and people struggling along on the minimum wage, and women grappling with unwanted pregnancy, and people without health insurance. So, weirdly enough, are the actual troops actually fighting his idiot war. His idea of them is here, an idea that includes physical invulnerability and a kind of iron robotic tendency to go on as if they were life. It must be that, because as soon as anybody is injured or killed or even indignant, that person is consigned to there and is no longer worthy of actual support, though words are still offered. You can't armor a vehicle with words, even if you used the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, but that's what there is.
This is why I write fiction, and not opinion pieces or essays.
Those people in Egypt are still dead.
P.
Life does go on. If one is grown up, or has moments of being so, one knows that one day one will be the person without whom it is going on. One knows too, at least intermittently, the truth that anything that can happen can happen to you. (People who wish to point out querulously that their chromosomal makeup or subsequent physical alterations make it impossible for them to die in childbirth, or that chronological considerations prevent them from discovering oxygen or a new species of jellyfish, will kindly hush for the moment.) I've known this for a long time; every once in a while I sit down and look it in its rueful face and learn the fact all over again.
The unsettling thing about the past five years has been the degree to which sitting down, in my privilege and insulation, and looking at the alarming face of that fact, has become unnecessary. I realized while thinking of the people killed in Egypt, the tourists walking about because it was so hot, the workers having their coffee, people sleeping and people talking and people working, that the reason this ritual is no longer necessary is that I feel consigned, by the entire apparatus of the people in power in this country, to the other side, to the side to whom such disasters just naturally happen. The Bush Administration is exceedingly good at declaring anybody who annoys them at all, anybody who is an example counter to their beliefs, anybody they don't want to think about, to be Not One Of Us. I don't personally annoy them; there is no real sense in which they know that I exist. But they have already consigned people like me to the pits of hell. They haven't come along to toss me in yet, but I have no confidence at all that, should they decide in their freakish, for extremely tornadic values thereof, paranoia and self-justification that it's time, they will do it. I'm not even talking about my political opinions or my contributions to organizations like the ACLU, which this administration is investigating with finite resources that they might as well have used up in making paper dolls and then burning them. I'm just talking about being a woman and not defining that fact in the mingy miserable cramped-up second-class way that they do.
It's always hard to tell whether Bush is saying what he seems to be saying or is just demonstrating general linguistic ineptitude. But he talked about the bombs in London as if the deaths they caused were not significant except to bolster his idiot assertions about how well his plans are working; those deaths were there, not here, so all was well. I don't know what he has said about Egypt, if anything, but I assume it's more of the same. It seems to me that, as far as he's concerned, a huge swathe of people here are, to all intents and purposes, really there. Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame are there, and everybody mistakenly or cravenly swept up in Iraq and put into Abu Ghraib or Guantanomo Bay is doubly there, there squared, twice removed from anyplace that matters. Gay people are there, and non-Christians, by another mingy miserable cramped-up definition of Christian. Most urban populations are there, but especially the population of New York City. Scientists who tell the truth are there; so are poor people and non-white people and anybody who has ever been injured by a doctor or a corporation. Schoolchildren are there, and people struggling along on the minimum wage, and women grappling with unwanted pregnancy, and people without health insurance. So, weirdly enough, are the actual troops actually fighting his idiot war. His idea of them is here, an idea that includes physical invulnerability and a kind of iron robotic tendency to go on as if they were life. It must be that, because as soon as anybody is injured or killed or even indignant, that person is consigned to there and is no longer worthy of actual support, though words are still offered. You can't armor a vehicle with words, even if you used the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, but that's what there is.
This is why I write fiction, and not opinion pieces or essays.
Those people in Egypt are still dead.
P.
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no subject
Date: 2005-07-25 03:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-25 03:47 am (UTC)you've pinpointed exactly something that's been nagging at me vaguely but which i've been unable to formulate. his us-and-them-ing really does come down to: "They" are anyone and/or any group who espouse something Other than his rhetoric. which itself is vague and constantly redefined to suit his purposes.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-25 05:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-25 06:46 am (UTC)But you know, I believe he's sincere. He's just dumb enough that he thinks he's going to be the guy to take over the world with democracy and Christianize the globe and all that jazz, and his handlers let him think that so they can accomplish their own nutty agendas. O'course, had anyone actually READ the Bible that they are always misquoting or taking out of context, they would KNOW that this is never going to happen. What Bush and Co. are doing looks far more to me like what happens to bring on the Apocalypse as described in the Revelation of St. John the Divine. I can't see how they can't see that, but maybe they just don't get it. That would be my guess. Or do they just PRETEND to believe? Or are they really this stooopid (how could anybody BE that dumb)?
On the other hand, who can say what our interpretation of events should be? I'm just sayin' that even in the Bible, the Lord says that there will be people who believe they are big-time Mr. Christian, and when they GET to the final judgment, it's going to be a vote-off the island, as in, "I never knew you." I really do wish that the people who cloak themselves in all this Christianity or morality or what-have-you would wake up and see what hypocrites they're being. But that ain't gonna happen. I mean . . . what kind of fool doesn't know the tenets of their own religion? I would bet that if you read the Koran, you would not find any passages that you could credibly say really tell you to go out and kill everybody else as infidels, blow up stuff, and so forth. They have got to be taking it out of context and/or just making stuff up, as it just makes no sense for a Creator to tell you to go out and destroy and hate. A lot of these people who say they're so religious can't possibly be religious, as that would entail a lot of meditation and thinking and reverie and quiet thought sort of stuff, and they don't seem to even think at all. It's really frustrating and must be really embarrassing for God/the Universe/Whoever you believe in . . . it's a wonder, really, that anybody can develop all that hate and then say it's really LOVE.
It's sad, 'cause anything that happens, they just use it for their purposes. They just twist whatever to make themselves look good. "See, we told you things would get blown up!" (sigh) The end justifies the means. It is not at all a "religious" way of thinking, IMHO.
Hang in there.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-25 07:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-26 03:41 pm (UTC)http://www.knowledgeofjesus.org/letters/1999/April_1999.html
Koran and jihad
Date: 2005-07-25 07:53 pm (UTC)Which means that an unscrupulous interpreter-of-scripture and leader-of-men could rephrase just about any conflict in terms of 'defense of religion,' and if one believed him one would have the idea one could become a martyr doing just about anything homicidal you care to name.
Which doesn't mean they're right. It's just why you get less Christian extroverted-suicide martyrdoms.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-26 01:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-26 02:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-25 11:30 am (UTC)I've reached the age where the terrorist most likely to get me is not a suicide bomber or the Executive Branch Davidians but my own body.
Excellent essay. I'm going to point to it.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-25 03:12 pm (UTC)Well said.
Date: 2005-07-25 12:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-25 01:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-25 01:27 pm (UTC)It seems that countries/civilizations can't help but make the same stupid mistakes over and over again.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-25 03:58 pm (UTC)Cindy
no subject
Date: 2005-07-25 05:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-25 07:08 pm (UTC)The advantage of writing fiction is that your writing can change the world. It's the downside of opinion pieces and essays-- they seem quite lacking in the ability to change it.