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Aug. 29th, 2005
Mark Green articulates part of why I'm all obsessed with consuming news and attempting to do something with all the information:
"There will come a time – whether it’s in five months or 5 years or 50 years, I don’t know – when we’ll all have to answer the question of what we were doing when the Bush-Robertson-Coulter crowd tried to ruin [the world], just as earlier generations had to explain the mass hysteria of the Salem Witch Trials or McCarthyism."
Funny, last night I was just thinking about how Arthur Miller would write The Crucible now, what the allegorical outside story would be. Or rather, how would I write the play now and what I would use.
See, it all started as research for my novel. Which has only been partially successful since I wrote this whole chapter with my soldier and made up a scenario that wouldn't happen at all, as I just learned least night while reading Rick Atkinson's In the Company of Soldiers which definitely is a book to sift through -- he likes to editorialize and it's obvious he has some biases, but it's not nearly as bad as I feared. So far. I'm only on page 75 and there are 225 more to go. But as far as giving me some raw facts and details to crib off of, it's not bad.
I have a strange relationship to the U.S. Army, as a child of a retired lieutenant colonel. My father isn't really a typical Army man -- he never smokes or drinks or cusses and he doesn't seem to have any affinity for guns in any fashion -- but he's also probably not going to any "Veterans against the war" rallys either. I do still benefit from the armed forces in an indirect way, as my insurance and one of my credit cards is with USAA. The Army hospital (and my mom) taught me all about socialized medicine and how well it works. I didn't grow up loving or hating the military, it was just my dad's job, a simple fact of life, no different from other facts like, this is the street where we live, this is the grocery store where we shop. The more I think about it, the more I feel like an anomaly, because most people I know so closely connected to military life have much stronger associations or dissociations and I can't seem to find many of them. I was never told I could or should consider joining up. In fact, I'm pretty sure my dad made sure he saved lots of money to help me pay for college to eliminate me having to consider it the way he did -- he couldn't have afforded college without it. Of course, by the time I would have joined up, the G.I. bill had already been cut anyway, so there would have been no money for college, but I think my parents planning preceded President Reagan's actions. But I was never told I shouldn't go either. Then again, I don't think I ever expressed interest in it. I just keep thinking lately though, what is this thing called military force and it's place?
I think in some ways, why am I going back and rethinking my philosophy of ethics and society and what I believe to be the moral obligations of such, is because I want to make sure my tendency to pacifism and anti-violent conflict isn't just a lazy statement because it's easy for Americans now to believe those things because we aren't being hosed by cops, thrown in mass graves, jailed en masse, or occupied by imperialists: we're living in nice air conditioned big apartments and driving around in big cars and drinking expensive burnt coffees and we wrestle with our tiny little microcosm issues like 'what will I plant in my garden' and 'what art will I produce' and 'what jeans will I wear tonight to go out and get drunk'.....ok, wait, I took a wrong turn and I'm careening towards self-righteousness so let me backtrack and stay on point because I'm afraid to say what I'm really thinking at the risk of it sounding utterly ridiculous. If it came to my door, what is worth dying for? Or killing for? Why do we have these ideas of honor attached so heavily too dying, maybe more so than living? Am I underestimating or overestimating its importance?
I feel like this is some sort of downer. I'm actually in a pretty good mood despite my existential wrestling and metaphysical depression. My husband recommeded I read The Hero With a Thousand Faces, so now I'm just waiting for it to arrive. In the meantime, I just keep writing in my journals.
"There will come a time – whether it’s in five months or 5 years or 50 years, I don’t know – when we’ll all have to answer the question of what we were doing when the Bush-Robertson-Coulter crowd tried to ruin [the world], just as earlier generations had to explain the mass hysteria of the Salem Witch Trials or McCarthyism."
Funny, last night I was just thinking about how Arthur Miller would write The Crucible now, what the allegorical outside story would be. Or rather, how would I write the play now and what I would use.
See, it all started as research for my novel. Which has only been partially successful since I wrote this whole chapter with my soldier and made up a scenario that wouldn't happen at all, as I just learned least night while reading Rick Atkinson's In the Company of Soldiers which definitely is a book to sift through -- he likes to editorialize and it's obvious he has some biases, but it's not nearly as bad as I feared. So far. I'm only on page 75 and there are 225 more to go. But as far as giving me some raw facts and details to crib off of, it's not bad.
I have a strange relationship to the U.S. Army, as a child of a retired lieutenant colonel. My father isn't really a typical Army man -- he never smokes or drinks or cusses and he doesn't seem to have any affinity for guns in any fashion -- but he's also probably not going to any "Veterans against the war" rallys either. I do still benefit from the armed forces in an indirect way, as my insurance and one of my credit cards is with USAA. The Army hospital (and my mom) taught me all about socialized medicine and how well it works. I didn't grow up loving or hating the military, it was just my dad's job, a simple fact of life, no different from other facts like, this is the street where we live, this is the grocery store where we shop. The more I think about it, the more I feel like an anomaly, because most people I know so closely connected to military life have much stronger associations or dissociations and I can't seem to find many of them. I was never told I could or should consider joining up. In fact, I'm pretty sure my dad made sure he saved lots of money to help me pay for college to eliminate me having to consider it the way he did -- he couldn't have afforded college without it. Of course, by the time I would have joined up, the G.I. bill had already been cut anyway, so there would have been no money for college, but I think my parents planning preceded President Reagan's actions. But I was never told I shouldn't go either. Then again, I don't think I ever expressed interest in it. I just keep thinking lately though, what is this thing called military force and it's place?
I think in some ways, why am I going back and rethinking my philosophy of ethics and society and what I believe to be the moral obligations of such, is because I want to make sure my tendency to pacifism and anti-violent conflict isn't just a lazy statement because it's easy for Americans now to believe those things because we aren't being hosed by cops, thrown in mass graves, jailed en masse, or occupied by imperialists: we're living in nice air conditioned big apartments and driving around in big cars and drinking expensive burnt coffees and we wrestle with our tiny little microcosm issues like 'what will I plant in my garden' and 'what art will I produce' and 'what jeans will I wear tonight to go out and get drunk'.....ok, wait, I took a wrong turn and I'm careening towards self-righteousness so let me backtrack and stay on point because I'm afraid to say what I'm really thinking at the risk of it sounding utterly ridiculous. If it came to my door, what is worth dying for? Or killing for? Why do we have these ideas of honor attached so heavily too dying, maybe more so than living? Am I underestimating or overestimating its importance?
I feel like this is some sort of downer. I'm actually in a pretty good mood despite my existential wrestling and metaphysical depression. My husband recommeded I read The Hero With a Thousand Faces, so now I'm just waiting for it to arrive. In the meantime, I just keep writing in my journals.