We have a pair of flickers & a pair of robins nesting in our woods. I’ve been spending a lot of time watching them fly around. And pulling weeds. (I’ve been pulling weeds, not the birds.) And conducting my online course, Understanding Vietnam, which takes time & concentration I usually spend pecking out my observations in this space — It turns out I do have a finite capacity for online activities. Who knew?
Monthly Archives: June 2007
Palestine
When I first began blogging six years ago, I wrote a lot about the Palestinians & the Israeli occupation. I got into a lot of blog fights & realized that this was a case in which rational argument was just not going to make any headway against fear & bigotry. I’ll stipulate that Fatah was / is corrupt & that Hamas is a terrorist group as well as a de facto welfare organization. (That’s a brilliant, if morally defunct, political combination.) So stipulated, but here is my question in response to news this week that both the Bush administration & the Olmert administration have now released millions of dollars to the Palestinian Authority: Why did you wait? Why did you pursue a policy guaranteed to radicalize a generation of Palestinians? I’ll propose an answer: because both governments are run by people whose imaginations have become so calcified, so narrowed, so sclerotic, that they simply do not understand the consequences of their actions. It is as if they were playing some bible-based video game. The failure of imagination at the most basic level is simply staggering; one can only understand such men — mostly men — by supposing them to have become their own caricatures. It is a failure, of course, that runs through the politics of the United States, Israel & some parts of Western Europe. Is this, then, the Enlightenment, collapsing upon itself to become a white dwarf? A political-gravitational sink hole? That’s what it looks like from where I sit out here in the country by a river flowing out of the mountains. But then, my position — my location — is not on the political radar. Which is to say, I do not exist. Like the Palestinians. Except that my suffering is intellectual & ethical, theirs a matter of life & death.
Note
There is a thunderstorm approaching from the southwest — common this time of year — & just now as I was taking the dogs down to the end of the road for a quick “out” before bed & before the storm, I noticed that there were a whole lot of fireflies about. The kind that have a greenish light & blink quickly, not the slower blinking yellowish ones.
On Abandoning Novels
As a reader, I mean. I haven’t every attempted to write one, a poem of three or four pages being about as long as I have been able to extend a literary structure. But after years of not reading novels very often, I have been on something of a roll lately. I had looked forward this spring to two in particular, Richard Powers’ Operation Wandering Soul & Phillip Roth’s The Great American Novel. I gave up on each for similar reasons: they’re full of set piece comedy & love-me-I’m-an-asshole characters. To put it in something closer to critical terms, neither novel was able to establish a bond of sympathy for either its characters or its situation. Powers lost me with the misanthropy of his central character (no doubt to be redeemed in the last hundred pages) & his overly clever writing. Roth lost me with the whorehouse scene where guys go to be bathed, dressed in diapers & treated like an infant. It was probably funny, or at least “daring,” in the sixties, but it just seemed dumb. I pushed on a bit, to a scene where a last-place major league baseball team — it’s a baseball novel — plays an exhibition against the inmates of an insane asylum. Both narratives traffic in emotional clichés & literary exhibitionism.
There Is No Truth about Vietnam
Only stories. Some stories are better than others, I’d argue. But on what grounds do you judge the stories? The historical events & ideological fixations that led to the American War in Vietnam are available in thousands of books & hundreds of hours of film & video tape, but the best we can do is choose a story that fits the facts as we understand them. My two criteria for evaluating stories are: 1) How does the story track with the available (though always incomplete) evidence? 2) How does the story stand up to what I would call the moral imagination? The function of literature is to stimulate the moral imagination. What we call literature at any particular time also shifts around. (I’m inclined to want to like graphic novels, but haven’t found many that really work as literature in the sense that I’m using the word.) As stories go, though, Jason Aaron’s & Cameron Stewart’s graphic novel The Other Side breaks open the hardening scabs of myth & requires the reader to take a new look at an old story. The story of the American War in Vietnam. I recommend it.
Note: Unfortunately, the phrase moral imagination has a history I was unaware of when I wrote the paragraph above. I may have had a dim undergraduate memory of Edmund Burke’s use of the term, but I didn’t know that arch-conservative Russell Kirk had taken the phrase and turned it into a weapon to use against liberalism & that the American Right has made a fetish of the phrase. In fact, what I was after in my usage was the idea that one human being has the capacity to form an image of the suffering of another. Or the joy. But literature is mostly about suffering.