A Pledge of Compatriots

The writers of the Declaration of Independence closed their document with a pledge:

And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor. 

Nice.  It seems comfortably fluffy because of our familiarity with it.  In reality, it carries an extreme weight.  To decide to oppose your king by force, to declare that he has no authority over you or your land -- that's treason (in a royalist's perspective).  So when they say, "pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor," they mean it literally: if the colonists had not succeeded in their endeavor for independence, they would have all been killed--those who signed the document (with John Hancock placing his signature in very large script to be prominent -- a message to the King).
 

If they had failed to secure liberty from the king, they would literally have forfeited every last thing they possessed; their families would have suffered in destitute circumstances.  None of them would have retained a shred of honor for their cause as they all would have been made examples of -- the signatories at least being killed ignobly.  (And just why is it that the concept of "honor" doesn't seem to weigh very much in the collective American mind these days?)

John Hancock's Huge Signature: "In Your Face, Georgie Boy!"

During the American Revolution, one of my ancestors, Capt. Fredrick Cramer, from New Jersey, fought along side George Washington.  The story goes that during one battle Washington's horse was shot out from under him.  As all officers rode white horses -- an honor and a duty as your men could see you clearly as you led them in battle (and while the horse was also making you an easy target) -- Cramer handed his white horse to Washington.

Another ancestor, a Richards from North Carolina, ran into the woods with his son as the British invaded his village and tried to rid the place of patriots.  The document indicates Richards "was murdered and his wife killed" for their support of independence.  I'm not sure there's a great difference between "murdered" and "killed" -- "dead" seeming pretty much the same for one as for the other.

It's a serious undertaking to oppose a king.  That is just what the "protesters" and "rebels" in any country have gambled: their actual lives, and fortunes, and honors in order to be free of despots and dictators, manipulators of the laws and industrial-political connivers.  They, too, risk literally everything, and many, like my ancestors, have paid with their lives for freedom.

There are ironies inherent in this independence we have: we still pay taxes on tea and windows.  Imagine that.  And who doesn't think that tax dollars (billions) are wasted every day in Washington?  Even given the inconsistencies and ironies, the freedoms to be had in the US stand apart from those in other places throughout the rest of the world.  Simply put, freedoms are immense in the U.S. -- absolutely immense when we think about the histories of many other countries.

Still...I've come to think that Americans' right to pursue happiness is often taken well beyond reasonable, equitable, or beneficial.  Does that "right" seem today to mean solely, "I can do whatever I damned well please," but fails to include my responsibility for how my actions impact the welfare of others?  So it seems to many Americans I meet here and abroad.

The Greeks (whose ideas of democracy largely became our own) saw such a person as an idiot.  Idiot is a word we get from the Greek, ἴδιος -- someone who is a private person, concerned only with their own affairs and pursuits without consideration for how their deeds affect the good of the city-state, the good of all the people, the πολλοὶ -- the very people around them who share the same community with its rights and responsibilities.  These are people with whom you have a social contract to abide by the same laws for the good of all, even at the expense of limiting some of your individual, private freedoms.  Read your Hume and Locke, if not also your Plato.  

In this context, idiocy means, say (on a large scale), collusion between crooked politicians, big-business magnates, or a collection of Bernard Madoffs (am I being redundant here?) who ferret away their own special-interest packets while not working for the public's or their constituents' best interests -- who work against the rights of all within their society.  Lobby-ism.  "Corporations are people, too."  Not.  And when that idea undermines the Constitution, the people's rights, and laws that were written for and protect the individual, not a corporation, then it all comes at the public's expense and the demise of their rights and freedoms.

On a smaller scale, idiocy means the self-serving individual who stands in the middle of the aisle at the grocery store, blocking the way, oblivious to others in the aisle, or the person who rides sloowwwly down the interstate in the passing (left) lane...blocking traffic.  Idiots.

Watch the police (from the Greek, polis, city) move one of these idiots over:

The writers of the Declaration knew this word, ἴδιος (Jefferson and others knew Greek and had read their Plato...).  We were never meant to be so free as to climb over others or impede others' freedoms while pursuing our own.  The writers saw it as Freedom with Responsibility for others.  (Is it just me, or is it contradictory to this sense of responsibility that "Capitalism" has come to mean getting ahead -- and doing so in predatory fashion -- at the expense of others?).  But responsibility: that's a large part of the Greek way -- um, the ancient Greek way.  I have no idea how this all applies to Greece's current financial situation; it will take the European nations a while -- and require much sacrifice -- to pay Greece's national tab, if they must.

But the "pledge" in the Declaration, that is a pact made among friends, among compatriots -- I have friends of over 30 years now, friends I can lean on, who know my worst and best, and of whom I know the same, and we don't throw these important connections away.  I like to think that friendship is based on not only what the friends share in common, but on a sacrifice to support each other in both freedom from things we do not desire and freedom to pursue things we do desire.  Isn't that called "happiness"?  And it's mutual.  It involves respect for an individual's sovereign independence as well as respect for our mutual good.

Friendship is a democracy, then, enabling individuals to pursue their own and others' best interests. Friends "mutually pledge to each other our lives...," as the Declaration says.  If that breaks down, notice how friendship ends -- or should end, by common opinion.  So I see it.  And that's what happened in the 1700s between King Georgie's England and the colonies: an end of friendship.

This 4th of July, I celebrate not only the "friendship" of my ancestors who sacrificed much for what I now enjoy, celebrate not only our past and current military personnel and friends like Corpsman Vinny C., "General" Ruxlow, Maj. Hurt, and CW2 Shawn, "Majormajor" Tom, Purple Heart "Owie" Brekke, and many others who have personally sacrificed to retain freedom for us, but I also celebrate well-loved friends who have shared freedom and mutual good with me over many decades.

What a very rich place this land is -- rich no less in friendship.  It was personally costly to create, is personally costly to retain, and well worth sacrificing for, I think.  And it's always a sight nicer without idiocy.

Optimism, Pessimism, and Realism

Thomas Hardy called himself a meliorist (someone who believes everything is getting better) although many people saw him as anything but that -- he wasn't even a realist but a pessimist.  One of his poems, for instance -- "The Darkling Thrush" -- is about the old century waning as a thrush sings at the dusk of its last evening -- Dec. 31st 1899.  Hardy hears the bird sing of

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

And I was unaware.

No hope for a brand new century?  Grim.  Hardy's pessimism may echo from such poems as Shakespeare's more optimistic lines in Sonnet 29, a poem beginning in despair:

When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my *bootless cries,    [*useless]
And look upon myself and curse my fate....

It doesn't end there, but turns more hopeful:

*Haply, I think on thee, and then my state,    [*by chance]
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate.

Nice.  Suddenly "things is better."

Shakespeare, I think, was more of a Realist although he had his Pessimistic days (Hamlet -- dark and brooding over human fates, was written after Hamnet, Shakespeare's son and twin to Judith, died.  And King Lear is probably the darkest play in English literature).  But was he a Realist?  Well, Shakespeare, after all, could write lines like "love and reason keep very little company nowadays" and "young men's love then lies/Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes."  There's some Realism for you.

But since we're working backwards from Hardy to Shakespeare, let's look at something from just before Shakespeare's day: Henry VIII's armour, preserved in the Tower of London.

A Man's Optimism is His Castle

You may just notice the codpiece.  Yes.  Well.  Some men may view that as pessimistic.  Let us not befriend them.  Others may see it as realistic.  Let us not befriend them.  But really.  As Mae Western-Holly-Wood (16th-century movie actress) asked, "Is that a cannon in your codpiece or are you just glad to see me?"  As my good friend Major Hurt observed the other day, "it's Henry the VIIIth because the codpiece was only 1/8th full."  Is the glass half empty or half full?  Neither: only an 8th....  It's sheer, blind Optimism -- hopeful winking with ego-wanking.

And please note: the realism of my friend can pose a Major Hurt in only one case: if he leads you in your workout.  He flies helicopters, but he's solid as a tank with a perpetual motion machine in him.  One day he'll be merely a General Hurt.  Just so he's past a Private Hurt, which could be major.  Realistically, he's the man you want in a situation that looks optimistically like it is going to turn pessimistic.

Major Hurt in His Heli

The thing is, we seem to grasp for excuses when our optimism comes face-to-face with the real.  One excuse, from Garrison Keillor, speaks of men having to pee when ice fishing: "When it's cold out, all men are created equal."  Realism.

Any of Those Purported Health Benefits of Optimism Here?

I have no real point in all this (that's Realism); you shouldn't hope for more than that (which is Optimism).  But I do think (without undo Pessimism) that we humans will choose any of the three that would suit us in a single moment, as with the lads pictured above -- or with Henry, Shakespeare, or Hardy.

How so? Could we possibly choose Pessimism in any situation?  Well, yes we could!  Just try having a Pity Party and inviting Optimism over to entertain.  Doesn't work.  We would need Pessimism to come over to start a fight to straighten things out.  And Realism?  True: he could come over and at least be persuaded to admit there is a darker side to things.  But for a Pity Party, Pessimism is your true friend.  Great party!

To celebrate a really big event, however, it's Optimism you want.  Sir Optimism, apparently, was an armour maker to royalty in the early 1500s, protecting nether egos with steeled and bright opinion.  If Henry had invited either Realism or Pessimism to his party, it would have been off with his cod.

But what about Reason?  Seldom invited.  Boring lad at a party.

Reason and humans keep very little company nowadays.

Chosing to BE.

A few years ago in my Shakespeare course, we had finished discussing Hamlet just as spring break approached.  In returning from the break, I asked students what they had done during their vacation that was exciting.  One student said, "I got a tattoo."  On her calf, just above the ankle in a very simple typewriter font, were two words and a period:

Just like that.  It took me a second to get the affirmation.  The student remarked that she had thought very seriously about Hamlet's question -- whether to remain in existence, albeit having to face life's many troubles, or to die and sleep, "perchance to dream" through eternity, a prospect bringing up other questions ("what dreams may come?"  They might be perpetual nightmares, worse than any trouble life might bring).

She said it was better to live, live fully -- and To be through it all, no matter what life brought along.

I am still today impressed by that tattoo.  Not being tatted myself, if I ever were to get inked, those two words might be an apt statement.

The significance lies in the undercurrent of those small words.  My nephew, as some of you know, has had his fate decided for him (unlike Hamlet, who wishes that his flesh would melt and allow him a quick end).  Michael has brain cancer.  He was given -- at the end of March -- 6 months to live, but things seem to be moving faster than expected.  Daily he weakens, can scarcely stand without holding onto something, whereas mere weeks ago he could hit a baseball (although not run the bases).  His right arm and hand are debilitated.  His face muscles have stopped working, so he has no expression even in laughter, no ability to smile.  His brain is incredibly sharp, but his body fails in new ways daily.

This is, obviously, hard to watch -- but how infinitely more so for him to watch?  At thirteen...?  And this week he grew very angry at it all.  Yes, indeed.  We all are.  But where does one direct anger at being dealt such an unfair hand?  I recall Dylan Thomas's poem:  "Do not go gentle into that good night....  Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

It is a choice, "to BE."  It may be that one's fate is decided, and the decision is that "you shall not be."  But to BE until that time -- Michael chooses every day to be.  It may be to accept; it may be to be angry.  But he still chooses: to BE.

His cancer is not unheard of.  Another young person to have this cancer was Elena Desserich [Link].  She spent her last months in an affirmative decision to be.  She wrote notes to her mother, father, and sister Grace -- even as her ability to write and draw deteriorated.  Elena hid her notes all over the Deserrichs' house, so her family would continue to find them long after she was gone.

One of Elena's Notes

Is it possible "to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them," as Hamlet asks?  Is it possible to war against this disease and by opposing end it?  To quote E. M. Forster (writing about the sea of troubles inherent in human relations), "Not now.  Not yet."  But even still, to look on these troubles, on this disease, and to be overwhelmed, to be put off of living in the face of it all, to "lose the name of action" as Hamlet says?  Not so.

Hamlet's decision is the hardest question we face whether living or dying.  If dying, we must BE.  If living, we must BE.  It is not to divert ourselves from troubles but to face them, clear eyed, honestly, not least -- as Michael teaches me -- bravely.  He's a soldier doing his duty in the midst of the hardest imaginable situation.  And, as Milton observed, "they also serve who only stand and wait."

Michael, BEing: Right Seat, UH-60 Blackhawk

In Time of War II : Lipstick for the Dying

Children of the Holocaust

The  Imperial War Museum houses, among its many displays, an assertively reverent section devoted to the Holocaust.  Of course, the photos overwhelm; the stories leave holes in us, and the shoes of children devastate.  Molded to the shape of the little feet they once carried, these shoes now carry implications heavy beyond those of adult suffering.

Who Can Lift Such Weight?

Bansky, if you do not know already, is a street artist with great wit and vision.  He has become a very sought-after "artist-with-stencils," and one would have to possess a packet to purchase a piece of his work.  His is well-earned success [Link].

One of his bits is this:

Banksy's Holocaust: Serious or Trivializing? Read on.

I used this image in my course on "Life in Wartime," and -- in an exercise of visual rhetoric -- asked students to analyze its message.  They invariably thought it trivialized the seriousness of suffering in the concentration camps and was, thus, unfit as "art" was concerned.  So, perhaps, it appears.

About the time I first saw this work, I also found this account from a military official involved in the liberation of the Nazi camps:

_________________________________________________

An extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO who was among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945.

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diphtheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentery which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

Source: Imperial War museum

__________________________________________

In reading this account, my students saw into the dilemma.  There is, of course, life after Holocaust for the few that survived, which meant the need to be a person, the need to reject institutionally-defined non-identity, and the need to re-establish oneself as a sovereign entity -- ultimately the need to become and to assert an individual life in the face of nameless death.

Primo Levi, a survivor of the camps, recalled this about the total erasure that the camps effected for the individual:

"For the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offense, the demolition of man.... They will even take away our name" (italics, mine).

One producer of a documentary on the Holocaust said this regarding Levi's words: "It is in this way that one can understand the double sense of the term "extermination camp" -- that is, both body and entity, including their very names -- something that goes on still [Link].

The students also became aware of the dilemma of the artist.  Most often, the artist (in words, in paint, in performance) must express something outside the experiences of the audience. Who has experienced the Holocaust?  Very few remain.  And who, not having been in a camp, can communicate that experience truly?

Banksy and I haven't seen one another in some years and haven't talked about this piece.  Oh--right.  I don't know him (or her).  But the sensitivity of this piece speaks movingly about the sovereignty of human existence.

A statement in the Imperial War Museum deeply impressed me (it was posted next to a dissecting table from a concentration camp -- used to dissect and analyze mentally "unfit" children who had been killed).  The statement was from a Catholic churchman in 1941:

If we allow the mentally challenged to be "euthanized" as "unfit" and essentially "unproductive," it is but a moment more and other elements of society will conveniently be deemed "unproductive" and killed.  Next are simply the physically disabled who are mentally fit but costing society too much.  Then the elderly.  And then...?  You.  No one is safe.

So the message has proved true in various places on the globe since the 1940s.

Equivocation and the flowing robes of state-sanctioned license have a long history of working to justify politicians' inhuman endeavors.  Inhumane acts have been precipitated regularly and repeatedly within civilized societies--nearly as a standard of operation and sanctioned by shiny laws.  It was illegal to hide Anne Frank in the 1940s; it was legal for her to be murdered.  That is not ironic: that is literal.  It is real.  As the woman at Honfleur (quoted in the previous posting) said to me in exasperation regarding repeated German exploits in France, "Quand encore?!"  --When again?!

Questions anyone?

 A Survivor of Institutional Expedience

On our day at the Imperial War Museum, I told a couple of my students about a Holocaust survivor who spoke at one of my classes -- Peter Pintus [Link].  I told them his story, and, although they had read and had heard many other stories in the museum, they somehow fixed upon his as more -- what? -- immediate?  actual? -- because I had worked with him?  I don't know.

He was not only a gifted person, but a very funny man, once surprising me with his wit in a moment of bawdy humor.  Before speaking in my class, a young coed with a rather large bosom came into the coffee shop in a low-cut top as he and I were talking over a cuppa.  And he noticed her.  Finally, when the young woman left the cafe, he turned to me and said, "That young woman had a top like a nuclear bomb."  I: "What do you mean?"  He: "It was 90% fallout."

About his suffering, and his life after war -- well, the students didn't want to leave the class after his talk; indeed, they wanted to take him home, he was such a gentle, funny, delightful man, respectful of any human being regardless of race, gender, religion.

But the real story: when a child, he was a blue-eyed, blond-haired little boy.  Aryan by all appearances.  So when his mother took him to see Hitler drive by in various parades, this short little boy stood at the front of the crowds who were spread along the street to observe.

At one parade, a black-booted SS member parked his car in front of the boy and his mother.  Then the soldier saw the little boy standing there, unable to see over the car.  Because the boy was blond and blue-eyed, he was picked up by the SS man and seated on the hood of the car to see the parade up close, and (as Peter said to me), "When Hitler drove by, I was as near to him as you are to me this moment."  If Hitler (or the SS Ass) knew that this little blond, blue-eyed boy was half Jewish...?  You know the story.  And that's why -- when the Nazis in fact found out -- this boy was eventually placed in a work camp from which, after some years of hard labor on starvation rations, he escaped and survived in the woods by eating grass.

Shiny Murder

Stuff hits the fan for someone in every century of human history.  But the amount of it that had hit the fan early in the last century for so many led Churchill to name it -- even before the end of its second decade -- "the terrible Twentieth."  That was before the Holocaust and before the nuclear age.

Lipstick perhaps doesn't cure the ills of a society that precipitates such immense wrongs.  But it can help when there's little to appease the pervasive ills of an age.

Who knew so little could do so very much?

Thanks, Banksy.  Keep talking.