Lady Marchmain

Hearts and minds

One other thing: any moron who cares to romanticize the SDS radicals of the 60s and 70s needs to take another look. During the civil rights movement in the 60s people were getting killed. schools and churches were bombed, and the human dignity of a race of people was at stake. The issues were pretty clear. (Nor should anyone start just blaming the South--remember the riots in Boston when the schools were integrated?)

It was very different later on, during the Vietnam war, when mass tantrums  erupted on college campuses (it is much more fun to "demonstrate" than to study). When what mattered was what was cool and what wasn't--and if protesting was cool to a suburban American teenager, violence was even more so.  Because we didn't know what it was really like. 

 

I lived in Nyack New York when my kids were little, and I was walking down South Broadway to the fish store, across the street from the Police station, when all hell broke loose; sirens sounded, police cars came from everywhere and began disgorging enraged policemen who were kicking and literally punching a man through the door into the police station; a man with long hair and a beard.   It was the day of the Brinks robbery, and these were the high-principled souls who had just shot a cop who tried to prevent them from robbing a Brinks truck. The whole town felt vulnerable all of a sudden--and not safe, not really ever safe again. The funeral parlor was across the street from my apartment building, and the streets were full of Nyack residents holding lit candles. Everyone, everyone was sad. Next day the policeman was given a full inspector's funeral.

My friend drove the schoolbus his little 5 year old son rode every day. Just the one passenger on that route--this little kid who lost his father.

Those radicals--they weren't principled, they weren't idealists--they were evil. Nasty, brutal, and privileged. They came from relatively affluent families (I'm sure their fathers made more money than the policeman they killed) and were well able to live their lives completely divorced from reality.

I've met radicals from other countries, countries with really bad governments-- and very few of them have any respect for Americans who dabble in radical politics--because we really dont' know what the hell we are talking about. I doubt if even now many left-wingers would recognize real tyranny if they had to live under it.

 

I watch "Cold Case" in the wee hours because I can't sleep anyway and It is usually about some issue dear to the heart of this 60s child.  I know everyone thinks I am a right wing fascist (partly true) but last night I got to remember where my passion for politics came from.  The show was abot some lame 50s housewives selling Tupperware against racism (I kid you not--this is one worth looking up) but what got me was the few seconds of films they shot of black people in Mississipi being sprayed with hoses by the southern cops--I remember those pictures from when I was 6 years old. I remember they were the very first things in my life that made me aware of racism and oppression, and they were the reason I wrote my very first  political missive--  a very angry letter to then president Kennedy asking how he could allow such things to happen. I knew nothing about anything at that point-- it was a comletely emotional and intuitive response to great injustice, and the fact that people watched it on tv--well that just seemed barbaric. Awful. Hideous.  It caught me by surprise, how powerful those images still are-- I just started crying and crying.  And now I know why I got to see those films again. Because that's where my politics began and that's where they will always live-- in my heart.  It isn't a matter of left or right, it's a matter of how human are you going to be? Are you going to immerse yourself in statistics and "pragmatic" solutions?  Will you ever be able to use words like "justice" without blushing?  Are the questions you debate about human beings, or statistics? 

Want to know the political state of this nation?  Walk down the damn street and look into the eyes of the beggars and the homeless.

Treachery

A few years ago  (the kids were still in school and we were living in
Virginia) I met one of the most notorious traitors in our history--Robert Hannssen.  I didn't talk to him or anything, just shook his hand and nodded, he smiled-- we met very briefly at a function given by my son's school. He probably wouldn't remember me at all. But I got a good look at his face, and I was kind of interested because I'd heard he was in the FBI. Years later when his treachery was exposed, his face was all over the papers, and I noticed the same thing I had noticed when I had met him.  He looked weak and afraid.  Uncertain, would be a good way of describing it. Uncertain to a degree I'd never thought possible.  I read a few books and articles about him, and saw the movie.  The most puzzling thing was, here was a picture of someone I should, in all honesty, really hate. But when I looked at his picture it alwayw seemed like it was a picture of nobody--there was no one inside that face, behind those empty, scared eyes.  I neither hated him nor pitied him. I was merely very puzzled.

 

Of course I have had more time to think about traitors, and broken vows, since then, and on a more intimate level. I think now that really, if you want to see the absolute essence of treachery, look at Robert Hanssen's photograph. A traitor breaks things--vows, commandments, rules, promises--and a traitor has no loyalty but to himself. He is, in a way, in a universe of laws he has created himself. You can't choose which of the Decalogue you will follow and which you won't--it doesn't work that way. You break one, you broke 'em all. They weave the universe together into one, and they are inseperable. So a traitor betrays everything permanent and unchanging in his world--the rules we ought to live by. But he's still alive, you know, and has to live by a set of standards even if they aren't consistent, or real, or make any sense.  Otherwise, without even an illusion of consistency, we would all go mad. Because of cause and effect, you see. Things like that. Actions having consequences.

So imagine you're a traitor, like Robert Hanssen, going to work, eating dinner with his family every night, church on Sundays--all of that stuff he has to do in addition to being a traitor and getting American agents killed. How do you do it?  What code do you live by? Since his sin is deliberate and calculated (one assumes) he must have some rationalization he makes when he feels the need to justify himself to his own conscience.  And he can't use the ready-made Ten Commandments because he broke those already. So he does what everyone who lives a lie has to do--he makes his own rules as he goes.  That, I think, is why he looks so scared. Imagine you had to create your own moral code all the time--and the only one you could compare it to is the Natural Law.  Would you even try?  Probably not unless you were a pompous, syphilitic 19th century German philosopher, a man I like to call "The favorite philosopher of teenage boys..."

Of course I don't claim to know the state of Robert Hanssen's soul, or anyone else's for that matter. But know a traitor or two, and courage does not seem to be their most prominent characteristic at the moment.  Defiance doesn't last forever. Reality bites back.  As it should, when one tries to reinvent the universe in order to gratify some obscure psychological quirk, (as in the case of Hanssen) or worse, one's lust and grandiosity.  I have suffered from others' betrayal--and that happens, that's life. But God help anyone who makes my children suffer for the sake of their own lust. God help them. I won't.

 

Dear God...

What a horrible holiday season--The first sign that things were going to be bad was some fool inviting himself here to "visit"  (later he admitted he expected me to marry him, or some other kind of nonsense. ) Hey, idiot, just because you have harbored some wierd obsession for 35 years doesn't make you any more appealing --  you are disgusting.

 

When you tell people you are divorced, the assholes come out of the woodwork. They  think they can take advantage of a vulnerable, needy woman.  It's very unpleasant. 

 

Then I ended up getting very sick and very depressed and went to the hospital--turned out I had aspirin poisoning (from chronic pain, but that's a nightmare for another day) and the doctor was kind of shocked at my thyroid numbers--a low thyroid can cause dementia, and aspiringcan cause hallucinations. It was just--par for the course.  Then, in the hospital, (remember what I said about the assholes?)  this older student nurse  began to follow me around, and  she held forth about things she really didn't know anything about, like books-- she would sidle up to me every time she visited the unit. She was kind of butch, but it wasn't till I got home that I realized she'd been putting the moves on me. YECH!!! GROSS!!!Besides which I despise any sexual predator who tries to take advantage  of their position to go after--my God--patients.  . So it's been a jolly time, really fun.  One by one these little episodes are almost tolerable, and certainly comical--I can take care of them. But when they add up, and are especially nasty, it makes me very weary and very angry and very frustrated.  Because I would really like to kick these people in the ass all around the block.  I don't know what bothers me most--that they harbor the illusion they are attractive (they're not) or that they think they are the least bit intersting, witty, or engaging when they try to engage me in a conversation. They aren't.  They are  maladjusted, emotionally crippled, narcissitic lechers who are sadistic enough to try to push around people who could never be the least bit interested in them, other than as an example of self-centered emotional regresson (to abut age 4).

 

Oh yeah, the Slobbering Drunken Nurse texted some incoherent message about  being "scapegoated" and it went to everyone on my phone list, including a nun and my spiritual director, Father Bill, and, yeah, my therapist. Way to make a total ass of yourself in public, stupid.

 

Now, though, I have been treated for the metabolic mess I was in and I actually feel pretty much ok. The only residual feelings are hatred for most people in the "caring" professions  for their arrogance and stupidity. Anyway, at least I don't have to go to work in pajamas.