Response to the Response to the Death of Osama bin Laden

There are two ways I didn’t react to the death of Osama bin Laden.  The first is exemplified by the hordes of half-clad OSU undergraduates that jumped into Mirror Lake waving American flags and chanting U-S-A, U-S-A on Sunday night.  I was there, and found the scene unsettling and confusing.

The second way I didn’t react (and I feel some guilt in admitting this) was:

I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

MLK Jr.  really knew how to write an inspiring quote.  And he was absolutely right.  No good comes of hating people.  Rejoicing at a person’s death–even a bad person’s death–is unfeeling and wrong.  But I’m going to argue that, for those kids in Mirror Lake, and for me, and I suspect for a lot of other people as well, Osama bin Laden has never really been a person.

First, though, I’d like to productively digress to the only other celebration of  death I’ve ever witnessed.  I was a 9th grader at Woodbury Junior High when Senator Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash in October 2002.  I got a little choked up when I heard the news, but I didn’t really cry until I heard people cheering in the halls.  Cheering.  Because a man who rode around in a green bus and cared about the environment and had a wife and three children and had shaken my hand at the US capitol several months before was dead.  I don’t care whether the celebrating students thought Wellstone was the worst thing in the history of US politics, or whether they had never had the opportunity to shake his hand.  With the personal lives of US politicians splashed all over the media, we’re forced to see them as people.  These (few) WJH students were celebrating the death of a person, which, no matter how much you disagree with that person’s beliefs, is not only in extremely poor taste, but is pretty much just wrong (see MLK Jr. quote above).

Osama bin Laden, by contrast, hasn’t exactly interacted much with the American public on a personal level.  We know him exclusively through the media, which has done a pretty good job of constructing him as a non-person.  Bin Laden is a grainy picture on a blurred screen.  He is the name linked with the fear, loss, and destruction of 9/11.  He is a symbol of national insecurity.   As a young teen, I primarily thought of him as the legitimate target of US military operations from which attention had been irresponsibly deflected by the war in Iraq.  One person couldn’t unsettle a nation the way he did.  It seems clear that he was a placeholder for something much bigger and more threatening.  And, while some information on bin Laden’s personal life is certainly available, this is not the sort of thing major broadcasting networks spend a lot of time discussing.  To the average individual with no specialized interest in the matter (me, for instance), Osama bin Laden is reduced to a cardboard cutout that represents fear, instability, and (increasingly over the past 10 years) American failure.

And, for most of the young people in Mirror Lake, bin Laden-as-threatening-symbol has existed since before they developed a national, global, or political consciousness.  In moments of self-doubt, when I’m feeling inadequate as an academic, friend, and human being because I’m 22 amongst people who by-and-large aren’t, I sometimes see myself as little more than an undergrad suffering delusions of grandeur.  But–at least in this case–I’m in a significantly different position from the average undergrad.  I date my political awareness from the 2000 election (not counting vague memories of laughing at Ross “the Chipmunk” Perot with my dad in ’96), so by 9/11 I already had a sense of the nation and wider world and was tolerably able to understand what was going on.  These kids would have been in elementary school, for the most part, and probably had a pretty hazy picture of why the adults around them were so upset.  Some probably date their political/national/global awareness from that moment, and their entire conscious lives have been lived against the backdrop of US involvement in the Middle East and the manhunt for bin Laden–the cardboard cutout rhetorically constructed to represent anti-American evil.

And so I can’t fault them for celebrating the downfall of that symbol.  It takes a great leap of imagination and effort to re-construct Osama bin Laden as a human being after years of understanding him in non-human terms.  We can and should think about the ethics of abstracting human beings into symbols.  For the moment, though, I want to recognize that the people rejoicing in the death of bin Laden are (I suspect) essentially rejoicing at the destruction of the bundle of fear, instability, and national failure he was made to represent.  So, while the symbol-that-was-bin-Laden had a less significant presence in my life, and while the scene of celebration made me decidedly uncomfortable, I’m not going to pass judgment.  And, while I sincerely admire those of my Facebook friends who are able to re-construct bin Laden’s humanity in order to make relevant that excellent quote by Dr. King, I’m not there with them either.

Although the actual occurrence left me relatively unmoved, the various responses to bin Laden’s death have seriously startled me.  So, while I’m probably revealing the cracks in my decency or liberalness or humanity here, I felt compelled to think honestly about my response to these responses.  Maybe I’m way off base.  I have never followed the business of the world as closely as I ought.  I don’t really know anything about anything.  But that, I think, makes me no different than a lot of other people.  People who waved American flags out car windows at midnight.  People who quoted Martin Luther King Jr.  People like my mom, who responded exactly the way I did–with a pause and a thought: “hey, they finally got that guy.”

If it’s not on facebook it didn’t really happen: or, reality through technology

I watched the first episode of The Wire today.  So far it comes across as one more (exceptionally complicated) cop show.  I was struck, however, by the repeatedly interspersed shots of the action as seen through surveillance technology.  An illustrative example is when two of the cop/detective types (can’t quite keep up with the names yet) step into the elevator together.  As they enter and exit the elevator, the shot is a fairly standard medium-distance color shot–what the tv/film viewer is used to accepting as an unmediated look into the storyworld.  As the elevator ascends, however, the shot shifts to grainy black and white taken from above, as from a security camera.  Nothing whatsoever happens in the elevator–no activity, no conversation, nothing.  The only point of the shot is to remind the viewer that everyone is always being watched, that technology is constantly absorbing and fixing reality for later review and analysis.  What actually happens is ephemera; it’s what the camera captures that is reality.

This sinister reminder of the ubiquitous eye of technology is made (to me) even more disturbing in Paul Murry’s Skippy Dies. This novel seems to suggest that the mediation of reality through technology is not just an unnerving reality, but in fact the contemporary individual’s preferred method of dealing with life.  One scene that sticks in my mind is when history teacher Howard Fallon is having a strained conversation with his girlfriend, a technology writer.  He is playing with an image-enhancing digital camera about which she is writing a piece, and as he looks at her through its gold-toned screen all the tensions of their relationship fall away and he finds it easier to talk to her.  Of course, it doesn’t last–their conversation devolves into argument–but for a few moments, through the screen of the camera, he is able to see the beauty and good in the woman with whom he’s been sharing his life.

In all honesty and hopefully without sounding like an old fogey or a Luddite, I have to admit that this deeply worries me.  It worries me because I see it in myself.  I am much fonder of my online presence–aka the facebook me–than my actual self.  The allure of the online presence is control; facebook Kate is both wittier and prettier than the real thing, due to my ability to carefully think out her words and censor her images.  The thoughtless stupidisms and double chins are largely filtered out in advance, and my “about me” suggests that I spend all my time reading and painting and frolicking outdoors, passing completely over the stretches of time I spend lying on my bed staring at the ceiling or engaged in other unflattering occupations.  It’s uncomfortable to realize that one’s better half is a construct, an electronic projection of the rosier bits of oneself.  It seems wrong to prefer the image of sterilized reality filtered through the camera/internet/phone to raw, messy, uncontrolled, real reality–wrong, but uncomfortably like the truth.

Yes, I’m worried.  Of course, I could talk out the worries with an actual human being, but…I think I’ll just blog about it.

Trompe l’oeil is no fun in dreams

Apologies; I know it’s a bit boring when I write about my dreams, but this one was weird even by my standards.  I dreamed: I am part of a large (possibly Jewish…too much Maus before bed) family of (I think) bakers.  We have a shop on the fourth floor of a building and everyone in the family works there.  For bits of the dream–the normal bits that make sense–I am hanging out in what seems to be a fusion of the basements of my two best friends, cutting paper snowflakes and watching something on a very fuzzy, staticy TV.  But then, I realize it is Christmas Eve and I have to get home to my family to watch “Charlie Brown Christmas”–I really don’t want to miss Linus and his blanket!  Instead of going home, though, I go to the bakery to close up.  I am the only person there, and consider stealing a couple of cakes from the glass case to bring home for the family (as though the family won’t notice I had stolen our own cakes). 

So here’s where the crazy approaches.  I take a chocolate from the case instead, and am about to shove it in my mouth, when I realize I am not alone.  My father-in-law (I wasn’t married, but that’s the way with dreams) who was in charge of day to day bakery operations is there.  I apologize, saying I was just going to eat this one chocolate because it was damaged.  He doesn’t say anything, just looks through me and walks into the back room.  Behind him, sitting cross-legged on the counter, is my narcoleptic cousin Eddie (don’t ask me how I know his back story, but somehow the dream filled me in; he fell in and out of sleep at the drop of a hat, staring vacantly into the air until he woke or something woke him.  He’d always been that way).

Now, the crazy:  I realize that, all those times I thought Cousin Eddie was sleeping, those were the times he was really awake.  And all the times I thought Cousin Eddie was awake, those were the times he was asleep to everyone else.  I realize I am a frickin’ figment in Cousin Eddie’s recurring narcoleptic dream.  I’m not sure I can adequately convey how upsetting this was.  In the next scene, Cousin Eddie is taking me to the window, his hands gently pressing on my back, saying “It’s all for the best now” and I am scared but not resisting.  I sit down on the open windowsill four floors up (it looks higher) and, just before I jump, I say “It was good, you know?”  Then I fall, and mid fall, thank God, I wake.        

I don’t know if I meant the chocolate was good, or the dream life while it lasted, or nothing at all by that last phrase.  The real question is:  Are dreams like this the product of reading wacked-out postmodern fiction (too much Satanic Verses, Lanark and Angels in America before bed) or are they its source?  Which is indispensible, which auxiliary?  Who creates whom: the mind, fiction, or fiction, the mind? 

And here’s the other question: Why can’t I have nice, respectable Victorian realist dreams?

Im/Ex-plosion

“I’m under a lot of pressure” seems to be synonymous with “I’m stressed out.”  But, since I think that the “I”–one’s experiencing self–is located at the intersection of the external/public world and the internal/private mind, it seems that the term “under” might be unnecessarily one-sided.  In other words, pressure pushes up as well as down.  Thinking about stress in terms of pressure–where it’s coming from and what it’s pushing on and what’s pushing back against it–seems appropriate.

Under normal conditions, people seem to live in a state of (relative) equilibrium between their internal and external worlds.  In other words, the activity of one’s mind and the activity of one’s body are essentially balanced.  Stress, however, (at least for me) seems to manifest in an imbalance between internal and external forces.  Either 1) there is extreme pressure exerted by outside forces that threatens to shut down or crush the productive functioning of the internal, or 2) there is a buildup of internal activity that finds no counterpart or release in the external world.

Situation 1 is what happens when one is overwhelmed by responsibility, work, etc, and the result is implosion.  This mode of stress is the sort we most commonly refer to–the world’s expectations are too great to be comfortably born.  Situation 2 is what happens when there’s an incredible, disproportionate amount of something–thoughts or emotions, say–going on inside the mind, and the result is explosion.  This second mode of stress has characterized my last four summers; I was reading loads and was full of ideas, but working full time at a job where no one cared, I had no place to exercise my intellectual restlessness. (Embarrassingly, it also characterizes the entirety of my stint as a teenager…sorry for all the angst, Mom and Dad).  In both cases, I became irritably touchy–explosive, in the most unpleasant way. 

Implosion is, however, markedly worse.  Explosion, at least, can be productive.  You can have an explosion of creative activity, but no one’s ever heard of creative implosion (and for good reason).  The result of implosion is apathy, paralysis, an utter inability to cope.  Implosion, therefore, is the enemy.

Thinking about stress this way–in terms of a balance of internal and external pressures–it seems to me that the way to counter intense pressure from outside forces (over which you have no direct control) is to work up an equally intense frenzy of internal activity.  The possibility of destructive implosion is then neutralized by an equal pressure from within.  By this account, external forces cannot on their own create stress, liberating the individual from the victim’s role. 

This seems potentially useful.  Although, at this point, a large mocha, neck massage, and speed-reading superpowers might be more useful.  It’s hard to say.

Helpful Words

Because I occasionally still fall prey to the “parents are parents and not actually real people” fallacy, I was surprised when my dad mentioned how sometimes, because of the particulars of your life at a given moment, a book or film can suddenly and profoundly touch you.  I guess I thought this was something that happened only to me, or only to people who frequently read fiction (my dad’s a nonfiction man, primarily).  On further reflection, though, I suspect that this may be a fundamental and universal human experience.

A lot of novels have grabbed me over the years, and for various reasons.  When I read the The Chronicles of Narnia in second grade, for instance, I was just old enough that (having experienced the relentless routine of the school day for a few years) I was incredibly aware of and disgusted with the usual.  Formal education was boring for me pretty much all the way on up through high school, and I think fantasy series–Narnia, Harry Potter, Tamora Pierce’s work, etc.–rushed in to sooth the sting of constrained dulness that was a major feature of my teens and pre-teens. 

 College wasn’t boring anymore, but actually caring (about more than my GPA) made life stressful in new ways.  An accidental reading of Byatt’s Possession while applying to grad school felt, at the time, like the only thing between me and nervous breakdown.  At any other time the book would have been merely interesting and well-written, but at that time it was precisely the passionate case for the pleasure and worthiness of an academic career that I so urgently needed to remind myself that all this worry would be worth it in the end. 

In recent weeks, it hasn’t been books or movies so much as graffiti.  Someone wrote “Try Harder” in black sharpie on the rise of a stair approaching the third floor of Denney Hall.  Every time I see it I feel like it’s speaking directly to me, and I do try harder, at least for awhile.  Another anonymous friend scribbled “you are smart and beautiful” in a toilet stall somewhere on campus; I didn’t feel either of those things the day I found it.  And, one day when the sidewalk along Neil Avenue was freshly poured, someone grabbed a stick and wrote “forget regret” in the wet concrete. 

That person didn’t know that I would run past their defacement of public property on a November morning when I needed to hear what they had to say.  A.S. Byatt didn’t know that my emotional stamina in the fall and winter of 2009-2010 depended on her publishing a literary love story.  That’s what makes the phenomenon so powerful, I think–it reminds us that we’re all human, and more the same than we are different.  People put their words out there without knowing for whom, and because we’re all so similar at the bottom of it all, their words are the perfect shape for the holes in someone’s heart that so desperately need filling.          

Thinking about Winnie the Pooh thinking

Even when reading through Winnie the Pooh and House at Pooh Corner with an eye for narrative levels and metalepsis, one can’t help Noticing Things (things like Milne’s proclivity for nonstandard capitalizations, for instance).  It’s been awhile since I spent significant time with Pooh, so a lot of these discoveries are hitting me for the first time.  I wish I had time to focus academic work on everything; however, here are a couple of interesting things about Pooh that I won’t be covering in my narrative theory paper:

1. There’s a major emphasis on literacy and intellectual prestige.  None of the characters is fully literate, but those who have even a shred of reading and writing ability flaunt it extravagantly.  Pooh–who frequently misspeaks–refers to “messages” as “missages,” a particularly apt malapropism given that his ability to interpret language ends with recognizing the letter “P” and equating it with “Pooh,” leading him to miss the point of many written communications completely.  Despite the fact that all the animals are in more or less the same boat when it comes to lack of literacy skills, there also seems to be a serious shame attending illiteracy.  Lying and evasion is preferable to frank admission that one can’t read.  This focus on literacy is closely aligned with the repeated attention to who has a brain and who has just fluff between his ears.  Having a brain is considered a prerequisite for intelligence and authority, and Pooh is repeatedly referred to as a “bear of very little brain” or “bear of no brain at all.”  Yet, (and this brings me to point 2), Pooh is responsible for the vast majority of artistic creation that takes place over the course of the books.
2. There’s also quite a bit of commentary about the artistic process.  After eating and spending time with his friends, composing poetry seems to be Pooh’s primary pastime.  Few chapters go by without a “hum” or two of the bear’s own creation.  And, while his poetry uses nonsense words and is often somewhat simplistic, Pooh is not a naïve artist.  He is self-conscious and seems to have a philosophy of composition.  One telling example is when he promises to write a poem about Piglet’s bravery when Owl’s house is blown over and Pooh and Owl require a rescue.  Several days have passed since the event, and Piglet is growing impatient, so Pooh returns to the site of the disaster to wait for inspiration.  “But it isn’t easy…because Poetry and Hums aren’t things which you get, they’re things which get you.  And all you can do is go where they can find you,” he reflects.  “I shall begin with ‘Here lies a tree’ because it does, and then I’ll see what happens.”  After composing a seven-stanza poem with a fairly complex rhyme scheme, Pooh reflects again: “It’s come different from what I thought it would, but it’s come.”  Later, when Piglet questions his own heroism, Pooh says, “in poetry–in a piece of poetry–well, you did it, Piglet, because the poetry says you did.  And that’s how people know.”  This statement is almost an echo of Hayden White on history–the historiographer’s composed account of history validates and constructs the past as we know it, just as Pooh’s poem validates and constructs Piglet’s bravery.  This sense of Pooh as philosopher and poet is almost nonexistent in film versions of the stories, retained only in  the characteristic pose of a head-scratching Pooh muttering “think, think, think.” 

It is largely (for me) this image of such an intense, physical, earnest attempt to think deep thoughts that makes Pooh so endearing.  That and his unabashed desire for food.  I like to think that if I had to pick a literary character who’s most like me it would be someone badass, beautiful, and brilliant (a la Elizabeth Bennet), but, honestly speaking, it’s probably that good-natured, bewildered, rotund, fluff-filled philosopher-poet-of-very-little-brain, Pooh.