January 30th, 2009 by Hoopleton

Maybe God was here.

But why did she write it? What did it mean?

Maybe God was here.

Was it a line from some book she was reading? Was it from a song or did she just decide the words made sense together? But why those words?

Maybe God was here.

No. She didn’t just absently scribble that sentence. There was more to it than that. She underlined the location as though the place itself was somehow more divine then any room in any other building. God wasn’t just here in the abstract. He was here. Right here.

It was like a hurricane when she came in. At first I thought she had just been nervous. Maybe there was that too, but she wasn’t all there. It was like she was possessed by something. Not high or demented, but like she was waiting for something to happen. Dread maybe.

She rambled, played music and adjusted her clothes. She hardly ever looked me in the eye. She wasn’t manic. There was calm to her but also nervousness.

On the elevator ride up she clutched the wall.

“Elevators make me nervous,” she said.

I smiled at her. I wasn’t laughing, I was just entranced. I knew her well but for the first time I got to see her. Really see her. See her move and laugh and fidget with her hair. She made me nervous too but in a good way. It was the rush of a light bulb going off in complete darkness.

Maybe God was here.

And somehow in the midst of it she picked up a pen and wrote that sentence. I can’t trust my own memories. I don’t know when it happened exactly.

I can see her now, writing it. Her thin frame bending down over the desk, a hotel pen awkwardly squeezed between her fingers in her small hand. Wisps of short black hair covering her dark eyes. She was wearing her jeans low enough to show off her hips and stomach. The curve of her neck extended. Her arm bent easily and gracefully.

I’m sure she was nervous about me that definitely played into it.

We sat at the window, staring down out of the fifty-fourth floor at the remnants that had been the World Trade Center. It was a crater of construction then. Jackhammers boomed and cranes turned in lumbering arcs. Train cars buckled in slow turns from out of the ground and to the station from which hundreds of ant-like people climbed out into the light of Manhattan.

Was God there? Was his presence felt in the public mass grave fifty-three stories below? If anything it was the absence of God that I felt. Standing pressed against the window of my modern, posh hotel room. Techno-pop luxury and sleek, slender electric design. Understatement meets elegant swank. Everything you could want to distract from the view.

Nearly three thousand people died in stark terror just below my feet and it was impossible not to be consumed by them. The replay of passenger airliners exploding against steel and glass was imprinted in my mind, mixing equal parts with flashes of people hanging out of their office windows, some desperate enough to jump. I could glance down at the pavement and feel numb at the rate of that fall.

If God was there I didn’t feel him. I could see she didn’t either. Whenever I did catch the glint of her eye there was only emptiness there. God’s shadow extending from the charred earth below up the face of the building and wrapping us in its cold embrace. So why then would she write it? Why was she compelled to leave me that message?

She left in a hurry when the phone call came. We had argued. She pushed further and further away. The winds of her entrance barely settled when the door closed behind her. I offered her cab money. I offered to come along.

“This is what I do,” she said, her makeup still running down her face as she walked to the elevator refusing all the help I could think to offer.

Maybe she was right. Maybe in some way God was there. But I know now that if he lingered there for even a moment he left us behind.

January 26th, 2009 by Hoopleton

It’s the afterthought that concerns me. Like so many lost breaths we cling to righteous action and disregard the pause before the repercussions take full effect. We stride in with absolute certainty but have not the wisdom of our end. Circling the drain is all we know, in ever narrowing arcs till we wash away with the soap water.

The prophets, preaching the word amidst the pulsing beats of their super colliders tell us that chaos is the way to comprehending the fractured mind of God. Within anarchy order asserts itself. A universe of infinite space in which patterns emerge out of a churning ocean of colliding and dividing particles. In such a perfect gamble we are the afterthought. Beings of reason struggling to form systems of hierarchy out of pure randomness.

We are ants in the greater purview of nature. Completely independent of the colony and yet like a hive brain able to construct absolutely awe inspiring complexity. We rush with certainty toward a seeming technological, cultural endgame without stopping to wonder what that end will be or why we are so determined to reach it. If all that reality is, was, or ever will be, is chaos, then what, oh Lord what, are we racing toward?

And what of our interpersonal relationships? What of emotion? What of love? What of our struggles to remember who we are? Is that just afterthought? Is all that which seems to consume us so fully just repercussions of our existence? And if that’s true, then is life just an accident? A cruel, unintended consequence of a conspiracy of subatomic particles.

We’ve never been able to formulate an adequate reason. We’ve never, in the ten thousand years of recorded history been able to make sense of why we feel, breathe and think. And so questions of ethics, politics and religion become mere afterthoughts in the light of consciousness. Why can I ponder the meaning behind my capacity to think? Is there no worse punishment in a universe built upon chance?

I think and therefore I am. But can I be prove that anything was before I existed or that anything will remain when I am gone? If all is chaos and this moment is the only one I can hold onto, then in this moment am I not a god? In this moment does not all reality serve me and is trapped by me as I am trapped by it?

So many questions. But soon even these become afterthoughts. Soon these too wash down the drain with the soap water. All that is left is me. All that can ever be. All that ever was. The alpha and the omega. The beginning and the end. Chaos incarnate.

Could it all really be that simple?

Must we give ourselves over to the rushing stream?

January 21st, 2009 by Hoopleton

Imagine a man sitting on a bench on a long boardwalk.

It’s cold and he’s wearing a coat and hat. The sun’s out but if offers little relief from the winds coming off the water.

There’s no one else on the boardwalk. There are no birds in the air. No stray dog sniffing at the trash bins. It’s just the man and the wind and the sun.

If you could look into his mind you’d see that it’s full of pain. His thoughts aren’t on anything specific, only the fragments of a dream he can’t quite remember.

This man is older. Past middle age with graying, thinning hair. He rubs his hands together to keep them warm. His skin is like paper. Wrinkling. Lined.

The dream was about his father. They were sitting together on that same bench on a long boardwalk. Just as now there was no one else there. The sun was out but it was cold. The wind blew in from off the water.

If you could ask him why he was in so much pain when thinking about his father, he wouldn’t be able to answer. Maybe he missed him. Maybe he hated him. Maybe he never lived up to what was expected. He wouldn’t be able to answer.

Imagine a man, that man, sitting on a bench on a long boardwalk, rubbing his hands together for warmth, agonized over a dream about his father.

It’s the smug-faced bottom feeders that have kissed the girls and driven off into the light fantastic. Dance they say. A chorus line of jiggling limbs held together by panty strings and diamond studded M16 machine guns. The crowds are twenty deep and not a face among them.

I’ve seen them all, walking like shadows down the streets. Spare change pouring out their pockets. Potential squandered in the daze of pixels and pornography. Empty cocktail glasses and prescription pain pills. All washing down the riverbanks like so many tons of dead salmon.

Glittering lights, jobs and opportunities a plenty. Come one come all. Dance they say. So much glitz and glamour would make Solomon blush and we have front row seats in the gutter. Does it get any better than this?

I don’t know.

I’d rather imagine myself as an old man sitting on a bench struggling with a dream about my father.

January 21st, 2009 by Hoopleton

Life isn’t exactly easy these days. The brutal chills of winter only seem to add further weight to our shoulders. But yesterday a new President was sworn in and for many there is the prospect of light on the horizon.

The Bush years are officially over and President Barack Hussein Obama has taken up residence on Pennsylvania Avenue.

President Barack Hussein Obama.

It’s still unbelievable. It has yet, even two months after the election, even a day after the inauguration, to all fully sink in. Partly I feel as though I’m still trapped in Bush’s America, watching a resurrection of the Kennedy era playing in shadows against the cave wall. I see there an America that has received a reprieve. A renewed sense of innocence.

It’s hard to give way to hope. It’s hard to let go of cynicism. The realist in me screams that President Obama is just like the rest, but I can’t help and feel pride in the moment. I can’t bring myself to take the Obama poster off my wall. I’ve never had a President’s picture up on display before. I know people used to, fifty, sixty years ago.

A student in one of my classes remarked with seething contempt the other day, “Now that Obama is President, everything will be fine. Everything will be perfect. There’s hope. Yes we can!”

Great rhetoric inspires, and inspiration leads to godliness. If all that Obama does for the next four years is give our young nation hope and pride, then he’d already be one step above most of the men who’d ever held the office. Things will not be perfect. Everything will not be fine, but maybe America can have faith again, not in intolerant dogma, but in ourselves.

Then again maybe it’s not just hyperbole. Maybe he really can deliver. Maybe he’s exactly what we need.

Watching the more than two million people crowd the Mall in Washington yesterday and remembering the scenes in Grant Park on Election Day, I wonder if it’s more than just politics at play. There really seems to be a religiosity in action. Jokes of Obama supporters being cultists aside, it’s hard to ignore the worship on display. The iconography of Obama souvenirs resembling that of holy relics. Are we seeing a sort of revival unique to the United States?

It’s possible the honeymoon with our newest president will pass in the days to come. That the moonlight glow will fade and we’ll accept this reality as our own. That the next several years will not be as transformative as we might hope. That the near religious fervor will dissipate into the familiar hum of the everyday.

But at least for now there’s light on the horizon. Dim as it may be, surreal as it may seem, the light is warm and that may be enough for us to move beyond the brutal chills of winter.

January 19th, 2009 by Hoopleton

Baring a coup or some sort constitutional mishap, George W. Bush will no longer be President of these United States as of tomorrow. Eight years that have felt like a few lifetimes will fade away and a history will be negotiated to forever remember these troubled times. America gets a reprieve if at least for this moment, the void in-between the failures of the last administration and the hope of optimism with the next.

There’s little point in discussing the crimes and misdeeds, the ignorance and intolerance of the fallen regime. Bush’s legacy will be admired by some, criminalized by others and forgotten by the rest. The truth will be lost in the negotiation, if there was ever such a thing, all that’ll remain is silence until decades from now some up and coming Historian will pen a book claiming that George W. Bush was perhaps the greatest, if not most misunderstood man to ever sit in the Oval Office. So a myth will be born, a new truth, completely devoid of reality discussed with the same certainty as the alternate sexuality of Abraham Lincoln and the tortured humanity of Adolf Hitler.

In the meantime it’s left to us to pick up the pieces of our economy, military, infrastructure and identity. It’s left to us to rebuild after the firestorm.

My students often ask me why I teach history if I dismiss it factually. What is the importance of knowing the past if so much of it is untrue, or more accurately, framed only from certain points of view? If the human race is so insignificant in the grand scope of eternity and if most of our deeds are forgotten and misremembered, why not embrace ignorance? Why ever bother to look back beyond our own lifetimes, or even past yesterday?

To be honest I’m never sure of what the right answer is, but ultimately I suppose it’s a personal one. To understand our attempts at forging unified memories, to know the lies we tell to ourselves, is to come that much closer to self-awareness. To understand why we do the things we do. To comprehend how we see or would like to see ourselves.

As politics shifts in the United States, and not by the overwhelming majority that one-day historians may claim, is this just an attempt to see ourselves in a new light? Have we changed or would we only like to believe that we have? And if we believe in something, is there the capacity for truth in it? That illusive truth…

January 8th, 2009 by Hoopleton

With the world falling apart it might seem like an odd time for a movie review, especially of films I haven’t seen nor ever plan to, but as a sometime historian I feel it’s my duty to shine the critical light on cinematic works that purport to be based on actual events.

Valkyrie, a film directed by Bryan Singer and starring Tom Cruise, is the story of Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, a German colonel who led a plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944. Skimming over the fact that Tom Cruise is far too creepy to convincingly play even a German officer during World War II, let alone far too American to play anything other than an American, and also ignoring the more dramatized events in the film (i.e. Tom Cruise is shown barely making it out of the explosion that is meant to kill Hitler when in reality Stauffenberg was already miles away when his ill positioned bomb detonated), the movie is by all accounts another fairy tale revision of actual history in which the lines between good and evil are so clearly drawn that the good guys might as well be wearing white hats.

It is accurate that Stauffenberg was outraged at the murderous campaign against the Jews, but he was also a devout German nationalist whose main contention with Hitler was not his anti-semitism but his misconduct of the war against the Soviet Union. The assassination of the Fuhrer was conditioned on the possibility of signing a separate peace with the Western Allies and was predicated on several demands. These demands included Germany’s right to retain territorial gains in Poland and Austria, the extension of current occupied territory south, as well as an allied commitment to continue the war against the Communists and the right of refusal to hand over war criminals.

In other words, the plot to kill Hitler was not some idealistic attempt to usher in world peace, but instead a rearranging of deck chairs on the Titanic.

In a similar vein comes the film Defiance, directed by Edward Zwick and starring, among others, Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber. The film is tagged as the true story of a Jewish resistance unit that bravely defied the Nazis. Again forgoing an examination of Daniel Craig’s inability to star in a film that doesn’t involve gun violence or Liev Schreiber’s unhealthy obsession with World War II (although Everything Is Illuminated was an exceptionally excellent film), this movie, just as Valkyrie attempts to make saints out of sinners, or at the very least, make overly simplistic morality tales out of what are in fact very complicated histories.

Tuvia Bielski (played by Craig) was, it is true, the leader of a Jewish resistance group that evaded the Nazis and on occasion struck at Nazi targets in an attempt to aid the approaching Red Army, but Tuvia was hardly a shining knight. Although he did save over a thousand lives from certain execution his violence against suspected collaborators and captured Germans was often beyond brutal (he was reported to have executed entire families and even dismembered prisoners while they were still alive). More so, in 1943, Tuvia and his resistance fighters were most likely involved in the Soviet-backed massacre of 128 Polish civilians (Stalin led a bloody campaign against the Poles when the Russians “liberated” the country at the end of the war, often using Russian friendly groups to decimate entire communities). For the better part of sixty years allegations have also circulated that his righteous few often engaged in frequent terror attacks on local Polish communities, stealing food, burning down homes and even murdering the innocent. Some have even said that his work with the Russians helped in destroying the Polish Resistance and aided in the transformation of Poland into a Communist state. None of this is depicted in the film.

My main issue with Defiance is not that a movie was made about Tuvia Bielski, as a person will often become that which he abhors in order to defeat it (what horrible crimes would we have committed if we were alive then?), but to completely ignore such evil acts is an injustice not only to Tuvia’s victims but also to our collective memory.

The reason I will not watch Valkyrie or Defiance is the same reason why I will not watch any World War II movie these days, because far too often these films paint a brutal period in history, in which nearly everyone had blood on their hands, as a clear lesson on the dichotomy between good and evil. The Nazis were all bad and we were all good. End of story. The history of the war is not so simplistic. Human nature is not so simplistic. Films like these fail to reveal the most significant lesson of war, that in such times there are no heroes. It’s easy to edit out the crimes and celebrate ourselves. It’s easy to forget we fire bombed Dresden and Tokyo that we dropped atomic bombs on cities filled with civilians. It’s easy to pretend that our GIs never executed prisoners or raped or pillaged. It’s easy to forget that we too had concentration camps or left untold destruction in our wake. As Robert McNamara once said, “If we had lost the war we would’ve been tried as war criminals.” But we didn’t lose and so we get to airbrush our flaws out of memory.

By presenting two-dimensional accounts of World War II, if not history in general, Hollywood helps to perpetuate that worst of American flaws: the glorification of war. So entire generations, brought up on recruitment ads that make almost no mention that a major job requirement of the military is murder, are led to believe in the false premise that one can commit violence without blackening one’s soul. I’m not saying that fighting the Nazis wasn’t just or that it wasn’t crucial, what I am saying is that to excuse ourselves so completely is the worst kind of self-denial. Pure good and pure evil simply don’t exist and it’s the belief in such absolutes that constantly pushes us toward absolute action. Without middle ground how can there be compromise? Without understanding of our own demons how can there be peace in places like the Middle East? How can there ever truly be equality and tolerance?

Introspection isn’t easy, truth isn’t easy, but it most definitely is something we need.