Regarding the past, and what is lost to us, I always loved this fragment of Auden:

‘O plunge your hands in water,

Plunge them in up to the wrist;

Stare, stare in the basin

And wonder what you’ve missed.

‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,

The desert sighs in the bed,

And the crack in the tea-cup opens

A lane to the land of the dead.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15551

Thank you for sharing the history and your story; they are inspirational. It’s easy to focus on the failures, and miss the times when people have remembered to resist.

It sounds as though your Professor was trying to explain the process of commodification and the related process of commodity fetishism. It’s the second of these that my point about consumer culture refers to. He may also have been falling into the all to common practice of economic reductionism. Assuming that if you view social life as being driven by economics that you must view individuals as nothing more than economic units. Again, a lot of self identified Marxist have done this as well.

The irony is that commodity fetishism was Charlie’s way of explaining why, as capitalism developed, monetary values began to be applied to things in a fashion that had little or no relation to their functional value. It’s a particularly useful concept when examining our current economic system’s dependence on the manufacturing of demand/desire through marketing and advertizing. Rather than reducing people to mere economic entities, the idea of commodity fetishisim recognizes the importance of subjective perception in social and economic systems.

Vulgar Marxists of the reductionist type have often argued that the entirety of Women’s oppression was defined by the exploitation of their labor and ignored any aspect that couldn’t be tallied on a balance sheet. Feminism succeeded in exposing the fallacy of this thinking.

Enough of that. You ask what do we do rather than grieve? I can only answer for myself when I say that I embrace perspective /inspiration as necessary prerequisites for intelligent and effective action. To return to Amsterdam for the moment, what is enlightening is the reaction of the citizens of Amsterdam to the beginning of the Jewish deportations.

That city possesses what is called the Museum of the Resistance, housed in what had been a Synagogue prior to being closed by the Nazis. There I learned that when word spread of the round up of the first 700 Jewish men, the Tram workers union called for a general strike. The strike resulted in the complete shutdown of the city for two days until the nazi occupation forces intervened directly to suppress it. The event inaugurated the start of the Dutch Resistance movement that grew thoughout the war and helped cripple the Nazi war effort in the face of savage repression. It should stand with the Danish people’s rescue of the Danish Jews as one of the shining moments in human history.

That spirit abides yet in Amsterdam. On one trip there, I visited the Nordekirk, whose tolling bells are mentioned in Anne Frank’s diary. They have a statue of her there that is quite beautiful. At the opposite end of the church plaza there is a large, pink marble triangle set into the pavement. It is known as the “Homo Memorial” and is dedicated to the memory of the gay and lesbian victims of the nazi extermination. As I was taking a picture of it, two women on bicycles stopped by and ask if I knew what it stood for. I will always remember the expressions of both pride and pleasure on their faces when they learned that I was an American and that I knew exactly what I was looking at.

Do you know the song these words come from?

As we go marching, marching,
unumbered women dead,
join with us in our singing,
their ancient call for bread.
Small art and love and beauty,
their drudging lives they knew.
We also call for bread
but we call for roses too.

Absolutely. ;) We can each make half a sandwich.

You make it sound as though you’re setting yourself up as the arbiter of whether or not it’s legitimate for us to be angry — as though a little oppression should be okay, why don’t we swallow it and go make a sandwich? That may not be your intent, but it is how you’re coming off.

I can see where I might have left that impression, but I don’t think any level of oppression is okay. It’s possible that we might disagree on where the weaving line between oppression and community needs lies. I don’t believe we have the infinite resources required to give everyone every desire without it infringing unfairly on someone somewhere, and our hope for a best possible culture demands we adopt on a cultural level some personal obligation toward the welfare of others, even if we really don’t care to. I don’t think I have any convictions in that regard that favor mens rights over womens. If I believe there are sandwiches to be made and grinning and bearing to be done in the interest of the common good, I would be doing it as well.

My fiance has that book! He showed it to me two or three months into our relationship, during that lookit-all-my-toys! phase. He talked me through it. It was a lot of fun. I’ll have to take another look at it when I get back to California.

Christian:

I didn’t watch the video at Twisty’s either. Just the knowledge it was there was deeply upsetting — in a way that I don’t think it would have been so vastly upsetting without video documentation, even though I didn’t watch it. Knowing there was a video record made her “realer” than the brief summaries we get all the time about these kinds of murders.

I agree with you that the men who killed her have also been twisted, just as we here have been twisted by our circumstances. That is regrettable; those are also lives lost in a way.

I don’t really know how to respond to what you’re saying about the hatred of men. I don’t hate men. I hate systems of oppression. I think you do a disservice by underestimating the effect of patriarchy on women’s lives, though. The number one threat to the health of a pregnant woman is a reluctant father. Women are raped and murdered by men. We are kept in line with objectification and violence. There is a constant barrage of threat to take away even our rights to control our own bodies. You make it sound as though you’re setting yourself up as the arbiter of whether or not it’s legitimate for us to be angry — as though a little oppression should be okay, why don’t we swallow it and go make a sandwich? That may not be your intent, but it is how you’re coming off.

W.B.:

Don’t apologize for being heavy, what you have to say is very interesting. Grief is, of course, a salve. I can hope it will be a spur to future action, but how well has that worked for us? We build a holocaust museum with the slogan “never again,” and on the day of its dedication, we allow 600,000 more innocents to be murdered. If not grief, should we be striving for — perspective? Remembrance?

Sorry for getting my Marx wrong. I was hazily remembering a lecture by one of my professors who was riffing off of Durkheim’s view of cities, and who was of the opinion that all relationships between people in an urban environment come down to economics, that we’re making each other into potentials for “can make this number of plastic toys in an hour” or “is worth $50 for landscaping.”

“When you live by the graveyard, you can’t weep at every funeral.”

Sorry if that sounds callous but it’s important to remember that our grief is of no use to the dead. Grief is the solace of the living.

I’m not sure that objectification is really the appropriate term. It sounds as though you weren’t even thinking about the human cost when you reacted to learning that the bombing of Berlin had destroyed a unique artifact. Any comparison you made was after the fact and I think the overarching point is that you considered the human cost at all. That speaks well for you, not against you. Many, if not most, wouldn’t have given the dead a second thought.

I’ve had the privilege of visiting London, Amsterdam, Berlin and the former Leningrad. I’ve walked the streets that bore the brunt of the Blitz. I visited the secret annex where the Frank family hid from the Gestapo. I stayed in a hostel over looking the street where the first 700 hundred Jews to be deported from Holland were assembled. In Berlin I saw and touched walls scarred by bullets and shrapnel. I stood on a bridge over the canal where the body of Rosa Luxemberg was thrown after her murder. In St. Petersburg, tens of thousands died during the Nazi siege. A cemetery of mass graves is located on the on the Vyborg side of the Neva.

Everywhere I went, the streets were full of people going about the business of life. I don’t think this is something they need feel guilty for.

Here at home I live in a section of the U.S. where the soil has been watered by the blood of thousands of slaves and soldiers and where “the pinetrees of the forest have hid a thousand crimes.” If I pay homage to the dead it is for my own sake, not theirs. They are past caring or being known by me.

Our world, for all its beauty and vibrance, is a vast cemetery. The only duty that we owe the dead is the one that we owe the living. To make this world a place worth living in.

I hadn’t meant to be so heavy but your post was thought provoking.

A word about fetishizing. It is, I think, related to objectification but not quite the way you suggest. The reference is to tribal fetishes of shamanistic worship. Objects imbued with magical or spiritual power. In a Marxist context it refers to imputing a similar, totemistic power to an object, symbol or idea. To give a vulgar, partial illustration, if rather than saying a man makes money, you say money makes a man, you are vesting both power and volition in a symbol of economic exchange. Another example would be the manic consumerism of modern life, which urges that acquisition of more and more “stuff” will solve all our problems. The right shoes, the right clothes, the right car (or even the the right boyfriend, girlfriend), etc. The commonality between the two terms being the substitution of an imagined or created identity for the “thing itself.”

I never watched Twisty’s video. Reading the responses to it is enough. My mind tells me their culture destroys men’s lives too. How strange to think of those men as victims, but I feel like I’ve been hit by those stones, breaking my soul apart, a spiritual battering that must be unimagineably worse to be born in. I believe dark times end, and I believe in redemption, and in the healing power of love, but can it end in such a place, after such crimes, without a bloody reckoning? My emotions tell me to take all the women and children out of the country and scour it with nuclear hellfire. Then bury it in a hundred yards of soil, plant over it and leave it fallow until the youngest child of the youngest survivor has passed away peacefully in her old age, and never speak of what went on there again, all trace of their religion, their culture, their language and heredity gone. Erase them.

I want to fall down and cry, and be erased with them.

1) Science Fiction
2) Dinosaurs
3) Dougal Dixon

Then you really really reallllllly need to check out “After Man: A Zoology of the Future”. As a kid, it blew my mind, and I still really want a pet Rabbuck.

Preferably an Arctic Rabbuck. They’re so fuzzy.

—Myca

ps. I’m not blowing off the rest of your post . . . I read it, and I’m thinking about it, I just immediately thought “OOH! Dougal Dixon!” and wanted to post.