Thought That Came Unbidden

Two articles appeared in today’s Washington Post. The first deals with the current U.S. war in Iraq:

Witness Testifies Marine Knowingly Shot Children in Haditha

CAMP PENDLETON, Calif., July 17 — One of the Marines charged with murdering civilians in Haditha, Iraq, in 2005 knew that only women and children were huddled in a back bedroom in a house there, but he opened the door and shot them anyway, a squadmate testified Tuesday.

The second deals with World War II:

Japan Warns U.S. House Against Resolution on WWII Sex Slaves

Japan has warned leaders of the House of Representatives that serious, long-term damage to Japanese-U.S. relations is likely if the House passes a resolution demanding an official apology from Japan for its wartime policy of forcing women to become sex slaves for Japanese soldiers.

What makes the killing of unarmed women and children so much more shocking than the idea that a government sanctioned the repeated rapes of unarmed women for the pleasure of its soldiers?

Nothing.

There is nothing more criminal or shocking about one or the other of these crimes perpetrated in a time of war.

War by it’s very nature is government sanctioned brutality. The basis of war is physical violence of all kinds. Destruction of property, food supplies, and livelihood, beatings, rapes, torture: these are all tools that have been employed systemically throughout human history by one group of people as a means to control another. We simply call it something else – war, pacification, occupation, a police action – when these methods are undertaken under the auspices of the government and usually for some specious reason like differences in religion. Heathens, after all, aren’t the same as “us.” And if “they” aren’t the same as “us” “we” can do whatever “we” want to “them” goes the rationale.

And the killing of innocents is nothing new. Soldiers in Vietnam quickly discovered that women and children could be “enemy combatants” as easily as big strapping young men from the heartland of the United States. When anyone could possibly be the source of the next sniper or bomb attack, who is a threat in a combat situation challenges what we hold in the U.S. as “normal” for who can and who can’t be a soldier.

So, in the shifting sands of who can and can’t be a threat, what makes killing one person justified and killing another person murder? It’s a cheat to make a distinction.

Each of the crimes written about in these articles is a reflection of the brutality inherent in all war. And it’s this dressing up of brutality – calling one killing permissible and another murder – that perpetuates the illusion that there is ever any justification for war.

In discussing this amongst ourselves at Amphetameme we’ve been torn between our own cynicism – war is brutal, ugly, and, in my opinion, requires doing things that make you sick to your stomach (like shooting a nine year-old girl to death) if you want to truly “win” (assuming you define winning as ending up with a country full of dead bodies) – and our questions about just what standards the military is using to recruit the soldiers they are putting in the field.

I think, too, there are some underlying questions about the culture of violence in general in our country. Americans, in particular, have a very skewed relationship with the natural order of the world. There is no question that violence is a part of human behavior. Violence is a part of nature in general; anyone who has ever watched a nature special in which two animals compete for the right to be the alpha in a pack or group knows this. Sex too is a part of human behavior; after all, it’s how the species propagates.

Yet why is it we accept violence as entertainment – as of May 25, 2007 Entertainment Weekly records a summer movie body count of 15,776 – but sex is still taboo?

And to what end has our current regime here in the U.S., in their rush to war in Iraq, in their unwillingness to recruit and train troops via a draft (a move that would put Republicans out of the White House for a good dozen years I think), ignored the tenuous limits such training puts on the behavior of violence saturated individuals in tense, life-threatening situations?

More to the point: how much are military commanders exploiting our blood-thirsty culture and ignoring behavior they shouldn’t?

Is Haditha the tip of the iceberg when it comes to violence against the unarmed? Part of me wants to say yes; BushCo. has a control over the media that Lyndon Johnson probably would have given his right arm to have in Vietnam.

Yet, part of me wants to believe that the troops we have in Iraq are simply doing the best they can to survive and keep their essential humanity, to not turn into the kind of monsters they would need to be to actually “win” the war, so they can come home.

Perhaps the most cynical position of all is that both scenarios are true.

This article cross-posted to Amphetameme.org

I never thought it was possible but I actually miss a retail chain.

Alright, technically that’s not true: I miss the staff at the Suncoast video store at which I used to shop. Suncoast mismanaged itself right into into a buyout by FYE. Not that it matters much in our grand corporatocracy which video outlet is selling you DVDs you really don’t need to own, but in the making life more pleasant realm it makes a big difference.

I’m what you’d call a binge DVD shopper. I have one criterion which every DVD on my shelf must meet: It must be something which I will want to watch more than once. None of this using the DVD store like a rental outlet because “they’re just so cheap and if I don’t like it I can sell it back used for 2/3 the price and get my money back” bullshit. No, if it’s on my shelf it’s there because it’s something that on some random night when I just can not sleep I might actually want to watch. This, of course, leads to an oddly currated collection.

Part of the reason I’m a binge shopper is that Suncoast put me in the habit. Every six weeks or so they’d have a triple points weekend for people enrolled in their frequent buyers’ club. Instead of getting one point for every $1 you spent you got three. Buy enough in quantity on those weekends and eventually they were paying you to take DVDs out of the store.

And I guess because I showed up regularly and treated the staff, who were just as big if not bigger movie geeks that I am, like human beings they always remembered me by sight if not necessarily by name. I could go from triple points event to triple points event and have Jenna, the assistant manager, remember that I’d asked about something previously that was out of print that had since been scheduled for release. Plus, they had a decent selection since all they did were DVDs.

Unfortunately, though, in the reorganization and purchase Suncoast’s buyer closed most of their stores. The closest one now is, well, not all that close and the staff has been disbursed, on to other jobs that I hope are more rewarding for them. And me, I’ve been reduced to buying my DVDs at Best Buy or via Amazon.com

So it was thus I found myself at a Best Buy in Northern Virginia yesterday attempting to fill in some holes in my collection (Criterion Collection Edition of The Seven Samurai, no go; The Rock, check; Speed, check; To Have and Have Not, no dice) and a indulge in a couple of impulse purchases, things that meet the basic criterion but weren’t on the mental list. Despite the resemblance to a casino that Best Buy seems to cultivate, and despite the paucity of offerings there was one extremely bright spot in yesterday’s shopping trip.

If it had been just one copy I could have written it off to customer abandonment. But no, there were five copies of Terms of Endearment right there in the Horror section where they should have been.

I was in the gayborhood yesterday returning a book (who files a book of erotica which focuses on straight couples on the lesbian erotica shelf in a glbt bookstore? even the clerk was aghast.) when a rack of cards in a card shop caught my eye. It was full of those square cards (extra postage required) with pithy pseudo-philosophical quotes on them (Dance like no one’s looking… People can only make you feel inferior with your permission… etc, etc). The one facing out read “It’s never too late to be who you would have been.” And while the author of said saying was too small for me to read at distance I had simultaneous and diametrically opposed reactions.

I wanted to weep from relief at the possibility of hope, and I wanted to punch the author in the face until my fist was covered in his blood all the while screaming “Bullshit!” Yes, it’s been one of those weeks.

You know those weeks: nothing goes quite right; you get the rock in your shoe; stupid commercials make you cry; humanity irritates the living shit out of you just by breathing; you’re forced to bite your tongue before you ask when your boss got the lobotomy and why no one bothered to tell you so you could send flowers during his recovery; the stupidest stuff makes you laugh like a 7 year-old on nitrous.

OK, so maybe I’m the only one who has weeks like that. Nevertheless, it’s my week and I have to live it. And then Dan Piraro publishes this as today’s cartoon.

I’m not sure what made me laugh harder: the blatant homoeroticism of sports, the drawing, or the concept. Either way, my week just got better.

My great-grandmother used to remark in that terse, Missouri way of hers that a Methodist was just a Baptist in a rut. I’m not sure how true that is, but knowing that I appreciate routine almost as much as I appreciate spontaneity I wonder sometimes why we do things the way we do them.

I was thinking the other evening, as I often do while I do the dishes, about a trip I took to Key West. Lovely little island; flat as, well, something really flat, and small enough to walk, pedal, or be pedaled just about everywhere. And then I started to wonder: why is it that I think about Key West while I’m scrubbing noodles off a sauce pan? I think what first caused this activity-thought connection is the cartoony tiles I use as trivets on the stove; a frog on one and a pink flamingo standing in some water on the other, both of which make me smile and are not dishwasher safe. Scrubbing them free of food particles initially took me back to that trip: the warm breezes of February mornings, the sitting on the front porch of the coffee shop in the converted Victorian house that looked so out of place among the low-slung bungalows, my second shark sighting in open water. Good memories all. But I don’t wash the trivets every night – they don’t always need it – so what is it that takes me back there?

And wondering what it is, why that association is so strong, got me to thinking about the difference between discipline and habit.

Being who I am, I went right to AskOxford.com (yes, I was too lazy to get out the Compact OED; it’s been hot here, OK) for denotative definitions. I found these:

discipline

/dissiplin/

noun 1 the practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behaviour. 2 controlled behaviour resulting from such training. 3 a branch of knowledge, especially one studied in higher education.

verb 1 train in obedience or self-control by punishment or imposing rules. 2 punish or rebuke formally for an offence. 3 (disciplined) behaving in a controlled way.

— DERIVATIVES disciplinary adjective.

— ORIGIN Latin disciplina ‘instruction, knowledge’.

(As a side note: I would argue that “disciplined” is actually an adjective but what do I know.)

habit

noun 1 a settled or regular tendency or practice. 2 informal an addiction to drugs. 3 general shape or mode of growth, especially of a plant or mineral. 4 a long, loose garment worn by a member of a religious order.

verb archaic dress.

— ORIGIN Latin habitus ‘condition, appearance’, from habere ‘have, consist of’.

Connotatively the words are similar but not the same; discipline is something that is both instilled from without (you can learn it from others) and something that you impose upon yourself whereas habit is something you do by rote, without thinking, and often without pleasure.

Or is it that habit is merely discipline which you do not find onerous?

Writing teachers will tell you that trying to come to your writing through discipline is a sure way to kill any creative muse; that by making writing something you have to force rather than an aspect of your life that is as integral to your survival as breathing writing will become something you no longer really want to do.

Habits, too, are usually spoken of in the negative. We hardly ever speak of developing the habit of going for a walk or of eating a piece of fruit instead of 15 squares of Ghirardelli chocolate for dessert. True, some lifestyle educators talk about encouraging kids to develop “healthy habits” but when it comes to adults, habits are generally not something we encourage. This attitude envinces itself most convincingly in slang: why else would a drug problem be referred to as “a habit” ?

My romp through the dictionary brings me no closer to knowing why I think about Key West when I do dishes or about Albert Einstein when I clean the bathroom but I wouldn’t be surprised if one of my unconscious thought patterns turns out to be my Rosebud.

What’s the visual equivalent of eavesdropping?

I ask because having a definition for this as a concept will have increasing relevance as video becomes portable (yes, I know, only three more days until the iPhone [insert sound of noisemaker here] whoo, hoo…someone shoot me now) and more public. Indeed, just how am I to react to the glimpse of someone else’s pornography on portable DVD? Is looking at someone else’s downloaded episode of Battlestar Galactica the equivalent of reading over someone’s shoulder?

I have to go with no. In order to read over your shoulder I have to make a concerted effort to both take in and process the information.

But in a world where we’ve all been trained to look at the moving picture, where indeed novelists have posited a world in which the television replaces human interaction (and people walk around with ear pieces constantly piping music into their ears so they don’t have to interact with others (Ray Bradbury was a god)), am I really to blame if I catch a glimpse of what you’re watching on your 9 inch LCD screen that you’ve lugged onto the subway?

Or are we going to go with the private conversation over a cell phone in a public place school of thought: if you didn’t want me to look, you wouldn’t have played your video where I could easily see it?

Interesting questions for interesting and increasingly impersonal times.