I am a camera

Natasha Richardson, rest in peace. Natasha Richardson won a Tony award for her performance as Sally Bowles in the revival of Cabaret on Broadway, a production I later saw in Seattle on tour with Joely Fisher as Sally. Cabaret was based on a play by John Van Druten titled I Am A Camera, which was based on one of Christopher Isherwood's "Berlin Stories."

“I am a camera with its shutter open. Quite passive. Recording, not thinking. Someday all this will have to be developed, carefully printed. Fixed.”
-Christopher Isherwood, Berlin Stories

Christopher Isherwood was born in England, lived in Berlin during the Weimar Republic and emigrated to America in or about 1940. He settled in Santa Monica during the war and worked as a novelist and teacher. Besides his own fiction, he is noteworthy for his circle, which included W.H. Auden (champion of Tolkein), Stephen Spender, and for having met fledgling writer Ray Bradbury in a Santa Monica bookstore, a chance meeting that resulted in a famous positive review of Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. I met Ray Bradbury in Seattle about 10 years ago at a book signing. He was gracious and spoke to me for some minutes regarding On the Orient North, a short story of his that had been made into a teleplay by Ray Bradbury Theater on Showtime. He didn't care for its execution, but after I sang its praises he promised he would take another look.

Natasha Richardson's aunt, Lynne Redgrave, performed Shakespeare for My Father at the Intiman several years ago, which I saw, and was quite moved by. This was right before the release of Shine. I later saw Ms. Redgrave standing on the corner of Mercer and 1st Avenue N. waiting to cross the street, a dreamy look in her eye. I wish that I hadn't been driving so that I could have told her how moving her memoir was to me, and how much I enjoyed not only her performance, but her writing, which captured a moment from her father's life of such intimacy and grace that it has been indelibly recorded in my memory. Her father, in a completely selfless frame of mind, ravaged by Parkinsons into an egoless state, cries, "I'm so worried about your mother..."

Natasha Richardson's Mother, Vanessa Redgrave, performed in Little Odessa, with Tim Roth, in which her character is dying of cancer. My own mother had passed away just the year before of the same disease, and Redgrave's frank resemblance to my mother was simply overwhelming. To this day I still associate Vanessa Redgrave with my mother because they looked so much alike.

I am a camera.

Human Life - a closed system.

Reading Peter Levenda's Sinister Forces: The Nine, which collects and investigates the minutiae of American political history. Levenda abandons the kind of clear and convincing historical pattern most common to historical textbooks, in favor of collecting and analyzing bizarre coincidences and synchronicities, the warp and weft of historical threads of various intentions and purposes. This I think has an unintented consequence. How often have we heard that "truth is stranger than fiction?" We know this can be true because we have experienced it in our own lives. However, perhaps most historians fear that their theses will be disregarded if they get lost in the tangential circumstances surrounding "the EVENT." While Levenda's tangential obsession makes him seem like a crackpot, it also gives his work a kind of verisimillitude that seems strangely convincing--because it seems like the way life operates.

Levenda likes to find connections and correspondences between seemingly disconnected events. Charles Manson seems to stand at the nexus of many of these threads. How does Charles Manson relate to military intelligence, the CIA, and psychological warfare? Levenda connects the threads in a convincing way. At first blush, most would consider these connections to simply be coincidental. Levenda believes that human history is connected in ways that are invisible and strange (what he calls "occult") and thus not written about by mainstream historians. Levenda believes that coincidence is an illusion. I find his hypothesis meritorius. My life is dicated by my beliefs and desires, and these have led me in certain directions to meet certain people whose beliefs and desires have led them across my path. Human organizations also have beliefs and desires and act accordingly. We do not live our lives in a vaccum. Our lives are determined by forces (belief and desire) which are invisible and often unarticulated and unexamined on an individual level. These forces of motivation are as strong as laws of gravity. Human life and culture is a closed system.

Imported Post: Conspiracy Theory

Originally posted: Thursday, February 12, 2009

Reading Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi's Monster of Florence. Epiphany: Conspiracy theories are wonderful for fiction, but they are annoying and bizarre when applied to real life. But, when the police develop a conspiracy theory as in the the case of Dr. Narducci, the School of the Red Rose, and the serial killer(s) known as the Monster of Florence, then God help us.

It is as though the investigators, in their single-minded obsession to catch the killer, see it as a personal offront that the killer is still loose, and develop a kind of collective delusion. They must justify their obsession. They must justify why this character has eluded them for decades. Of course! It can't be only one person! Of course! It must be a conspiracy against law and order. Of course! It has to be a shadowy group of very rich and powerful individuals who are united against me, because a poor Sardianian illiterate could never have eluded justice so effectively for so long. There's nothing wrong with MY methods--I must be up against impossible odds. The motive? Of course--it MUST be SATANIC, because I certainly feel as though I'm in hell...

Apparently such investigative "technique" is tantamount to a kind of hysteria--and leads to factitious delusion and the most bizarre leaps in logic. Like auditors, investigators may need to be rotated so that they don't develop these Captain Ahab-like fixations and mental disorders.

Preston and Spezi, having the temerity to review the evidence and come to their own conclusions--which deviate from the investigator's bizarre construct of events, fall under the lens of suspicion themselves. Like the Salem Witch Trials, when questioning the procedure itself was enough to bring suspicion on the questioner.

Money quote: "I felt like I was in Franz Kafka's The Trial, acted out by Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis."

Imported Post: Witch Hunt

Originally posted: Friday, February 13, 2009

Finished The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi. It ends on a sad and sombre note, the expression of the mother of one of the victims who has gone bankrupt financially and in almost every other sense during the decades since her daughter's death. "I'll take these pictures down and put them away. I don't care about the truth anymore. There can be no truth that will make up for this pain. I have forgotten I am alive." (I'm paraphrasing there, but you get the idea). Heartbreaking. It put me in mind of the appearance by the mother of one of Ted Bundy's victims on the local news--this was back in 1989 and she appeared together with Bundy's mother, discussing his imminent execution. Her grief was devastating. It was a life-scarring trauma, and she still bore the wounds of it 20 years later. Still, her daughter's death was no mystery.

There was never nor will there ever be a solution in the Monster case. However, finding and punishing a malefactor was not the theme of Preston & Spezi's book. The cerebral romp of pawing through suspects and clues takes a decided turn into uncharted territory for Preston as his temerity to review evidence and come to a different conclusion than the ministers, lawyers and policemen in charge of a seriously derailed and deranged investigation, earns him their scrutiny. He goes from being an obstructionist, to a libeller using the media, to a perjuror, a planter of evidence, and finally, an accessory to the Monster himself.

Preston says that until you've been interrogated you cannot possibly know what it's like. I believe him. In the case of the Monster of Florence, police interrogated poverty-stricken, mentally retarded witnesses who were all too willing to offer testimony confirming the police and prosecution's theory, that a satanic sect was behind the Monster murders.

This testimony would be rejected by parallel court proceedings, invalidated by one jury, yet used to uphold the convictions of others! Incredible. Only in Italy could this happen, yes? A nation of supersitious, backward peasants or excitible Roman Catholics.

Not so fast. Here in my own State of Washington, something quite similar took place in 1995--known as the Wenatchee sex ring. Again, based solely on questionable witness testimony, prosecutors and detectives ruined many lives and reputations looking for a vast network of pedophiles that didn't exist - or so the jury found. Again, the police based their case on confessions gained from poverty-stricken mentally deficient witnesses, who pleaded guilty to charges and then turned around to give evidence against others charged with the same crimes. This evidence and testimony was eventually completely rejected by the juries, but those witnesses still rot in prison as a result of their guilty pleas.

But the worst of the worst--and the theme of this post, is the Witch Hunt. A witch hunt is more than just ruthlessly seeking out a certain group of people, using questionable tactics in single minded obsession on the part of law enforcement. A true witch hunt occurs when the hunt becomes more important than the truth, more important than justice, and more important than reason. In a witch hunt, the investigator feels personally that his theory is correct, it is sacrosanct and can bear no review, anyone who might disagree with his conclusions is automatically on the other side, aligned with the forces of darkness, an enemy, and hence, in league with the malefactors. As in the Monster case, when a person who criticizes or questions the investigation itself falls under suspicion as being involved in the conspiracy--you know you have a witch hunt. Precisely that happened in Wenatchee. America, with all her checks and balances has no defense against irrational, paranoid, factitous rumor--and god help us all when those rumors are believed as truth by a prosecutor.

Imported Post: Absolute Truth

Originally posted: Saturday, February 21, 2009

I've been working on an idea for a novel, and have been casting a wide net. Recently Post Modernism got caught in the mesh and I took a look. While I've written about relativism before, it again gave me pause. Post Modernism can be defined as that school of thought that came after 'modernism.' Well, that's self-evident. Specifically it is a branch of philosophy that holds there are no absolute truths--we are stories without authors--everything must be approached with skepticism.

From there we get moral relativism, I would guess.

Well it makes me damn bilious. While I find the far right wing completely bankrupt intellectually and ethically, I find the far left wing completely bankrupt morally. This sounds like just the ticket for far left wing professors who want to stick it to the establishment, by questioning its most cherished traditional values.

What I don't understand about the school of thought, and I'm completely eager to be taught, is when does the skepticism and the questioning stop? When do you get an answer?

And when do you accept truth as being a priori? I think it's a-priori that murder is wrong. I would object to murder on ethical and moral grounds because if Decartes is right, and my capacity to think defines my humanity, then my murder would deprive me of my ability to think, and by extension, my being.

By questioning absolute truths, see, I think that most people in academe would want to limit that to traditional truths. They wouldn't want to contemplate skepticism from the other side of the spectrum. Such as, "Torture can be justly applied in certain circumstances." or, "Genocide can be a legitimate tool for social engineering."

I do think there is a place for legitimate skepticism in most areas of human endeavor--especially the arts. It's perfectly fine to question the absolute truth that every wall must meet in a right angle (architecture) or "all plays must conform to the unities of time and place," or "All novels must be sub-divided in equal parts called chapters." By questioning the norm, we can often make great leaps of logic and aesthetics. The humanities flourish when questioned. But we cannot ignore experience in our questioning. We cannot question whether genocide is moral because we know empirically, posteriori, that it is not. There is no epistemology like experience.

Imported Post: The Leader Principle

Originally posted: Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Her performance in The Reader won Kate Winslet an Oscar. She plays a concentration camp guard on trial for war crimes. I've been doing a lot of reading this past year about the Third Reich, including Peter Levenda's Unholy Alliance and The Hitler Book, edited by Mathias Uhl. While I recommend Levenda's book wholeheartedly (I'm currently reading Sinister Forces), The Hitler Book really seemed to capture more of the zeitgeist of the Third Reich. I also recommend The Goebbels Experiment, a documentary available through Netflix.

One cannot resist the temptation of comparing those times with the times in which we live. For example, the burning of Reichstag as a prelude for war shares certain harmonies with the lead up to war in Iraq in 2002-2003, and George Bush's conflation of Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda, and the destruction of the World Trade Center. It also shares similarities with Emperor Nero's burning of Rome and his subsequent blaming of the Christians for the arson.

And while the Patriot Act, the bobble-heads on Fox News calling any dissent unAmerican, etc. and the ilk on talk radio and internet, had a chilling effect on free speech, this was still a Western Democracy. That was not the case when the first concentration camps were built in 1935-36.

Germany had become a totalitarian dictatorship in June, 1934 when Hitler purged his political enemies by murdering 85 of them, including Kurt von Schleicher, former Chancellor of Germany. This would have been on par of say, Richard Nixon ordering the assassination of ex-President Eisenhower. Though the dissemination of news was not nearly as fluid as it exists today, the German hierarchy could not keep the news secret. But the lie told was that the murdered, led by Ernst Rohm, were planning a coup. This event is also known as The Night of Long Knives, Operation Hummingbird, and "the so-called Rohm-Putsch."

It was a turning point for Germany and the German government. It did more than solidify Hitler's power base, it confirmed Hitler as de jure, the sole highest judge of the German people, and above the law. All law was vested in the personal fiat of Adolf Hitler. Extra-constitutional courts and executions would become commonplace thereafter.

This was when The Fuhrerprinzip became the whole of the law in German society. After the war, at Nuremberg, defendants tried unsuccessfully to use the existence of the leader principle as a mitigating factor, or even an outright defense. It was denied by the tribunals, under the rationale that soldiers are not obliged to obey illegal orders. Under the Fuherprinzip, however, it was argued that there was no such thing as an illegal order, that any order that came from your leader was legal. The tribunals responded that officers should have used their moral consciences as their guides.

While I certainly don't excuse their conduct, nor do I weep at their executions, the defendants had a point that was lost. The Third Reich was not a democracy. No dissent was tolerated. Dissent was punishable by death, and this was frequently proven. Sophie Scholl, of the White Rose movement, was guillotined for passing out innocuous mimeographs questioning the policies of the Third Reich--nothing more.

After 1934 no resistance to Hitler was possible on the individual level, and all who attempted it were murdered. The Hitler book reveals how bloodthirsty Hitler was, and illustrates his pathology--his compartmentalization of the suffering of his victims. He was a true psychopath, no doubt about it. He was the Gordian Knot of the German People. I don't think it's rational to expect someone to make a choice between one's own death, or the death of another (even many, many others), and hold them accountable for not choosing the former!

All that said, we must remember that Hitler didn't almost destroy the world by himself. There were a host of fellow travelers eager for the bloodbath and the victory, and they share Hitler's guilt and culpability. Those at Nuremberg enthusiastically supported Nazi programs and policies, it was just and meet that they should be executed for their crimes. But for the individual German? I'm not so sure how much suffering they needed to experience to atone. In any event, most of those who were alive at the time, are alive no longer. Time is justice.

Imported Posts

I'm going to import a few posts from my other blog - White Space - here. This is an attempt to separate the themes of the two blogs, and reserve White Space for news about my writing and its publication. I'll post links here from time to time when that blog is updated with specific news about writing.