Here’s something else the Brits did to commemorate the centenary
of the World War I Armistice: they created huge portraits on beaches up and
down England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland—portraits of people who’d left
their home shores and never returned. It’s a brilliant concept, from Danny Boyle,
the director/producer who brought Slumdog
Millionaire, Trainspotting and Steve Jobs to the screen, and who
orchestrated the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympics.
You don’t need me to point out the powerful symbolism of faces
carved into sand below the highwater mark, which will be washed away by the
incoming tide. Once there, there’s no holding back the inexorable waves; the
human features are doomed.
This was a project that drew in all kinds of people, engaging them
in art, history and the environment in an extraordinary way, and it gets added
to my collection
of art installations that help us come to terms with grief and pain that
would otherwise crush us.
Drone footage of one of the beaches:
You can find the list of the portraits and their beaches here. I don’t
think you have to have known who they specifically were to feel the loss. I
certainly didn’t.
The Brits do a tremendous job of honoring the sacrifices made in
wars of the Twentieth Century. Not—generally—contemporaneously, or as a
long-term thing; it wasn’t until the social welfare state emerged from the
destruction of the Second World War that Britain’s veterans received help with
jobs, housing and healthcare. (This of course shrinks during Tory governments.)
But when it comes to putting on a ceremony to acknowledge those who gave their
full measure of devotion, there’s nothing like having a Royal Family oversee
the laying of wreaths at the Cenotaph.
But around the country people also mark what’s known as
Remembrance Sunday (which coincided this year, fortuitously, with the actual anniversary
of Armistice), with ceremonies at village memorials (which started out listing
the names of the dead from 1914-1918, but then had to add on those lost
1939-1945) and local churches. On Remembrance Sunday church bells are
half-muffled in mourning, as in this ring from Remembrance Sunday six years
ago:
And in some churches, in the minutes before 1100, the tenor is
rung up, as in this clip from Exeter Cathedral:
At Holy Trinity Church in Cookham, Berkshire, my friend MLD and
her fellow ringers take this on as a solemn duty. MLD tolled the tenor by
herself for the fifteen minutes up to 1100, which is exhausting, being not only very heavy but for tolling you have to ring very slowly and hold the bell up—you see at Exeter they need three to do it. But
she’s glad to take it on.
This year, being the centenary, Holy Trinity augmented its
Remembrance service with some heartrending symbols.
As in many other parishes
and villages, people knitted poppies to be displayed—from John McCrae’s poem
that begins, “In Flanders fields the poppies blow between the crosses row on
row.” HTC decorated the sanctuary with these:
In addition to the knitted ones, they displayed a poppy that was part
of the gut-wrenching Blood-swept
Lands and Seas of Red installation at the Tower of London from August to
November 2014, commemorating the centenary of the outbreak of war. This was one
of the nearly 900,000 ceramic poppies that filled the Tower’s moat like a gush
of blood.
But the piece that I absolutely cannot view except through tears
is the Perspex silhouette soldier “sitting” in the pew. There were five of
these, each representing a man from the parish who left for war and never
returned.
Had I been in that sanctuary in the presence of those ghosts, I’d
have been unable to sing or follow the service.
(Photos taken by one of MLD’s fellow ringers, who I hope will not
object to me appropriating them.)
I’ll leave you with one more brilliant evocation from our British brothers—a
stellar Twitter thread capturing the universal truth about how we Anglo-Americans view our militaries,
as voiced by Rudyard Kipling.
As you might imagine I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the
centenary of the end of World War I. After all, mass conflicts of the first
half of the Twentieth Century are my field, and I see so much of their influence—for
good or ill—in our daily lives, even this far on.
And I’ve been thinking about the events of the past week—more mass
shootings, catastrophic wildfires, midterm elections, somber commemorations of
unbelievable destruction—all framed by the utter lack of leadership in our
highest office, which is currently occupied by an ignorant, racist, pathetic
buffoon who panders to (and feeds on) the absolute worst in us. And I wondered
what I was going to be grateful for today.
But then—Saturday Night Live. Which I only watch via YouTube, in
bits and pieces when prompted by Twitter. I knew of the controversy SNL regular
Pete Davidson sparked a week ago with his on-air (and apparently approved by
everyone in the show’s and network’s chain of command) comments about
then-candidate Dan Crenshaw, who lost an eye amid other injuries sustained in
an IED attack in Afghanistan six years ago.
Well, Davidson—unlike some in the public eye—manned up and
apologized on air this past Saturday. “I’m a dick,” he admitted. And Crenshaw
appeared next to him to accept the apology, do a little piss-taking and then—then
he laid on a message that really gives me hope.
“But, seriously—there’s a lot of lessons to learn here. Not just
that the left and right can still agree on some things but also this: Americans
can forgive one another. We can remember what brings us together as a country
and still see the good in each other.
“This is Veterans Day weekend, which means that it’s a good time
for every American to connect with a veteran. Maybe say, ‘Thanks for your
service.’ But I would actually encourage you to say something else. Tell a
veteran ‘Never forget.’ When you say ‘never forget’ to a veteran, you are
implying that, as an American, you are in it with them, not separated by some
imaginary barrier between civilians and veterans, but connected together as
grateful fellow Americans who will never forget the sacrifices made by veterans
past and present. And never forget those we lost on 9/11; heroes like Pete’s
father.
“So I’ll just say: Pete—never forget.”
Crenshaw and Davidson shook hands on that note.
I’m grateful for this display of grace by both of them—the smart-ass
New York comedian who was enough of a mensch to apologize and the ex-SEAL Texas
Republican congressman-elect who stepped out of his comfort zone to join the
show, and for the teaching moment on how to express appreciation for sacrifices
that others make—military, civilian, first responder, teacher—in the cause of
the common good.
Crenshaw would probably be the first to note that he does not—cannot—speak
for all veterans. But the ones I know would concur heartily in bagging the knee-jerk
“thank you for your service”. “Never forget” draws us in, and draws us
together.
One hundred years ago today, representatives of
the Second German Reich—their armies exhausted, their Kaiser abdicated, their people
starving, their cities roiling with revolution—agreed to surrender terms
dictated by Allied leaders. At 0500 in a railroad car in the Compiègne forest,
they signed the Armistice, which went into effect six hours later.
At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the
eleventh month, guns fell silent across Europe, and after more than four years
of total war, the nations stood in stunned relief. World War I gave us chemical warfare (Germany
first, then the rest to keep up with the Huns), genocide (Armenians, by Turks),
aerial bombing of civilian targets (Germans on French and British cities), unrestricted
(meaning: shooting at everything in the water) submarine warfare (Germany),
introduction of tanks (Britain)—all the mod cons of Twentieth Century life.
They’d be amplified by technological advancements in the next global
conflagration, and then refined in the “smaller” wars of the past 60 years.
In
my opinion, it was started and fought for reasons of empire—acquiring,
defending, expanding what you had or thought you deserved to have. Military and
political leaders were ignorant (woefully or willfully? I don’t know; maybe
some of both) of what advances in technology were about to do to warfare, and
they were criminally slow in realizing what was happening and what it was
costing as the war wore on.
And
after they’d all been in it for a couple of years, and had been depleting their
treasuries, exhausting their citizens, consuming their resources, killing off
their young men in their tens of thousands on a daily basis—well, a surreal
stubbornness seemed to grip them all. Essentially, the argument was, “We’ve
already spent this much and lost that much, now we have to
stay in it until we win.”
Right
up until almost the very end, the Germans were still marking out territories on
maps of Western Europe that they intended to annex upon victory—parts of
France, Belgium, Luxembourg to which a noble and martial people like the
Teutons were entitled.
Meanwhile
the French and Brits had a slightly tighter grasp on the geopolitical
possibilities before them, and were secretly negotiating to carve up pieces of
the Middle East which they expected the Ottomans were going to lose control of.
They were haggling between themselves, you understand, not with any of the
peoples who actually, you know, lived in those areas. Oh, yeah, they were
making promises, to Arabs, to Jews, to Kurds; but those were measures of
expediency and not agreements between gentlemen such as the ones they made
among themselves. Meaning—not anything they really expected to have to honor.
And
so many, many of those imperial chickens have been coming home to roost ever
since those shots echoed through Sarajevo. World War I reverberated
throughout the Twentieth Century. The wholesale slaughter not only killed
off much of the ruling-class youth in the nations of Western Europe, it
left the old men who held the reins of government throughout the 30s
psychologically crippled and unable to screw their courage to the
sticking point to check Hitler on the many occasions when a steadfast approach
would have lessened the likelihood of the global conflagration that ensued.
But
we’re even now feeling the effects of what was known at the time as the Great
War. The nearly
farcical assassination that started the war laid a pretty straight
path to the collapse of the Russian government and the communist revolution.
Along the way there was another imperial assassination, of Tsar Nicholas II and
his family, the liquidation of millions of Soviet subjects and more than 70
years of totalitarian government and global hegemony.
The
viciousness of the Allied victory, embodied in the Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919, set the stage for the next war. It wasn’t just the
dismembering of the parvenu German empire or even the onerous reparations
payments demanded of Germany. (The Prussians had extracted even more
ruinous indemnities from France in 1870, when Wilhelm I was crowned Kaiser of
Germany—in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. Just think about that for a
minute: talk about sticking it to your defeated foe...) It was that whole
sanctimonious black/white good/evil package that went with that settlement.
"Germany started it; the rest of us are victims."
The
Treaties of Saint-Germain (with Austria) and Trianon (Hungary)
set loose the turbulent peoples of the Balkans. You’ll recall how that shook
out in the 90s, with our Serbian comrades reviving the concept of eradicating
entire ethnic groups like pest exterminators. Those actions required
intervention by NATO and UN forces throughout the decade. And if
they’re not actively committing acts of aggression against their neighbors at
the moment, they will be doing so as soon as they think they can get away with
it. This is not over.
The
Treaties of Sèvres (1920) and Lausanne (1923) carved up the Ottoman empire
along the lines that Britain and France had mapped out earlier in the war,
picking up choice parcels of real estate in the Middle East. As with the
Balkans, those arbitrary geographic divisions, ignorant or dismissive of
ethnic, religious or other loyalties of the resident peoples, are still
reverberating on the global stage.
Iran,
Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon? Mes chers
amis—ces poulets have been coming chez le roost
for more than 90 years, with no signs of abatement in the merde being
produced.
Well, by 1918, German,
Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian empires were all shattered, although the
Soviet Union pretty well replaced the last one. (And since the break-up of the
Soviet empire in the 1990s, we see Putin attempting to rebuild the tsarist
holdings. If I were a Finn, a Latvian, an Estonian or a Lithuanian, I’d look at
Ukraine and be nervous.) The British
empire’s death knell was struck as well; it didn’t survive the second war.
And France—well, a steady retreat as well.
For the United States, it marked our emergence as a major
player on the world stage. Despite our best efforts to turn back the clock in
the 20s and 30s (possibly one of the reasons for blocking the
memories of our 18 months’ involvement in the carnage) and pretend
that those dissipated Euros’ problems were no concern of ours, by the time we
got through World War I, Part 2 (1941-1945, for us), it was clear that there
was no turning back.
For some reason, Americans pretty much blow off the First World
War. Perhaps because mass media didn’t keep it roiling through society in the
20s and 30s the way it did World War II in the 50s. A few novels, a
movie or two, and that’s it. By the time the Bonus Army marched
on Washington to be routed by Douglas MacArthur on orders of Herbert
Hoover (Republican presidents really don’t like being reminded of societal
obligations or of the actual cost of
wars) in 1932, it was safe to send in current soldiers with fixed bayonets to
storm the camps of the veterans of that war. But we still preferred to dismiss it from our collective memory.
Aside from emulating Britain and France in retrieving remains of an
unidentifiable soldier from the cemeteries of Northern France and interring
them at the Tomb of the Unknown at Arlington National Cemetery (Britain’s
Unknown lies in Westminster Abbey; France’s beneath the Arc de Triomphe), we
scurried back and declined to join the League of Nations. America first, eh?
Our involvement did have some positive effects on our society,
however, although most people are unaware of the connection. In a pattern that
was followed more fully in the second war, the US government had to
call on all its citizens to mount the effort, even for that period of months.
That included women and blacks. Turns out that once you’ve demanded
that all your people step up to the plate for a total war,
it’s hard to pat them on the shoulder and send them back to the kitchen or
the rear of the bus forevermore.
The Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the vote, was ratified in
1920. Equal rights for African Americans took longer. But a major step forward
came in 1948 when Harry S Truman, God bless him, issued Executive Order 9981,
ordering the desegregation of US armed forces.
Truman had been an artillery captain with the American
Expeditionary Force, serving in the Vosges in 1918.
This weekend in Europe, there are public and private commemorations
of the Armistice that was signed in Compiègne 100 years ago. Yesterday, Angela Merkel and Emmanuel
Macron unveiled a memorial there; Pierre Trudeau paid tribute to Canadian
soldiers at Vimy
Ridge. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly represented us at a ceremony
at the Aisne-Marne US military cemetery near the battlefield of Belleau Wood; Commander
Bone Spurs declined to venture out in the rain to honor the fallen. (Well, he is umbrella-challenged…)
It’s fortuitous that the hundredth anniversary of the Armistice
falls on Remembrance Sunday in Britain. The Royals and Commonwealth dignitaries
will lay wreaths at the Cenotaph in Whitehall. There are no longer any survivors
from 1918, but veterans from World War II and subsequent wars will march (or be
wheeled) past. There will be two minutes of silence precisely at 1100, and then
half-muffled church bells around the country will toll for the fallen.
(Throughout the past four years, the Brits have done an amazing
job of honoring the war that broke the back of their empire. Starting in August
2014, with the Lights
Out campaign and the Blood-Swept
Lands and Seas of Red installation at the Tower of London, it progressed to
a poignant series of public and private commemorations of the centenary
of the opening of the catastrophic Battle of the Somme in 2016 that
included a performance art piece called We’re Here Because We’re Here of men in
WWI uniforms appearing at train stations across the country just as they would
have done on their way to Somme. And then there was the statue of the soldier sculpted
from Flanders mud, who melted under rain at Trafalgar Square a hundred
years on from the Battle of Passchendaele. Finally, for the past week there has
been a
light and sound installation in and around the Tower of 10,000 torches lit
each night by the Warders, accompanied by a new choral work.)
Also today there will be a ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe at which
I hope to God that moral and physical coward 45 doesn’t shove any of the world
leaders out of his way as he impatiently waits for his meeting with Putin. At
least he’s not here desecrating Arlington.
Ah, well, perhaps I take these things too seriously. I’ve spent
too much time walking the battlefields and graveyards of Northern France and
Belgium internalizing the loss they represent. I can think of no more evocative
musical piece to commemorate this centenary than “Flowers of the Forest,” the
powerful centuries-old lament for Scots slain by Englishmen. But because
Highland regiments formed the backbone of the British army in so many wars, it
has been transmuted to a universal tune that accompanies the bodies of British
soldiers home to their final rest.
It has had rather a workout in recent years, in Afghanistan and
Iraq. But here it appears against the background of memorials to the losses of
the Somme. And if for no other reason, renders me a sobbing wreck.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
The first part of November always gives me the shivers. It’s not
just that we go off Daylight Saving Time, so it seems darker all of a sudden;
or even that the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November every couple
of years is Election Day here. It’s that this is the time we must acknowledge
dark deeds that have been done within living memory of our parents and
grandparents.
Today is the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht,
the Night of Broken Glass. On 9 November 1938, in “response” to the
assassination of Ernst vom Rath, a minor functionary in the German embassy in
Paris, by a teen-aged Polish Jew, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels
orchestrated “spontaneous” acts of outrage on Jewish homes, shops and
synagogues throughout Germany.
More than 200 synagogues and thousands of homes and businesses
were ransacked and torched throughout the Reich (which by then included Austria
and most of Czechoslovakia), starting the night of the 9th and continuing through the next day. Efforts by municipal fire and police services
to stop the conflagrations and violence were blocked by Nazi storm troopers.
More than 90 Jews were murdered and 30,000 men and boys were arrested and sent
to concentration camps.
Hermann Goering, Oberbefehlshaber Luftwaffe,
Prussian minister of the interior (thus head of the largest police force in
Germany) and chief Nazi clothes horse, berated Goebbels for mismanaging the
affair—since despite countless millions in goods looted, not a pfennig had made
its way into state coffers.
By way of placating Goering, Goebbels decreed that German Jews
should pay an indemnity of 1 billion Reichsmarks “for causing the damage” that
now littered communities throughout the Reich.
And he collected.
“Kristallnacht”doesn’t really convey the full horror of
these events. Although the Nazis had been steadily closing in the walls on Jews
according to the blueprint patently evident in Mein Kampf, and had
even essayed a public boycott of Jewish businesses (unsuccessful, as it
happens, so not repeated) shortly after taking power in 1933, this was the
first instance where widespread violence and murder were unleashed on the
community.
And this time they were successful. There were no substantial
protests either internally or from the fraternity of nations. The Nazis had
removed their gloves and revealed their brass knuckles—and no one cared. There
were a few lackluster objections from here or there, but no official recognition
(much less outrage) that this was a state act of collective violence against a
group of people. Likewise no one seemed to connect the dots that there could be
other groups on the murder list to be lined up after the Jews were eliminated.
Some
decades ago, I was following the pilgrim’s route from Paris to Santiago de
Compostela. I’d checked in to the Auberge de Jeunesse in Bordeaux and was
riding my bicycle around the town. At one stop light a young man on a bicycle
came up beside me—he must have recognized by the panniers that I wasn’t a
local—and we struck up a conversation. He was also outfitted for distance—I
think he was working the vendange (I ran into a lot of kids at hostels who were
following the grape harvest around the country), but at this point I can’t
really recall.
Anyhow, he was German and told me that he was heading over to the
“main” synagogue (the Great Synagogue). Seems he’d never in his life (of
probably 20 years) seen a Jewish temple, and thought he should do so. (My first
thought was, “Okay, there’s a reason you’ve never seen a
synagogue on the hoof—do you know what that is?” But I didn’t bring it up and
neither did he.) He’d been by earlier but was told he should return in the
afternoon. He invited me along.
Well, my only diary-entry for Bordeaux was going to be the Centre
Jean Moulin (museum of the Résistance), so he and I cycled over to the shul. He
was such a trusting soul he didn’t even lock his bike, just leaned it up
against the wall.
He rang the bell and we were buzzed in; no one came to greet us,
we just went in. I have to say I felt a little on edge—didn’t know whether he
was going to pull a Molotov out of his jeans and finish off one of the ones the
Nazis missed 35 years earlier. But in the end we just wandered around the sanctuary,
unescorted, looking at the space so different from Christian churches.
Actually, at the time this was only the second temple I’d ever
been in, so I wasn’t that much further along culturally speaking that my
companion.
We could hear voices in other rooms, but no one ever did come out
to check on us. After a while, we let ourselves out. He went on to find a place
to camp for the night (the hostel’s couple of francs was more than he wanted to
spend) and I headed off to the museum. (Which, BTW, had a terrific collection
of propaganda posters. Some of them are still quite vivid in my mind.)
I wonder if he’s remembering his first visit to a synagogue on
this anniversary, and how he had to travel hundreds of miles out of Germany to
find it?
I also wonder if we’ve progressed since 1938—no one did much about
the Serbian or Rwandan versions of Kristallnacht, did they?
A few years ago I wondered if we’ve progressed since 1979—would
the keepers of a synagogue anywhere today buzz in someone to have unaccompanied
free rein of the sanctuary? I found out in 2009 when I retraced the French part
of my pilgrimage: you
can’t get close to the Great Synagogue; it’s fenced off and I couldn’t even
see where you might ring to get someone’s attention. Looking at that iron fence
I thought, well, I guess 1979 was that brief window of lull in the
storm—between the Nazi anti-Semites and the Islamists and National Front
varieties of today.
Given recent events—of the
past two years, say—in my own country, I think we have reason to fear that
whatever progress we’ve made in the past 80 years is being eradicated. Anti-Semitism is on the rise at an exponential rate. (Following the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh two weeks ago, the racist-in-chief famously counseled that if the shul had only had an armed guard stationed there, all would have been well. Just as Rethugs in NRA pockets advise that arming teachers—and/or students—is the way to prevent Parkland-like bloodbaths. I thought about the temple in Alexandria that my friend attends. During her bat mitzvah I noticed an armed, uniformed Fairfax County cop patrolling the entrance, and I asked her about it. She said there one there for all Shabbat services. We have already lost to the Nazis.) We’re
electing fascists to local, state and national office. Those officials are
building concentration camps for asylum seekers, putting brown children in
cages and adopting them out to white parents, inviting their supporters to
commit acts of violence, breaking international treaties, throwing away environmental
protections and engaging in corruption on a scale that would make the likes of Papa
Doc and Idi Amin grow pale with envy. In short, Republicans at every level are
feeling free to combine their two guiding principles of greed and cruelty into
a unifying platform: making brutality a sustainable profit center. Goering and
Goebbels are verklempt.
So, I still don’t know how much progress we’ve made since Kristallnacht.
But perhaps it’s a start if we remember how it begins.
Yesterday marked the first day of the Hindu festival of Diwali. Although
there appear to be several legends
associated with the tradition of Diwali, they mostly revolve around the triumph
of righteousness over evil, of light over darkness. Thus it’s appropriate that
the focus should be on lights—oil lamps, candles and (so I hear) neon
lights among the nouveau
riche. (Diwali marks the end of a month of prep; I’m told there’s been a
lot of dancing at temples, and tonight big family meals with emphasis
on Indian sweets.)
I learned about Diwali when I moved to the Valley They Call Silicon. Since I was struggling with driving back the dark, I glommed onto
it like limpets on a rock. Last night I again massed candles to drive back all
manner of dark things. Not only do I like the soft light that groups of candles
give off, the very act of lighting them one at a time and nursing along some of
the ones at the end of their life slows me down. It calms me
down.
Filling a room with candle
light takes time; you can’t flip a switch and move on to the next task on your
to-do list. And if you’re lighting those floating jobbers, you have to be very
focused on not disturbing the water, because then it dowses the flames and you
have to wipe them off and start over again.
It’s like the
count-breaths-to-21 methodology of meditation: if you lose count because your
monkey mind is distracted, you have to begin again from one.
There are some days I never
make it into double digits.
But there’s something about
knowing how happy the moving lights will make me that enables me to persevere
with candles. I light them, sit back and watch; and for at least a few minutes
the world around me is peaceful and full of hope. Light prevails over darkness,
love conquers fear, and good triumphs over evil.
Yeah, the ‘Pubs were displaying their colors
yesterday—no element of fuckery was too blatant or too petty for them to omit.
After reading about all the voting machines in Georgia that were
non-operational (in largely African American precincts) because the guy in
charge of running elections for the entire state (white Brian Kemp, who’s also
the R candidate for governor and running against a Black woman—how’s that for a
conflict of interest?) somehow ensured that the precincts were not issued…power
cords, I just lost it.
Racist robocalls claiming to be from Oprah, illegally
purging the voter rolls and dogwhistles from the Kleptocrat and his closet VP
weren’t enough. Gotta just outright sabotage the polling places.
Work offered no respite, either, as we had a
palace coup last Thursday and I’m still finding out who’s been purged. Because
clearly the LEED-certified walls of our building would crumble if any actual
communication were ever to take place.
As an aside—and combining the chicanery of
voter suppression with the surrealism of my employer—on Monday the new HR
director sent us an email reminding us of both our civic duty and what the
company will put up with, viz:
Yes, the highlighting/bolding are hers. She’s
basically telling us that even though they’re technically required to give us an hour on the clock to go vote,
they’re on to our shifty ways, and they
know what times the polls in the area open and close, so we’d better not
try to claim that hour, or there’ll be some ‘splaining to do, Loocie. This
place has the highest density of PhDs outside an R1 university, and the HR
director is telling us all that we cannot be trusted to use the allowed hour for
its designated purpose—we could be getting our nails done, or stopping off for
a beer with that hour—and that she’s got eyes on us.
Well, well, well—the country stands on the brink
of a precipice, and I confess that I’m afraid to look over the rim. I don’t believe
that mid-term elections have mattered as much as today’s; at least not during
my lifetime. If Democrats don’t take back the House, the Kleptocrat gets two
more years to drive democracy into the dust, cheered on by Repugnants all up
and down the office-holding food chain.
And as though the actual elections weren’t
enough of a cliff-hanger, we’ve got Rethugs from the Oval Office on down to
state and local levels engaging in voter suppression and intimidation on a
scale that old Joe Stalin would admire. Closing polling stations, removing
voters from the rolls, declaring all kinds of IDs unacceptable—if these crooks
have missed one opportunity to deny citizens their rights, it’s certainly not
for want of trying.
These tactics are the kinds of things you find
in backward countries, which we appear to be well on our way to becoming. And
it scares the living daylights out of me. They’re also clearly the actions of
people who’ve held power for as long as they can remember and are terrified
that they might not be able to retain it if “the others” start demanding to share in it. (In this case, the others
include women, people of color, LGBTQ, immigrants and many more.) The closer we
others get to the seat of power, the more unhinged these people are going to get,
and the greater the likelihood that their fear and rage will manifest in
violence.
It’s not like we haven’t seen some of this
before—the Civil Rights and anti-war movements in my lifetime were bathed in
blood. Before that there were campaigns to organize labor. All of these
movements took place over years or decades; in each case, the power-holders did
not relinquish control with grace. And it’s clear that they just went
underground with their grievances. We’re now facing decades worth of papered-over
resentment gushing out like cockroaches through a gouge in the wall.
I’m trying to contain my anxiety. I’ve voted; I’ve
contributed to political campaigns; it’s in the hands of the electorate…
As you know, my preferred therapy in such situations is music. I’m
thinking that a Requiem is in order, so let’s have the one from Mozart.
It’s been months—perhaps more than a year—since
I last pulled out my DSLR to actually shoot. I use a pocket camera for all my
on-the-fly photos—particularly the ones I take in traffic. The Canon is
reasonably comfortable to use, and it fits in the pocket of my running sweats,
although I really miss having a viewfinder. Having nothing but that screen
means I’m guessing about what’s in the shot and what’s in focus when there’s
glare.
But Autumn-Winter-Spring are prime photography
seasons, and I decided I just needed to get back in practice. So I hauled out
the Nikon, charged the battery and…stared at it.
Because I’ve been using what’s essentially a
point-and-shoot for way too long.
So I did what everyone on the planet with connectivity
and a problem would do: I consulted YouTube. And, glory be, I found all kinds of tutorials on how to use this
model. I uncovered settings and functions that what Nikon is pleased to call
user documentation never bothered with.
Now, look, I learned to shoot on a Nikon
rangefinder (which inspired the name of this blog). No through-the-lens
metering; I carried around a light meter to calculate appropriate settings. And
I did not do badly with it. And for years, my Minolta SLR served me well—through-the-lens
metering, but not a lot of other bells or whistles. When I decided to move into
the digital age—ten years ago; I wanted to see if this whole thing had legs—I didn’t
spend a lot of cycles on it. I did take one Nikon 101 class through Seattle’s
Open University equivalent, but…
In my defense, I do not use the Nikon as a
point-and-shoot; I typically set it either to Shutter or Aperture mode, not Don’t-Worry-Your-Pretty-Little-Head-Honey.
But I’ve never pushed it.
However, YouTube had my back. In a couple of 20-
to 30-minute sessions last weekend, I learned heaps—enough to head out
yesterday in full Manual, and play around with a bunch of different functions.
And here’s the thing: whether it’s photography
(or specific photographic equipment), cooking, home improvement, auto repair,
whatever—there’s a multitude of YouTube videos to walk you through it. In the
past month, I’ve checked out how to use the Instant Pot to make soup, what I
need in order to mount hardware and hang curtains and how to fix a hissing
toilet. Yes—as with everything on the Internet—you’ll find crackpots there, and
I recommend checking out several “experts” to validate their instructions. But,
man—what a resource.
So, today I’m grateful for YouTube’s how-to
videos. Because of them, my first foray out into the neighborhood with the
Nikon netted 100 photos, 94 of which are decent enough to keep. And I had a great
time playing with the settings.
Here’s a keeper:
And here’s the one I completely overexposed—which I kind of like:
I understand that 2017 was the worst year in in
modern history for mass shooting deaths in the United States, with 345 mass
shootings reported…by 1 November, according to the Gun Violence Archive. So 2018
has apparently responded with, “Hold my beer.”
By way of illustration, here are just three
graphics from that website.
Number of incidents of gun violence of all
types—mass shootings, domestic violence, accidental killings, etc., as of yesterday:
Number of mass shootings (which they define as four
or more victims, both killed and wounded), as of yesterday:
Number of deaths from gun violence, as of yesterday:
Keep in mind that we still have two months to go
before 2018 is out, with endless spewings from the Kleptocrat, his spawn and his
ilk to ratchet up the hatred that spills over into these red splotches.
Today is All Souls’ Day, the somber time when
Christians remember those who have departed in the faith. In some parishes, the
names of the dead are read out in services; for others it’s a private
remembrance. Being a California Christian, I’m not too fussed about the “in the
faith” part; I mourn all who have left this life, particularly those who did so
suddenly, and especially from violence.
The revolting massacre of worshippers at the
Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh last Saturday, and the equally repulsive
murder of two black shoppers at a grocery store in Jeffersontown, Kentucky, the
same day (by a RWNJ who’d first tried to gain access to an African-American
church before heading down to the Kroger), are but the latest in a gush of such
killings since February 2017. The task of naming every victim—even just the
dead, leaving out the survivors—in that period is beyond me; I don’t even have
the heart to list all of October’s victims. I’ll just give you those who were
murdered last Saturday.
