According to CNN:
“Better a democracy with scandals than an authoritarian system without scandals.” — Shimon Peres in Newsweek
When public people screw up and they go into damage-control mode, they tend to utter words like these:
Bill Clinton’s escapade with Monica was a “mistake.” Other “mistakes” were made by Senator Craig, Paris, Lindsey, and Michael Vick, to name but a few. Politicians never do anything wrong or sinful; it’s always a matter of “mistakes.” Hey, we all make mistakes, right?
Bill O’Reilly expressed surprise that blacks could run a restaurant as well as whites. But he claims his words were taken out of context. The context is that he apparently has an inherently racist worldview.
Politicians continually state that their words were taken out of context. We’ll hear that a lot between now and Election Day 2008. I’m sure Hitler, if alive today, would claim that anti-Jewich statements from his speeches were taken out of context. And once taken out of context, things are invariably “blown out of proportion.”
People of character simply admit that what they said or did was wrong, and take responsibility. Mel Gibson did that. Don Imus did. Jimmy Swaggart famously cried, “I have sinned.” I’m no Swaggart fan, but hey, good for him. There are plenty of other examples of non-excuse-makers.
I listened to ESPN radio while returning from the table tennis club last night. They were talking about Michael Vick. One commentator said, “Michael Vick didn’t make a mistake. He made a choice.” Amen.
Some years ago, I watched a TV documentary about the Manson murders which focused some attention on a sister of Sharon Tate, whose mission in life seemed to be showing up at the parole hearings of the Manson girls and making sure they aren’t released. Twenty-five years after the murders, she remained angry, embittered, and unforgiving. It struck me as intensely sad. Her life is defined by something that happened in 1969.
I don’t know how I would behave under those circumstances, but I hope I would be able to get on with my life.
A few weeks ago, I watched something similar on MSNBC, this time about a woman whose brother was senselessly killed by two teenagers about 20 years ago. The woman was stuck in time. She had never allowed her family to take another family picture, because it wouldn’t include her brother. The others had moved on, dealt with their grief, but she hadn’t. She remained angry, embittered, and unforgiving.
Through a special program (whose name I can’t recall), this woman was able to go into the prison, meet with one of the killers, and ask him anything she wanted. It was interesting to watch. The man was as contrite as anyone could expect, with no excuses, and through the prism of TV, I felt he was fully sincere. He, in fact, had developed what seemed to be tremendous maturity and character within the confines of prison; his life was defined by his crime, but he was able to move on. But the woman left that meeting even more determined to keep the guy in prison; determined to show up at any parole hearings to state her case. This, too, struck me as terribly sad.
A few days ago, a news show mentioned a woman who lost someone in the World Trade Center. She was among the relative few who refused to accept any survivor compensation. She, too, remains angry, embittered, unforgiving. Stuck in 2001. She says, “I want answers.” To…what? She, too, struck me as a tragically sad figure. Someone you probably don’t enjoy being around. Someone who has crafted her identity around the tragedy of 9/11.
I can’t claim any knowledge of what it feels like to lose a loved one to senseless violence. But I would hope I could move on with my life. I would expect better of a Christian.
Today is 9/11. There are World Trade Center survivors still fighting over what will replace the towers. Some want to make it a perpetual memorial to their loved ones. On MSNBC this morning, Mayor Michael Bloomberg talked, in a diplomatic way, about the need to move on with your life. He mentioned the death of his father when he was 21, but that he and his sister, despite their grief, completed college and began successful careers, and now, looking back, the grief is gone and they only have good memories of their father. Their example is not sad.
Sometimes, reality is just too weird.
Richard and Raymon are identical twins who had sex with the same woman on the same day (she was with Richard early in the day, and that night went to Raymon’s place). The woman named Raymon as the father. Which means he has to pay child support. That child is now a three-year-old girl. The brothers have been fighting over paternity for three years. Neither wants to be the father.
A DNA test showed that both brothers have a 99.9% chance of being the father.
So one of them is the father, and one is the uncle. But which is which? The only thing for certain is that their mother is the grandmother. The judge ruled that since the woman put Raymon’s name down as the father, then he’s the father until another court rules otherwise.
I’m sure that if I watched Jerry Springer, I would already know about this.
I read Elie Weisel’s Night as part of a literature class in 11th grade, and ever since, I’ve been drawn to Holocaust literature. It’s not fun stuff to read. It’s pretty horrifying. What draws me? Probably the question which thunders to the forefront with each book: “How could people do this?”
How, indeed. But they did. And they could do it again.
Two weeks ago I finished Ordinary Men, an astounding book which focuses on a reserve police battalion–ordinary men holding ordinary jobs, most too old for the regular army–who got called up as reserve policemen and stationed in Poland. There, they participated in the deaths of 85,000 Jews, either directly executing them or herding them into trains bound for Treblinka and Sobibor.
The author asks:
How did these men first become mass murders? What happened in the unit when they first killed? What choices, if any, did they have, and how did they respond? What happened to the men as the killing stretched on week after week, month after month? [What were] the personal dynamics of how a group of normal, middle-aged German men became mass murderers?
The author magnificently weaves the recorded testimony of numerous men (they went on trial in the 1960s) into a chilling narrative.
In most Holocaust literature and movies, Germans are portrayed almost as caricatures–all without conscience, all Jew-haters, all capable of great evil. But the people who carried out the policies of the true-believer ideologues at the top (Hitler, Himmler, and company) were ordinary people much like you and me caught up in unimaginable events.
This book humanizes the Germans of Reserve Police Battalion 101. You see men who refused to take part in mass executions, and who were excused from doing so. You see Germans leading small groups of Jews into the woods, where they made them lay on the ground, stuck the bayonet at a point on their neck, and then fired in unison. One German killing one Jew, and then they go for another batch. After a few rounds of this, you see soldiers approaching officers and saying, “I can’t do this anymore,” or even just wandering off. You also see reservists who enjoyed what they were asked to do, and you see civilians who wanted to know when the next roundup of Jews would occur, so they could come watch.
Interestingly, “No one could document a single case in which Germans who refused to carry out the killing of unarmed civilians suffered dire consequences.” This was the conclusion of prosecutors in the 1960s, after two decades of trying Nazi war criminals. Ordinary Men focuses a lot on this. You see the peer pressure, the feeling among the solders that they had to “do their part” in the dirty work of executing Jews, and to leave it to your comrades was to let the unit down. But nobody was penalized; they were just given some kind of alternate duty not directly involved in killing. “The battalion had orders to kill Jews, but each individual did not….Since the battalion had to shoot even if individuals did not, refusing to shoot constituted refusing one’s share of an unpleasant collective obligation.”
Anyway, this was a fabulous book with new insights for me. It resonated with my perceptions of how people think and behave, and I can better understand how ordinary people can be caught up as collaborators in horrible atrocities.
You may be surprised by the author I am about to recommend: Angelina Jolie. Yes, that Angelina, the Hollywood wild-child. Lately she’s been getting some attention because of her role as Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees. I’ve been aware of that for some time. Her movie “Beyond Borders,” with Clive Owen co-starring, involved UNHCR work in Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Chechnya. The DVD extras, spotlighting refugee crises in the world, were illuminating.
Then I read her 2003 book, Notes from My Travels. It’s wonderful–just observations, journal-style, from travels to Africa, Cambodia, Pakistan, and Ecuador. She travels without an entourage–just herself, meeting up with UN people, and often finding herself in potentially dangerous places. Her eye for meaningful detail is impressive. She doesn’t take potshots at America, as you expect celebrities to do. She doesn’t pontificate, doesn’t act like an expert. She just writes what she sees, and with great humility and compassion. And it’s fascinating.
In the book’s third paragraph, as she prepares for her first foreign visit–to Sierra Leone, in West Africa–she writes:
“I honestly want to help. I don’t believe I am different from other people. I think we all want justice and equality. We all want a chance for a life with meaning. All of us would like to believe that if we were in a bad situation, someone would help us….I don’t know why I think I can make any kind of difference. All I know is that I want to.”
I was skeptical initially. But she won me over with this passage from a stopover in the Ivory Coast, while en route to Sierra Leone. She is standing in a marketplace, watching people.
“Contrary to our image of this country, it’s people are civilized, strong, proud, stunning people. Any aggressive feeling is pure survival. There is no time for casual or lazy behavior.
“As I wrote that, I realized I am writing as if I am studying people in a zoo.
“I feel stupid and arrogant to think I know anything about these people and their struggles.”
I think of church people I’ve heard, returning from a two-week trip to build a church in Honduras or Jamaica, talking as if they are now experts on that country and have the people thoroughly psycho-analyzed. Jolie avoids any such pretense throughout the book.
Here are some other excerpts.
She tells the heart-breaking stories of dozens of refugees, with detail that you only pick up when you’re listening intently. Stories of dedicated UN workers, stories of refugee camps. Her observations from Cambodia’s “Genocide Museum” were gut-wrenching.
The book also reminded me of the importance of the United Nations. In the US, right-wing pundits continually say the UN is worthless, that the US should get out. Yes, the UN is seriously flawed and idiotic things happen (just as idiotic things happen in the US Congress). But the UNHCR works in 120 countries, serving 20 million people who are invisible to the rest of the world, people who depend on the UN (including US dollars) for survival. Would God be pleased if America pulled out of the UN, and left so many dispossessed people without any advocates?
Anyway, it’s quite a book. Angelina Jolie doesn’t pretend to be a Christian, but the type of stuff she does, and her spirit amidst it, certainly shows the attitude a Christian should have. And then we just have to figure out the other side, the Hollywood marriage-busting vixen. People often have two sides, I guess, including us church-goers. I just know that I’d gladly hear her speak, but wouldn’t walk across the street to hear Sean Penn or Michael Moore.
Recently I told my brother Rick, a fellow blogger, that it had been a while since I had posted an anti-Bush rant. At this point, it almost seems like piling on. Most people now realize what a hideous failure the Bush administration has been and how it has severely damaged our place in the world and destroyed any claim to moral authority. The exceptions would be people who:
I continually read stories which reference blunders by the Bush administration, but it’s done in almost a so-so way, as if Bush’s incompetence is old news and there’s no sense dwelling on it. We’re just killing time now until he leaves office and someone new can try to restore some sanity to what has been a self-indulgent, arrogant romp. Things which might have disturbed me in previous years now seem ho-hum, just more (as if we need more) evidence of how severely Bush has botched up my country.
Here are four items I’ve come across recently. Nothing spectacular about any of them, alone, but when put together, along with dozens of other stories…well, historians are going to have a hey-dey.
Stories like these emerge all the time, and in the years ahead, as respected historians tackle these eight years, much more will come to light. But I’ve heard so much that nothing will surprise me. I voted for this guy twice–I trusted him–and he trashed our country’s reputation and influence.
Okay, Rick, I got this out of my system for a while.
Every time I check, MSNBC, Headline News, and Fox are all talking about Anna Nicole Smith. Meanwhile, CNN is always doing something worthwhile. Like tonight, Anderson Cooper is in the Brazilian rain forest doing a report on the climate. I’ve noticed this night after night–three channels lazily doing fluff, while CNN tackles substance. It’s not a difficult choice deciding which channel to watch, even though James Dobson and the other Christian-culture elites would be terribly disappointed with me.
This just in: a Congressional hearing on Global Warming was postponed because of an ice storm in Washington DC.
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