----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas Barbour" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, September 22, 2008 11:46 AM
Subject: Re: "You Don't Mean That"
I shudder to think just who 'You' is/are, Fred. Nothing mitigated
here...
(this one based on some specific historical reading?)
Doug
Doug, Ken -- I read a book whose title and author I've completely blanked
out. His name wasn't Bleichman; I chose that for the sound and because
bleich, in German, means pale. He was taken in a German / Hungarian fascist
roundup and in his memoir (The Ninth something -- CAN'T find it on Amazon)
he describes the Orthodox prisoners in those terms. Ken, I know the sort of
exploitation and contempt (and the utter self-contempt that is behind it)
you describe in your second paragraph; I grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in
Chicago in the 50s. But the author of this memoir wasn't like that; he
suffered horribly and was simply trying to be as honest as possible.
Part of what I was after in this poem was the idea that when we label
people - especially after the fact - as victims we tend not to see them as
human, with faults; and that enables us not to see living people with faults
also as victims, and worthy of compassion. Some victims go on pedestals,
others are snubbed and kicked in their shadow. I doubt if any social or
human progress will change this, though I have to go on believing in both.
Hence the last stanza, whose voice makes you shudder, Doug. It's a distant
future, the last state of mankind: a kind of perfect, exhausted Sweden
perched on the dead.
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