what joe said
KS
On 30/07/07, joe green <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Well, the point is you are not going to draw attention to the dead but to yourself. Why would you think the many will say "Oh, he's trying to show us something! How uncomfortable I am suddenly!"
>
> Nah -- you will be treated as a nut and a desecrating flibbertigibbet. Camp Iraq is a better idea. That's getting serious.
>
> Stephen Vincent <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Say, maybe folks ought to go back and read my original proposal for a
> temporary event with cloth covers over the stones.
>
> As to my alleged implication with acts of bigotry, desecration of the dead -
> along with the pieties and counter pieties, nationalist and otherwise, etc.
> I think folks are missing the original point. To draw attention to the dead
> - let alone the enormous number of permanently wounded - of BOTH sides of
> this War of Occupation. As most know, there is a huge disproportion. Several
> months ago one organization reported the number of civilian dead in Iraq was
> above 600,000. One would have to count way back through American wars until
> the Civil War to begin to approach that number. (Not also to think of huge
> number of Iraqi refugees in Jordan and Syria and elsewhere).
>
> My proposal was self-admitted provocative, to create outrage and a
> multi-national consideration and discussion of the incredible gravity of
> this carnage. Which is great to see here - rather than say silence. Other
> than the occasional personal lashing out, I appreciate the considerations of
> ways to acknowledge, and find some constructive way to respond to the fact,
> these ghosts of the dead.
>
> To pretend that the attention to the dead - particularly from wars - is a
> private matter between the dead and their families - is just plain silly. Do
> Jews, let alone the most of the rest of us, argue that the Holocaust should
> be treated as a private matter - that the continued public attention is
> 'bullshit'?? I have rarely experienced anything more profound than a visit
> to the Vietnam Memorial - soldiers, friends and families revisiting the
> names of families, buddies lost. It is national, familial experience. As
> people here have suggested it is a counter-heroic experience of the horror
> of war. (Ironically, to go back to my original proposal, there is not public
> awareness given to the Vietnamese dead and the horrors this country visited
> upon that country).
>
> Without belaboring the obvious, at least in the USA, the war in Iraq is - in
> the main quietly - under everyone's skin. ((Ironically, few of us know any
> soldiers in this war. CNN, the other night, revealed 120,000 military
> recruits today have criminal records)) The impotence, the inability to
> rebel, revolt, and transform this regime's dictatorial control of conditions
> is personally and publicly humiliating. The utility of poetry and art to
> speak, or let alone any public action to change course of anything in this
> war is deeply disturbing. Collectively there is a deep, inarticulate pain in
> the air. Brittleness abounds - as no few comments here suggest!!
>
>
> Stephen Vincent
> http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > Honouring graves is a basic human instinct. Consider Antigone.
> >
> > It's also one of the ways that palaeo-anthropologists differentiate between
> > the human and the animal.
> >
> > joanna
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Roger Day"
> > To:
>
> > Sent: Monday, July 30, 2007 10:10 AM
> > Subject: Re: New de blog - Stencil Art
> >
> >
> >> Every year in the UK, we have Armistice Day, with it's attendant pomp
> >> and circumstance. Originally meant to commemorate WW1, it became a
> >> commemoration of *all* wars, even the sordid little ones like Kenya.
> >> Now the 2 minutes silence is foisted on us in the workspace. Everyone
> >> *has to wear poppies. It's become an act of enforcement rather than
> >> remembrance. By this time, my bullshit meter is registering high, and
> >> I now opt-out of such "commemorations". It's become just another tool
> >> of patriotism, with little or no thought behind it.
> >>
> >> I'm with Mark about the desecration of the graves. I'm an atheist
> >> however I respect symbolism and feelings. Desecrating gravestones is
> >> distasteful and a gift to the bigot.
> >>
> >> Roger
> >>
> >> On 7/30/07, Mark Weiss wrote:
> >>> If memory serves, the right wing and a lot of other people protested
> >>> the war memorial not because of the names but because it lacked the
> >>> traditional statuary--the hard-right types thought its understatement
> >>> was an expression of shame, and the rest that a sort of decorum had
> >>> been violated, although the names have been enormously successful as
> >>> a sight for the expression of personal and generational griefs.
> >>> Myself, I think we should be ashamed that anyone dies in any war, no
> >>> matter how just. The resistance to adding statuary was largely on
> >>> aesthetic grounds, and the solution, to have the statuary somewhat
> >>> apart, seems to have worked for most.
> >>>
> >>> In every small town square in the US and Europe--I can't speak for
> >>> the rest of the world--the names of the dead of this or that war are
> >>> inscribed on monuments, whether the town was on the winning or losing
> >>> side. All over Britain the walls of churches are lined with the names
> >>> of those who died for the Empire, that evil sham. Who's trying to
> >>> keep the names from anyone?
> >>>
> >>> The problem, I think, is that governments and political activists of
> >>> right or left tend to treat those names as abstractions, just as they
> >>> tend to treat the living as abstractions, so many eggs that may need
> >>> to be broken to make an omelette. Neither the dead nor those who
> >>> loved them ought to be abstractions.
> >>>
> >>> I know you well enough to know that you're not on the side of that
> >>> distancing. You made a dumb, offensive suggestion. We all do that,
> >>> especially under the kind of stress we're all under. Let it drop.
> >>>
> >>> Once the juggernaut starts it's hard to derail it. The American war
> >>> in Vietnam began in 1950, when we began supplying the French as our
> >>> surrogate. By the end of thge French phase we were paying 80% of the
> >>> bill. Resistance in the US began, if memory serves, in 1966. The US
> >>> withdrew its forces in 1973 and most of its money in 1975. Why did it
> >>> take so long? I hate to think that all of my facing nightsticks and
> >>> tear gas had no effect on the war, but US forces were on the ground
> >>> for five years after Lyndon Johnson threw in the towel. The present
> >>> war would stop today if it were a matter of the people's will. So
> >>> I'll keep on protesting, but I have limited faith in the efficacy of
> >>> my presence as theater, no matter how offensive I were to make
> >>> myself. What pressure we can exert, and it's what will get us out of
> >>> Iraq, is at the ballot box. We're only delaying the unrestrained
> >>> bloodbath that will almost certainly ensue--removing the apex from a
> >>> pyramidal power structure without a replacement on hand is usually
> >>> disastrous, no matter how vicious the apex is. But it's not going to
> >>> be fun to watch the results of what our leaders have wrought in our name.
> >>>
> >>> Mark
> >>> At 05:55 PM 7/29/2007, you wrote:
> >>>> As you rightfully point out, Ken, those who are dead by State means
> >>>> (mainly
> >>>> war), they are constantly with us. The dead person is not a sole,
> >>>> private
> >>>> family matter. I remember well the way in which the right wing in this
> >>>> country protested and resisted the creation of the Vietnam Memorial -
> >>>> which
> >>>> brought the names of America soldiers back into the public light of day.
> >>>> The
> >>>> right did not want us - as a nation - to cope with the origins and
> >>>> terrible
> >>>> consequences of that miserably conceived war.
> >>>>
> >>>> Such will also be true of the dead in Iraq. (Pity the well paid
> >>>> mercenary/contractor/ soldiers who don't get no acknowledgement).
> >>>>
> >>>> It is an interesting query to wonder if the dead are ever completely
> >>>> released from their public contract into a purely family matter. Say
> >>>> whether
> >>>> German, Israeli, Cambodian, American, Iraqui, Palestinian - I am sure
> >>>> most
> >>>> of know the 20th Century list of offenders and offended.
> >>>> Greek plays wrestled with this often enough.
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> I am not sorry, Ken, if my proposal blew it all back up in your face, or
> >>>> if
> >>>> it gets in the way of removing yourself from 'outrage fatigue.' Such as
> >>>> it
> >>>> is for those of us who might want to pretend we are not implicated in
> >>>> all of
> >>>> this, and somehow can gratuitously disengage from this or any other
> >>>> disaster at will.
> >>>>
> >>>> No matter how silent, inevitably, we remain implicated
> >>>>
> >>>> Stephen V
> >>>> http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>> Stephen Vincent wrote:
> >>>>>> Dear Ken and Laura:
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> It's curious, Ken, that the first image your mind is a 'Swastika'!
> >>>>>> It does
> >>>>>> not surprise me, or I find it 'predictable", as I suggested,
> >>>> that you would
> >>>>>> confuse or equate an act of compassionate acknowledge for the Iraqi
> >>>>>> dead
> >>>>>> with Nazi behavior on my part. I would go a little deeper into your
> >>>>>> 'analytical well' before making such a knee-jerk, offensive
> >>>>>> assumption.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Fine. Temporary or permanent, what is the qualitative difference
> >>>>> between Krylon and envelopes. Both acts are incredibly
> >>>>> disrespectful.
> >>>>> Next step: I would never have gone to Bitburg the way that
> >>>>> jellybean-fressing moron in the White House did back in the 1980s. I
> >>>>> would not treat their resting places as sacred ground in the sense I
> >>>>> would the unmarked graves of Dachau or Buchenwald. But neither would
> >>>>> I
> >>>>> use those graves to make some political point.
> >>>>>> The war is the real outrage - and so many of us - among the dead and
> >>>>>> the
> >>>>>> living - have been silenced. How to make art and poems that move
> >>>> beyond the
> >>>>>> silence is the issue.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Yes, it is an outrage, but to be perfectly frank, I am
> >>>>> outrage-fatigued. If you have any left, fine. I don't.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> k
> >>>>>
> >>>>> --------------------
> >>>>> Ken Wolman rainermaria.typepad.com
> >>>>>
> >>>>> There's a lot of wisdom here among the employees,
> >>>>> Some of us have street smarts and some have Ph.Ds.
> >>>>> We're all bored and tired but we've all learned ways to cope
> >>>>> Some of us drink after work, the rest of us smoke dope.
> >>>>> --Austin Lounge Lizards, "Industrial Strength Tranquilizers"
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> My Stuff: http://www.badstep.net/
> >> "In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons."
> >> Roman Proverb
> >>
>
>
>
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