In a few minutes of down time the other day at work I started reading this Boston Phoenix
piece which featured 11 prominent area thinkers (none of them black but in eurocentric Boston whaddya' expect) and found it to be a worthwhile read.
As a former investigative journalist, I particularly liked journalist E.J. Graff's piece, which I blockquote in part below the fold.
But before I get there a moment of reflection is in order:
That Phoenix piece dovetailed with Sunday night's CBS presentation on the firefighters that my sister and I watched with rapt attention. It was told not so much through any political lens but as a human interest story, which I appreciated. [More]
There was a convergence between politics, human interest and art that proved quite compelling:
Art?
Yes. I was a reporter, and have media savvy people in my family, and have always been friends with many more artists than lawyers (I practiced from '93 - 2000 for government and on my own as a Civil Rights lawyer) and am involved in two video sites, KingCast.net and Justiceforkids.net.
So as I'm watching this incredible footage -- they were inside the South Tower when it collapsed and you see it and continually hear debris and bodies hitting the esplanade -- I hear one man ask "what could it really be like up there that your best option is to jump?"
But perhaps more compelling than the action footage was the aftermath, and the twisted architecture of disaster. The forms presented are very jagged, disjointed and sinister. That view is much more shocking from the lens of the film maker in this story than any newspaper picture could ever capture. People are walking around just like something out of Dawn of the Dead. As I viewed the forms, I listened in amazement to the firefighters describe the complete absence of anything of substance in between these forms... in the negative space.
One firefighter said:
"You got 100 floors of offices and you don't find a single desk. You don't find a chair. You don't even find a phone."
I looked in all of these spaces as the firefighters did their job, gingerly stepping from one beam to the next, and yet I found nothing more than they did. What I DID find in that negative space is a lot of hatred and despair. And who created that hatred and despair? Not us. Not any of us as individuals, in any country, but rather the governments that we elected. It is so sad. I don't vote for my government to kill people and I abhor War in general but it will always be there in part because it's a cash cow and in part because absolute power corrupts absolutely, as Mr. Graff and perhaps in some ways Franz Kafka's Problem of our Laws so aptly addresses:
I'll leave you with the excerpt from the Graff piece:
.....I've also come to learn, again with grief and sadness, about how strong the totalitarian impulse is in human nature. About how many ways it will come up. Of course we all know now about communism and fascism, but this impulse wasn't just a 20th-century thing. It's now manifested strongly in religion, in Islamic totalitarian impulses, as well as in Christian evangelical ones. That impulse toward absolutism certainly exists in almost every religion -- in fact, in almost every moral system, including the political -- but those are the two places in which we're seeing it come up strongly now. There was a time when it was expressed more commonly in non-theist and atheist ways, and now the same sort of utopian-totalitarianism -- that the world would be perfect if I obey the leader or ideology that would make it perfect -- tends to be more strongly expressed elsewhere. That longing for moral and political certainty is not something we can eradicate, but we do have to continue to call it out when it comes up.
We are seeing various expressions of the totalitarian impulse, including in our government right now. That tendency to fight totalitarianism with totalitarianism. That, if there are people who want to "destroy" our way of life, then we have to fight them by pretty much doing the same things -- the mirror impulse that led to things like Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, or "extraordinary rendition."
The impulse toward safety through absolutism and idealism is so terrifying and so deep in human nature; it occurs in progressive and leftist thought just as often as it does on the right. Every utopianism is totalitarian at heart. This is such a human impulse and so complicated and difficult to recognize. It recurs so regularly in so many different clothes. Almost nobody goes and blows up buildings because they think of themselves as evil. They do it out of a belief in good -- and good is a terrible thing sometimes, a very dangerous temptation.