May we all bless one another

This evening I rewatched one of my favorite films of the last few years. Joyeux Noël is a fictionalized account of the WWI Christmas Truce on the western front in 1914, and it is a very touching film. Sometimes we all need to be reminded that whatever differences we may have, even the ones that lead to anger, are very small in comparison to all that we have in common as human beings.

Injustice forgotten is injustice committed

President-elect Obama has said that he will close down the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.

That is a great thing, but it is not enough. All Americans should feel ashamed of the horrific things that have been done in our name, and we must make sure that what happened at Guantanamo is preserved as a lesson for future generations.

Please check out Remember Guantanamo.

Guantanamo: We must learn the truth and remember it always

Barack Obama has declared that he will close down the detainee facilities at Guantanamo Bay, but that long-overdue act will mean very little if we never find out what occurred there or if we are allowed to forget.

The place and the records must be preserved so that future generations may be reminded of a time when America strayed from its ideals. Justice demands that we cry out, "Never again!" We owe it to our children to preserve what we would prefer to deny, so that the lessons of the past will never be forgotten.

Our next president has asked us to all take part in the work of changing this country for the better. He has invited everyone to share their input here: http://www.change.gov/yourvision

I just sent him the following message, and I would encourage everyone who feels the same way to add your voices.

Dear President-Elect Obama,

Everything about the situation at Guantanamo Bay makes it one of the most shameful things in American history, and I do not doubt that you will restore justice and human rights to our nation by ending that disgrace. What I would ask is that when you close the down the prison camp at Guantanamo you do not let it be erased from our history. End the unlawful detention of the men held there, reaffirm the rule of law by giving them due process and fair trials, and close down that legal black hole, but do not bulldoze the prisons, do not allow the records of what happened there to be destroyed, and give the American people a chance to the know the truth about what was done in our name.

Although it is painful, the world benefits from being forced to remember such tragedies and constantly declare "Never again." It was only through the hard work of the survivors of the Nazi concentration camps that those sites were persevered to be memorials. Although its location makes it unlikely that schoolchildren will ever be able to walk those grounds and learn first-hand the lessons of one of the dark moments of American history, it is your responsibility to preserve as much as possible and allow the American people to know the truth of what happened there, no matter how much we would prefer to deny our sins.

This country is in great need of change, but it will be a great injustice if the restoration of this nation's dignity involves denial of the errors that made that change necessary.

Thank you

Introverts and separations

The realization that my summer is rapidly drawing to a close has resulted in a lot of aimless wandering through the goody-filled halls of the Internet, and today I came across an old article from The Atlantic that does a better job of expressing what it means to be an introvert than anything else I've ever read on the subject. Now if only there were a way to make extroverts realize how true it is...

I've also been following the horrified responses to recently upheld law in South Dakota that forces doctors to read a scripted statement (which was written by the legislature and has an only tangential relationship to science and reality). Even before you get to the free speech problems and the garbage science it is based on, the statement has a serious problem with basic logical coherence. As pointed out in the Human Nature blog on Slate, if a fetus is "a whole, separate, unique, living human being" then nobody needs to worry about getting an abortion, which the state defines as "the use of any means to intentionally terminate the pregnancy of a woman known to be pregnant with knowledge that the termination with those means will, with reasonable likelihood, cause the death of the fetus." If the fetus is already whole and separate, then who could think that there's a reasonable likelihood that removing it from the womb would cause its death?

The world is bit less awesome

RIP George Carlin

How to Use a Sledgehammer

I just got home from a performance of the The Laramie Project by the graduating MFA students of the National Theatre Conservatory. One of the great challenges of art is dealing with intense emotions without descending into melodrama, and in many ways it can be harder to avoid that pitfall when the material is drawn from reality, as opposed to a purely fictional situation. The great achievement of this play and the triumph of these actors was that they were able to reach the most dramatic peaks of emotional intensity without ever sacrificing the intellectual thrust of the narrative.

Back in January I saw and commented on the play Lydia, and it failed where the Laramie Project succeeds. This play reached the same levels of emotional intensity, but that visceral impact never felt like a gratuitous or manipulative action on the part of the actors, director, or playwright. On the contrary, the play was brilliant because it took the great aesthetic risk of having a purpose. It was neither didactic nor melodramatic, and yet it contained an almost frightening emotional intensity.

The Moral Aspect of a Sledgehammer

This evening I went to see the world premiere of Lydia, a new play that was commissioned by the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. It was extremely well-executed and powerful, but it also left me asking Why? The actors turned in excellent performances working with very difficult material, but I struggle to see what the playwright and the director were trying to accomplish. It was a brilliant sledgehammer of a play, but aside from the emotional spectacle of watching a family tear itself apart, I couldn't see that it accomplished anything.

That raises the question of whether art needs to have a "purpose" or if it should just be allowed to exist completely detached from moral considerations in a bubble of "art for art's sake". My feeling is that while art need not have a moral agenda, the artist must still take into consideration that it does exist in a moral world. Sometimes audiences need a play to be a sledgehammer that smashes ideas or expectations, but there's a reason we speak disparagingly of "shock value", and it is a shame that a play full of such beautifully crafted scenes ultimately did nothing more than revel in a spectacle of rage, guilt, and destruction.

* * *

A recent article in Slate has prompted a lot of thought on my part. I've actually never read anything by Nabokov, but I feel deeply conflicted about the question of whether his grandson should carry out his wishes and destroy his unfinished final novel. As a reader and scholar of literature, I have a knee-jerk reaction in favor of defying his wishes and releasing it to the public, but that thought sickens me when I consider that he clearly felt that it was incomplete.

At what point do the desires of the reading public override those the authors who provide the literature we crave? Does a writer's control over his work diminish in proportion to his greatness? I have no answers that can diminish my visceral feeling that the manuscript shouldn't be destroyed, and I feel like my inability to make up my mind on this issue is a failing on my part.