I don't really know what to feel about bin Laden's death.

I saw a headline online today: “Musings on the death of a madman.” I know bin Laden has been called a mad man since he started blowing people up, but it makes me uneasy, calling him that. It’s certainly easy to do so. Easy to relegate him to the cast of historical crazies, men whose acts were so violent, so reprehensible, that they MUST have been mad, because sane people don’t do such horrible things. But as far as I know, bin Laden wasn’t crazy. He did evil things, but he did them for reasons that, to him, made sense. Hitler did too, for that matter. Both men had values that were accepted by many others, goals based on their ideals, plans to reach them. Each took the logical steps to reach his goal. If we write history’s monsters off as nut jobs, it keeps us safe from our own lesser darkness. It creates a high, thick wall between us and them. They can do those things because they’re crazy. We’re not crazy. We’re different. We don’t blow up buildings with the express purpose of killing thousands of civilians. We accept civilian deaths (we call it ‘collateral damage’) as part of war…but that’s different (and it is, but is it a qualitative difference, or merely a relative one? Does that matter?) We may use enhanced interrogation techniques…but that’s different; we don’t cut off fingers. We don’t execute political prisoners, but we execute those who ‘deserve’ it, insisting their guilt absolves us of ours.

Osama bin Laden deserved to die, by any rational human standard (inasmuch as any of us are in a position to make that call). He did cruel, violent and terrible things. More horrible than any of us can ever imagine doing. But he wasn’t crazy. He was a human being, who had been angered, inspired to believe fiercely in whatever it was he believed in, and who lived out those beliefs to their most extreme conclusion.

I wasn’t personally affected by 9/11. I lost no family or friends. I’ve lost no one in the armed services. I remember walking into Mr. Bird’s room that morning and seeing the towers fall on the corner-mounted TV. I thought it was another one of his movies (we watched Predator when we studied Beowulf) and wondered what book it “related” to. Even after being shuffled into the school gym with the rest of the 200 kids in my high school, after hearing our teachers tell us what was happening, it still all seemed like one of Mr. Bird’s movies to me. And, in a lot of ways, it has continued to. I’ve never been to Ground Zero. I have no tangible connection to those events. I’ve been emotionally moved watching newsreel footage, but the events portrayed haven’t changed my life in any noticeable way, really. So, given that, I feel in a poor position to even form an opinion on the rightness or wrongness of what’s taken place over the last 24 hours. I didn’t lose anyone. I don’t want vengeance. I haven’t spent the last ten years of my life hoping for justice.

But then I’m not so sure I know what ‘justice’ means, anyway. It is used, it seems, as a synonym for ‘retribution.’ An eye for an eye is just. A tooth for a tooth. Justice is getting what’s coming to you. Karma is justice. It’s an unsatisfactory-sounding justice, I guess. And maybe that’s the best we can hope for this side of eternity. But I hope that’s not true. Shouldn’t justice be making things whole? Or at least better? Maybe bin Laden’s death will, ultimately make things right, in some way. Or better. Or not as f-ed up as they have been for the last ten years. I don’t know, I mean, I hope it does. But I’m not celebrating it. I am in no position to rebuke those for whom bin Laden’s death means their child’s murderer is dead. Or their mother’s. Or their friend’s. But I feel unsettled and uneasy by the whole media bonanza of exclamation points and congratulatory phrases. I thought maybe writing out my thought process would ease my unease. It hasn’t, particularly. I like having an easy position to retreat to, a nice clearly expressible opinion on whatever the issue of the day may be. But I don’t.

Do you know who Sarah Josepha Hale was?

Because I did not.

I'm embarrassed to admit that if you had asked me yesterday when Thanksgiving was first established as a national holiday, I would have had no idea. Today, in my internet meanderings, I discovered that it was officially declared a national holiday by Abraham Lincoln, in the middle of the Civil War, of all times. Cool, I thought, way to go Lincoln!
Then I meandered through the internet a little more, and discovered that it wasn't Lincoln's idea at all. A woman named Sarah Josepha Hale (who wrote Mary Had a Little Lamb) had spent 17 years writing letters to presidents trying to get one of them to make an official proclamation that the last Thursday of November would be a national day of thanksgiving. (FDR changed it to be the fourth Thursday so that the Christmas shopping season would be longer.) She wrote editorials in her magazine about a national Thanksgiving holiday, and finally Lincoln listened to one of her letters and voila, the whole country eats poultry, bakes pies, and watches football at the end of every November.
And so, for your cultural edification (and as a little reminder of how much more eloquent and literate people used to be), here is Lincoln:

By the President of the United States of America.

A Proclamation.

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consiousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the Unites States the Eighty-eighth.

By the President: Abraham Lincoln

A tour of the Delta

I just got back from New Orleans this afternoon, but went to upload those photos and realized there were a couple from earlier in this grand southern adventure that I'd yet to put up. So, I will leave my New Orleans trip for another night and give you a quick snippet of Mississippi.

First week here I signed up for a bus tour being offered by a professor here at Delta State. We drove through corn fields, and cotton fields, and rice fields, and looked at some Blues landmarks, including a crossroads near Dockery Farm where Robert Johnson might have sold his soul to the Devil to learn how to play the guitar.

Since the story itself is obviously apocryphal, the site itself is also apocryphal, and so the actual spot we stopped at looked like this.

A major highlight of the trip was (as is usually the highlight of most things for me) the food. We all got lunch at a soul food place all-you-can-eat buffet. I got fried chicken, chicken with gravy, and some pulled pork that made me suddenly mourn my five vegetarian years. Plus beans, plus greens, plus boiled cabbage. If I didn't value my cardiovascular health, I could eat like this every day.
If I didn't have to get up in less than five hours, I could go on about the other historical sites we drove past, but I'm going to be lazy, give you one more little tidbit and then throw up some photos. The last stop on our tour was a place called Po' Monkey's. Po' Monkey's is one of the last remaining Juke Houses, which were make-shift music halls where people could come and hang out and play the blues. It was built as a sharecropper's shack back in the day, and looks like it was pieced together with tin and plywood from a junk heap.
But this guy named Willie Seaberry lives here, and has lived here for sixty-some-odd years. And every Thursday the place is open for business. Sometimes there is still live music, although usually there is a DJ that works the night. Mr. Seaberry doesn't exactly have a liquor license, but he sells beers out of the fridge in the kitchen of the shack. The inside of the place was decked out in the accumulated memorabilia of sixty years. There was a definite monkey theme, with stuffed monkeys hung all over the walls, but otherwise the ornament itself didn't really seem to matter provided it covered a piece of wall or ceiling and was colorful or interesting. All 80 or so of us mostly middle-class, mostly white kids piled off the bus and within minutes were packed into this tiny little shack that maybe holds 40 comfortably, ooh-ing and ahh-ing over the quaintness and oddness of it all. Mr. Seaberry was friendly and seemed happy to have us gawking about, but it felt a little like invading someone's living room and going around commenting on their family photos. I hope this place stays around for a long time.

It was oddly reassuring to me to be reminded that America doesn't all look like the middle-class East Coast suburbs I grew up in, or the upscale metropolitan areas where I've lived. Whole huge chunks of it look like rice fields and cypress-wood shacks, and to the people who live there, that's America. The view that I know I tend to have of what (or who) our country is can get so limited that it's humbling, and sometimes startling, to be reminded what exists outside whatever little concept of America we're comfortable with.

In which I visit the American Museum of Natural History

As a sidebar, I have little use for Manhattan. Fun to visit for a day or two, but you couldn’t pay me enough money to live there (or enough money to AFFORD living there.) As I was walking north to the Whitney, I forgot where Times Square was and so accidentally found myself in it. I generally try to be optimistic about the future of our country. However, I do sometimes have moments of panic in which I imagine our entire society collapsing, Rome-style. In the moment right before this happens though, my dystopian imagined-future looks something like Times Square smeared all over the country. Horrifying.

On the positive and lovely side however, I took a long detour through Central Park after I left the Whitney and before I stumbled into the Museum of Natural History. I’d been in the park before, but really only in the open parts with benches and meadows and things. There’s a whole chunk of it that’s foresty and natural-looking and that was really quite beautiful.
Chicago is still, hands-down, my favorite U.S. city, but NY has us beat in the giant-public-park category. Millennium Park doesn’t quite cut it. Particularly since aliens from the future landed there and set up a “band-stand.” I went into Central Park from the Whitney on the east side of the park (around 75th street) intending to walk south and wind up coming out the bottom of the park (59th). I got a little turned around though, and came out on the west side of the park near the Museum of Natural History (81st). So…I got a little turned around. But all for the best because I’d forgotten to look up where the Natural History museum was, so I wasn’t expecting to find it on purpose. And then voila! I only had about an hour to spend there before heading back down to meet up with Alyssa (near 39th) but I could have spent all day in there. I hung out in the African and Meso-American exhibits, with a little junket through the Native American tribes. So much beautiful art, and elaborately decorated artifacts, and fascinatingly weird magic/religious/fetish items. There was a wind-chime-looking thing made by a tribe from what is now the Congo, that was supposed to make it rain, because the dangly loops are supposed to look like falling rain drops. If you’re going to have magical superstitions, they might as well be poetic and creative.

There was also a bad-ass charm for made by another Congo-area tribe. The caption called it “Medicine for protection against forest spirits.” I thought it kind of looked like a necklace Free People might sell for a couple hundred bucks, but it sure is a lot more interesting-looking than any medicine I’ve ever seen.

Another accessory you probably wouldn’t see in Free People was a necklace (headband?) made out of dead birds, from someplace in a South American rainforest. Some of the birds are Honeycreepers, which I remember we had in the Nature Museum’s butterfly haven where I volunteered in Chicago. I liked them better alive, but they’re still pretty beautiful dead, I guess.

Gettysburg and Antietam

This past week, all five Andersens piled into my Dad’s Camry and we did a two-day civil war battlefields trip: Gettysburg and Antietam. We stayed with family in Maryland, and my cousin Zoe, who just turned six, drew my portrait.

The battlefields themselves were similar in a lot of ways. Both involved a visitor center, with a dramatically-narrated movie (James Earl Jones for one, Morgan Freeman for the other) with lots of reenactors and some museum-type exhibits.

The main attraction at both battlefields was the self-guided driving tour through the farmland and woods where the fighting took place. The fields at Gettysburg, and Antietam to a lesser extent, were lined with memorials erected over the years by veterans groups to various regiments: the 11th Pennsylvania Infantry, the 1st Maryland Cavalry, the Massachusetts Sharpshooters, and so on. Hundreds and hundreds of stone markers, obelisks, bronze soldiers, men on horseback, crosses, slabs – over acres and acres of battlefields.

You drive along, and get out to look at some of them. The map tells you where to stop to see where this charge happened, or where this skirmish took place, or where the cannons were lined up. Military history per se has never really done it for me – battlefield strategy, maneuvering, who had what guns and what numbers – just not my thing. So honestly, I couldn’t tell you exactly what happened at either Gettysburg or Antietam. I know that Robert E. Lee tried to move North, and failed each time. The thing that hit me though, was the sheer number of people who died at each battle. Something like 8,000 men, all Americans, killed each other at Gettysburg. At Antietam, 4,000 people killed each other in a DAY. And in the whole Civil War, over 600,000 people died altogether. More than half a MILLION. I just can’t wrap my head around a number that big, period, much less when that number represents actual people. There was a quote from the period typed up in one of the visitor center museums: “Every name is a lightning stroke to some heart and it breaks like thunder over some home, and it falls a long black shadow upon some hearthstone." The other thing too is that there were so many photographs from the Civil War. So you see these mens’ faces, and their funny hats, and bad haircuts. I don’t know. Just unbelievably sad, I guess.

And you like to think we’re moving forward. We don’t line people up in fields and charge at each other with rifles and bayonets anymore. Soldiers don’t die from infection right and left, or have limbs sawed off in tents. But now, instead of slaughtering each other in cornfields, we can kill people half-way around the world with remote-control drone planes operated from some air-conditioned military base safely in the U.S. Which makes war much less terrible for us, of course. But there was another quote I remember from one of the museums, that Lee said at some point during the war: “It is well that war is so terrible – otherwise we would grow too fond of it.”

A less-somber side note. Gettysburg was swarming with groups of high school students. Hordes of teenagers, punching each other, singing songs and, mysteriously, pretending to be galloping horses running around the museum. Of course, in fairness, I remember field trips being basically fun times to hang out with your friends and act ridiculous. But man, I hope I am ready for the youth of America.

“A supermarket of surrogate experience”

One of the perks of living in a house where people have an almost unhealthy inability to throw things away, is that along with the piles of useless things, there are often some interesting things kicking around too. This morning I noticed pile of Life magazines from the 1970s sitting on a bench in the living room. The September 1971 issue promised a special section on “TV: The First 25 Years.” Wild. Maybe one day we’ll get “A quarter-century of Facebook.”

The article was eerily…not prescient, but something similar. The main gist of the piece is the isolation and segregation of TV viewing. I suppose TV hasn’t really changed much in that respect (texting your votes to American Idol does not a community make), but so many of the other technologies we have developed since 1971 have expanded, rather than reeled in, that isolation. Not all of them of course – Skype and cell phones and things connect us with real people we know in real life – but a lot of things keep us apart in ways we didn’t used to be apart. Riding the bus to work every morning for the past two years surrounded by 15 people all with ipods in their ears, who couldn’t hear my “Excuse me, can I get by?” much less any effort at friendly small talk, made me a little sad. I thought these bits were interesting:

“But as always before, to see a performance was to share an experience with a visible audience. At a concert, or a ball game, or a political rally, the audience was half the fun. What and whom you saw in the audience was at least as interesting, and often humanly more important, than what you saw on the stage. While watching TV, the lonely American is thrust back on herself. She can, of course, exclaim or applaud or hiss, but nobody hears except the family in the living room […] And while myriad island audiences gather nightly around their sets […] with more and more two-TV families, a member of the family can actually withdraw and watch in complete privacy […] A new miasma – which no machine before could emit – enshrouds the world of TV. We begin to be so accustomed to this foggy world, so at home and solaced and comforted within and by its blurry edges, the reality itself becomes slightly irritating.”

The article goes on to wonder if “TV-democratized experience” can “carry us to a new society, beyond the traditional democracy of learning and politics.” The answer given is, in part that “We must find ways outside TV to restore the sense of personal presence, the sense of neighborhood, of visible fellowship, or publicly shared enthusiasm and dismay.” Fair enough. The other part of the author’s answer is a bit different: “We must try every institutional and technological device—from more specialized stations to pay TV, to cable TV, and other devices still unimagined.” Pay-per-view as the answer to society’s problems! Oh, those wacky 70s.