Who was Cassandra?
In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters
of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo
loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed
that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow
Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well,
you know what happened.
the cassandra pages
words, pictures, and a life
Saturday, March 22, 2003
Meanwhile, spring is coming to my village. On Thursday the ice started to break up in the river, and apparently it flooded the home of a family of beavers living on an island near the bridge. But these are resiliant, well-prepared refugees. Looking down, we could see six beavers swimming, hanging out on the bank and on big chunks of ice, and chewing sticks. It was hard to tell if they were already engaged in rebuilding, or just waiting out the high water to see if they could go back home. Maybe I can tell when I go back down to check today. In the trees outside my house, huge flocks of suddenly-returned redwing blackbirds are making a huge joyful racket -- and yesterday I spotted some pussy willows in the swamp. Maple sugarers say the sap is running intermittently. So it's coming -- and after this winter, not a moment too soon.
1:57 PM
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Couldn't sleep much last night. And, frankly, why should I have the peacefulness of sleep when my country is bombing a foreign country, terrorizing its residents, killing its poor conscripted soldiers ("I felt kind of sorry of them," said one generous American officer in today's news, "they looked like they hadn't had much to eat."), on the basis of flimsy lies and hypocrisy? "To eliminate weapons of mass destruction". Yep. And to do so, we get to unleash the most horrific display of the same that the world has ever seen. Sorry, world, only America gets to have the weapons, only America gets to control the playground. I saw a photo yesterday of two protesters holding a sign that had a map of the world, with every country colored-in with the stars and stripes, and at the top it said, "The American Dream". Since that's not MY dream, or a dream ever held by anyone in my family or anyone close to me, it makes me cringe with shame and go limp with horror and helplessness to stop this war machine operating in our names.
At our Friday vigil yesterday, one woman held a sign that simply read," Madness. Madness. Madness."
Was anyone besides me stunned by Richard Perle's editorial in yesterday's Guardian? His title: "Thank God for the Death of the UN." What a display of arrogance. I wonder if these self-styled Christians have ever read the books of Kings or Chronicles, and what the prophets had to say about overreaching power, pride, and self-righteousness. And even leaving aside the prophets - these are books of history, and they tell what happened to that long, long succession of kings that came after David. It wasn't exactly pretty.
Excellent interview, though brief, with journalist Chris Hedges on NPR. A friend sent the transcript. He is talking about the myth-making that happens in time of war: "...we don't look at ourselves in wartime with any kind of self-criticism or self-awareness. We have become good. We have become the saviors of the planet. I mean, this flies in the face of tremendous opposition and anger towards us across the globe. But, you know, even our allies, the French and the British, when they criticize the effort, we turn on them. And, you know, for instance, I find--the jokes about the French on the late-night shows, I don't find them funny. They're racist, and they are a symptom of our narcissism, the fact that we now stare into the pool and see only our own reflection, and a symptom of that racism that is always the flip side of nationalism."
Thursday, March 20, 2003
Can you feel it? The tension as the short, brittle hours count down; the faint but palpable cries from faraway hearts?
I am brittle today too: edgy, irritated, snapping at my husband uncharacteristically, realizing I need to handle the porcelain teapot with extra care. I can’t bear what’s about to happen.
Those who aren’t pacifists apparently can’t understand this pacing, these sweaty palms, the sickness inside. They don’t share the sense of personal responsibility and complicity I feel in the face of war, genocide, and execution.
But neither can I understand how someone can send another person’s child into war, or how they can face even a single morning knowing they’ve caused the deaths of innocent civilians, let alone another human being. I cannot fathom war-as-theory, war-as-game, or victory in war as something thrilling. I can’t imagine what kind of perversion of the human spirit creates a person who can plan to launch the greatest destructive force the world has ever known, and then claim to "sleep like a baby".
What I do understand is the agony of a beautiful activist friend who seems to be wasting away before my eyes. "Are you eating?" I ask her.
"Yes, I’m eating," she tells me. "I look haggard because I’m not sleeping. I can’t sleep because this thing is breaking my heart."
And so I’ve spent the day -- this day that feels like an ultimate Good Friday -- trying to work, trying to do "normal" things, well aware that nothing is normal, that it may be a very long time before the world feels normal again. As a pacifist and a liberal Christian, I’m wracked by two conflicting emotions: the desire to be peaceful and centered and to have the ability to pray for the innocents, for the soldiers, and for Bush and Hussein and all the other leaders whose policies I abhor -- and an intense anger at everyone who has contributed to bringing us to this abyss. On this day of self-examination I don’t exempt myself. Somehow it doesn’t help in these final hours to know that I’ve been a dedicated antiwar activist, to know I’ve tried. All I have to do is look around at my comfortable home, or hear the oil-burning furnace come on, or draw some clean water from the tap. All I have to do is walk over to the filing cabinet and take out last year’s tax return with my signature at the bottom, authorizing the use of my money for whatever purpose my government decides. What percentage for tanks and bombs and depleted uranium shells? I could do the math and figure out my personal subsidy. If I really wanted to go crazy, I could do the math.
The anger persists, and toward mid-afternoon I realize a lot of it is anger at that particular kind of high-testosterone male aggression that is fueled by revenge. It cannot see the victim, cannot empathize, cannot imagine another way other than striking out with violence. It feeds on itself and on talk with other like members of the species, enlarging, encouraging, exaggerating, moving inexorably toward a violent, cathartic release. These are the 82% of Republican men who give Bush his biggest support in the polls. They’re the young men in souped-up cars who yell obscenities at us as we stand for our street-corner vigils. They’re the guys who perpetuate our culture of violent video games, movies and TV, tune in to Fox, and can’t wait to watch the U.S. kick Saddam’s ass.
This is the maleness that has given rise to, and perpetuated, all patriarchal systems. Theirs is the personal patriarchy that treats women as property but insists it is only protecting them. Theirs is the patriarchy that institutionalized oppression of women, and allowed slavery, and fought tooth and nail against emancipation and equal rights for any groups other than itself. It is the patriarchy that destroyed native cultures, and gave rise to colonialism and empire-building. It is the patriarchy that chooses theory over empathy, the patriarchy that always knows best
I believe that what we’re seeing now are the last, desperate acts of the remaining believers in patriarchal systems. How ironic that we are witnessing a confrontation between George Bush and his cabal -- the ultimate inheritors of the Western tradition of unfettered white male power -- against Islamic fundamentalists, determined to hold onto the last vestiges of an Eastern tribal tradition rooted in male dominance and fearing nothing more than equal rights and freedom for women. And if the fundamentalists sound incredibly backward, then how deluded and hypocritical are the westerners, with all their talk of liberty and freedom, which must be "preserved" or established through violence, militarism, and repression of free speech and civil liberties! If this is democracy, who would want it?
Israel, that highly-touted democratic experiment set down among the Arabs, has been, until the invasion of Iraq, the last gasp of western colonialism. It daily becomes less democratic in direct proportion to its increased militarism, violence, oppression, and paranoia. And so does the United States. The men and the ideologies currently ruling these two countries are cut from the same cloth, and their hubris and errors are the same.
Meanwhile, independently of these dramas, the world has for more than a century been slowly and painfully moving toward a different paradigm -- one that honors equal rights for all races and for women, and cries out against exploitation, oppression, injustice, and war. This process can be delayed or even arrested for a time, but there is no stopping it, short of annihilating the human race altogether. We need only look at the growing anti-globalisation movement, or the Catholic Church, or the worldwide opposition to the Iraq War, to see the shockwaves and what they portend. Dying patriarchies reveal themselves by their insecurity and their reliance on disproportionate use of force. Consider the massive security surrounding each G-7 Economic Summit, or Israel’s apparent need to drive bulldozers over young women, or kill six-year-old Palestinian boys armed with pebbles -- or George Bush’s need to use overwhelming military force to disarm a country already weakened by sanctions and lacking any equal ability to fight back. These shameful displays of aggression aren’t far removed from clubbing seals.
Yet I believe the days of patriarchal power are numbered. The ranks of women and men in all cultures who understand and voluntarily choose a different way of being are increasing. Threatened people will instigate huge battles to maintain the old systems, and for a time it may feel that we are going backwards. It’s unlikely that these changes will happen in our lifetime; perhaps they will take another hundred years or more. But the ultimate trend is clear.
If I am going to deal with my own anger constructively, perhaps I can dredge up some compassion for people who sense, even dimly, the threat to the only system they know, the only way of being they can comprehend. Like dumb, cornered animals, they fail to recognize sincerity, refuse cooperation, lash out in loud rhetorical barks, exaggerate the degree of provocation, and attack pre-emptively. They are locked in a cage that only they can see. How horrible it must be to experience life this way, whether you are Osama bin Laden, hating and fearing the West with its personal freedom, its emancipated women, and its lack of understanding of all the traditions and values you hold dear, or George Bush, thinking that friendship and loyalty can be bought with dollars, terror quelled by violence, and true democracy established by the forced occupation of a sovereign people and the repression of your own.
The world sees through them both, as it begins to see with clearer and clearer eyes all patriarchal systems that promise protection in exchange for economic or political or sexual submission. On this eve of destruction, perhaps we can try to look forward, far forward, seeing these terrible and tragic events as part of the death-throes of patriarchy: a crucial step in the long unfolding of God’s true plan -- not of Armageddon -- but of real freedom and justice for all the earth’s people.
