and then I remember that our school doesn't exactly have classes in the kind of history I would like to study.
Anyway, you know how everyone (especially American observers) dislikes that organized religion, when portrayed by the Japanese, always turns out bad, cultish, worse than the "villain" if not the "villain", sexually deviant, etc.? As quoted from
the New York Times...
As the Lovecraft scholar Robert M. Price argues in an insightful introduction, the original Cthulhu stories resonate uniquely in Japan, a nation that has not only a documented affinity for giant green, scaly monsters, but also a longstanding fear of any organized activity that smacks of cultism — a land where Christianity was alternately banned and bastardized for centuries.
Americans, by contrast, don't have the history of Aum Shinrikyo. We actually don't have that many cults anymore, and we're more likely to associate "religious cult" with Tom Cruise and Scientology than with sarin gas and subway attacks.
See, it makes sense, and I don't even know any Japanese history. I sort of wonder if this may be the reason that I always portray organized religion badly too, because Indonesian religion is rarely all that organized, and is much more of a personal choice, how much you worship, how you worship, no matter what the scholars would want, and the kind of mass integration of worship that exists in America just doesn't exist there.
I also realized that I like Shaun of the Dead for very similar reasons that I like other post-apocalyptic movies, even if it is funny, because it too shows the stripped down version and values of each character. Mild-mannered, unambitious Shaun is actually a leader. Ed and David, by contrast, are actually not, and both are self-obsessed, though David is self-obsessed
and spiteful, whereas Ed is just self-obsessed.
Oh yeah.
Kurt Vonnegut is dead. I unfortunately said "yay" when Kim told me this before I could stop myself, because
Slaughterhouse Five is my third least favorite novel. I know, I know. Bad karma galore. Kim asked me why I disliked
Slaughterhouse Five so much, and I couldn't come up with a very good reason other than that the book just didn't sit well with me - I just disliked it. Then again, if his was the philosophy of the '60s and '70s, maybe that explains some of it too. I have not been known to agree with that generation. And yes, my parents were there, but they also weren't. It was different in Indonesia.
Slaughterhouse Five, you see, is a purely American novel, full of American presumptions, but it parades itself as one of the whole world. You can tell from Mr. Vonnegut's own writing, however, how very un-universal he really was:
“The firebombing of Dresden,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote, “was a work of art.” It was, he added, “a tower of smoke and flame to commemorate the rage and heartbreak of so many who had had their lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of Germany.”
This event (that Billy Pilgrim witnesses in the book as a prisoner of war, just like Mr. Vonnegut did in real life, proving that the self-satisfied, pathetic Pilgrim is a stand-in for himself) was the saddest point of the book for me, the only part that resonated, and it didn't resonate for that reason. It resonated because so many people were dying, and to me, it didn't matter that they were Germans or Nazis or how bad they had been. They were still dying. I identify with Indonesia, but that doesn't mean that I'm happy to know that the Japanese - the nation that as colonizer has treated Indonesia the worst - had to endure the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I don't crow and say, "Yeah, that's what you get for enslaving us." I also have big problems with the phrase "so it goes". To me it screams - or rather, shrugs - of apathy, which I can't stand. Yes, it's all a charade, isn't it, life. We're all going to die anyway. We're brought here just to suffer through stupidity and a lackluster society, and for what? For nothing. Yes, and you must accept that. I come to the conclusion that our goal is to survive - not only that, but to help as many other people survive too. Not because you'll be rewarded in the afterlife or in this one. Just because I do think we can alleviate pain, little by little, and if we can, even for a moment, why wouldn't we?
However, I do like the poem that he used to close his final novel, called "Requiem".
When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done."
People did not like it here.
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