a sense of joy and then a panic

Last night I was researching Iris Chang (the writers who committed suicide page is always interesting!), a Chinese-American journalist-cum-historian who got noticed when she published The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.  She wrote in her introduction that at a conference on the Nanking Massacre, she was "suddenly in a panic that this terrifying disrespect for death and dying, this reversion in human social evolution, would be reduced to a footnote of history, treated like a harmless glitch in a computer program that might or might not again cause a problem, unless someone forced the world to remember it."  It was an emotional response and an emotional book that was criticized by historians but was a bestseller in the U.S.  Chang was researching her next book - another account of another group of people victimized by the Japanese in WWII, the U.S. soldiers who were forced to participate in the Bataan Death March - when she suffered a break of some kind, was put on anti-depressants, and killed herself three months later.  

Chang immediately reminded me of Sarah Kane, the English playwright whose play Blasted used "extreme and violent stage action" to forge connections between England and Bosnia (Kane wrote "The logical conclusion of the attitude that produces an isolated rape in England is the rape camps in Bosnia and the logical conclusion to the way society expects men to behave is war"), whose personal despair was posthumously linked to a sort of global despair - that she was depressed "because [she sees] the world around [her] and think[s] what an awful place it is." 

But Chang's wikipedia page instead directed me toward Minnie Vautrin.


Vautrin was an American missionary who established and led the Ginling Girls College in Nanking prior to WWII.  During the Japanese invasion she tried to save as many women and children as she could by harboring them in the college ("up to 10,000 women in a college designed to support between 200 and 300") within the Nanking Safety Zone, established by the handful of Westerners in Nanking who stayed behind when the Japanese approached. 

The leader of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, interestingly, was a German businessman for Siemens AG, John Rabe.  He was a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party, and was elected leader for that very reason (the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern Pact, the Westerners hoped, would give him extra leverage).  Rabe wrote "there is a question of morality here... I cannot bring myself for now to betray the trust these people have put in me, and it is touching to see how they believe in me."  His efforts to delay the Japanese to allow Chinese civilians to escape were credited with saving the lives of 200,000 to 250,000.  When he returned to Germany in 1938 he showed photo and video evidence of atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers in Berlin, and wrote to Hitler himself asking him to get the Japanese to stop.  The letter never reached Hitler, Rabe was interrogated by the Gestapo, and ordered not to speak about the subject again.  After the war he was arrested by the Russians and the British for being a Nazi, but declared de-Nazified in 1946.  He and his family lived in poverty thereafter until his death in 1950, sustained by food and money parcels sent by the Chinese government.  His tombstone was relocated from Berlin to Nanjing.  An interesting flip-example is Chiune Sugihara, Japanese Vice-Consul in Lithuania during WWII who wrote travel visas on his own initiative to enable 6,000 Jewish refugees to escape death at the hands of Soviets and Nazis via transit through Japan - "an extraordinary act of disobedience."  He hand-wrote visas for 18-20 hours a day, wrote them all night before his departure when the consulate was closed, and was still writing them as his train pulled out of the station, throwing them into the refugee crowd gathered outside.  The Simon Wiesenthal Center, however, notes that these 6,000 were heads of household who were allowed to take their families, and therefore considers Sugihara to have saved about 40,000 - he and his family were granted permanent Israeli citizenship.  As his train left the station he said to the crowd, "please forgive me. I cannot write anymore. I wish you the best."

Back to Minnie Vautrin, who stayed in Nanking until 1940.  All she had was the somewhat less powerful American flag, but she went back and forth to the Japanese Embassy to get papers banning soldiers from committing crimes in overcrowded Ginling College (papers that were subsequently torn up by the soldiers themselves).  After the siege, "She even helped the women locate husbands and sons who had been taken away by the Japanese soldiers. She taught destitute widows the skills required to make a meager living and provided the best education her limited sources would allow to the children in desecrated Nanking."  Vautrin wrote in her diary - both her diary and Rabe's were discovered by Iris Chang - "I suspect every house in the city has been opened, again and yet again, and robbed. Tonight a truck passed in which there were eight or ten girls, and as it passed they called out 'Jiu ming! Jiu ming!'—save our lives."  Vautrin's diary, which I've read a little of (555 pages of her papers are available from the Yale Divinity School), consists of her running around the campus beating back Japanese soldiers with her presence alone: "Went up to South Hill three times I think, then to the back campus and then was frantically called to the old Faculty House where I was told two soldiers had gone upstairs.  There, in room 538, I found one standing at the door, and one inside already raping a poor girl.  My letter from the Embassy and my presence sent them running out in a hurry - in my wrath I wish I had the power to smite them in their dastardly work."  Days later she wrote, "The days seem interminable and each morning you wonder how you can live through the day; twelve hours." 

Vautrin was "unnerved" by the war.  Seeing doctors at home in the U.S., she "blamed herself... and added that she was a burden and a failure." She felt "responsible for not being able to save more lives."  She had written in late December 1937, "The looting of our residence has been light and even that would not have taken place if I could have been in about four places at one time.  Our looting, therefore, is all to be blamed on me, because I have been too slow!"  She killed herself in 1941.  The idea that Vautrin was a failure who had not done enough seems totally ludicrous.  Who among us would have stayed in Nanking if we didn't have to, let alone commit to trying to save tens of thousands of people at the risk of death-by-bayonet?  Without even a weapon?  And yet: a failure.

She reminds me of Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian Force Commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda during the genocide.  He had asked the UN for more assistance - the UN said no, because the US said no, and the last Belgian troops (Belgium had colonized the Congo, and was as such the de facto "babysitter") withdrew, leaving Dallaire's peacekeepers to try to stave off killings alone - an impossible task, although he is credited with saving 32,000 people.  Dallaire now suffers from PTSD.  He was dismissed from the army because he was not responding to treatment and "was trying to kill himself through work."  He has tried to commit suicide - because "After Rwanda, Dallaire blamed himself for everything."  He says, "I failed, yes. The mission failed. They died by the thousands, hundreds of thousands."  Again - he failed?  

Meanwhile, for the rest of us, the news is too depressing, so we need something to escape to, some way to shut our eyes and keep ourselves from even being witness.  We stigmatize mental illness.  We live "Fitter, Happier" lives - "concerned (but powerless)."  "(The ability to laugh at weakness)."

Jon Krakauer has produced an investigative expose of Greg Mortenson and his memoirs about building schools in Afghanistan, Three Cups of Tea and Stones Into Schools (available for free at byliner until April 20th).  Krakauer seems mostly pissed off because the dramatic story was used to solicit donations for the Central Asia Institute - Krakauer gave them $75,000, and Obama gave them $100,000 - and there are now questions about fraudulent financial statements and misuse of CAI funds by Mortenson, as well as falsehoods about how many schools have been built. 

Three Cups of Deceit is pretty short (89 pages).  The first chapter is about inaccuracies in the "creation myth," as Krakauer calls it, about how he found this village that he pledged to build a school in (let's call it dramatic embellishment - what's worse is that he backed out of a promise to build a school in the village he actually went to post-K2, and then accused them of greed in his book for trying to hold him to the promise).  What's most aggravating is that Mortenson apparently portrayed a friendly visit to a Pakistani village where Mortenson was treated like the guest of honor as a Taliban kidnapping.  I mean, if that's so, that's not mixing up dates or locations - it's slandering a whole village of people, mislabeling photos of them as being of their "sworn enemies," etc.  Krakauer writes:

A preponderance of evidence indicates that Mortenson manufactured his account of being kidnapped by the Taliban out of whole cloth, apparently for the same reason he’s invented so many other anecdotes of personal derring-do in his books and public appearances: to inflate the myth of Greg Mortenson, “the astonishing, uplifting story of a real-life Indiana Jones and his remarkable humanitarian campaign in the Taliban’s backyard,” as the back cover of Three Cups of Tea puts it. The likelihood that anyone in the United States would ever discover the truth about what happened in an exceedingly isolated Pakistani village must have seemed infinitesimal to Mortenson.

If that's true, that's gross.  One of the people he's portrayed as a Taliban kidnapper says: "“Years later,” says Naimat Gul, “when I scanned through the book Three Cups Of Tea and read that Greg had been abducted and threatened with guns, I was shocked. Instead of telling the world about our frustration, deprivation, illiteracy, and tradition of hospitality, he invented a false story about being abducted by savages. I do not understand why he did this.”"  Mortenson has implied in reply that those who have contradicted his story are those who "do not want our mission of educating girls to succeed." 

The second chapter is about a lack of communication between Mortenson and the Central Asia Institute's board, lying in the book about turning down raises when he actually got even bigger raises, more making up stories about real people, using CAI "as his personal ATM," and generally being an egomaniac.  Particularly hilarious:

According to one of Mortenson’s friends, when he learned that Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love had bumped Three Cups of Tea from number one down to number two on the New York Times paperback nonfiction list, “Greg was furious. He started buying books like crazy, with the CAI credit card, to try and put Three Cups back on top.”

Krakauer estimates CAI's actual budget to be 50% fundraising and administrative funds, as opposed to the 15% they claim goes to fundraising and administrative funds on their web site (because they count book advertising and charter jets as program funds, not fundraising and administrative funds). 

Then in chapter 3, more lying about places in Afghanistan ("The most troubling irony is that the focal region of Mortenson’s work—the Shia region of Baltistan with its Tibetan-Buddhist heritage—has nothing to do with the war on terror, yet is primarily viewed through this lens in [Three Cups of Tea]."), abandoning schools after the physical building has been built, short of supplies or teacher training ("The statement about students learning five languages is absolutely false, says a CAI staffer, “not even true for a single school.” Most teachers, this staffer also reports, have never received any training from CAI."), simply lying about the existence of some schools, CAI filling in the many holes in their expense accounting, not listening to what the needs of the area are ("Their rationale for ranking clinics above schools, Callahan explains, was the appalling infant mortality rate in the Pamir. As one Kyrgyz elder told him, “If 50 percent of the children die before age five, who is there to educate?”"), driving away talented people at CAI, more lying about actual people, and unforeseen consequences:

The Afghan government provides a teacher who holds classes inside a yurt right in his camp, he pointed out, “so why would our children want to walk all the way down there to go to school, and then have to walk back up at the end of the day? The school is pointless. It’s empty. The border police seem to use it sometimes.”

Defrauding people is one thing - and an important thing, because of the bad name it gives to altruism and the betrayal of people's trust, etc. - but for me, the worst part is the creation of villains and danger, essentially just to make the plot more exciting, and slandering various remote but real people and communities to do so.  And then there's the role Mortenson plays in the greater U.S. narrative. 

And, this is my other issue.  My personal opinion is that Krakauer is right to call Mortenson's central argument - that increasing secular education in places like Afghanistan will discourage and eliminate terrorism - "uncomplicated."  It's part of a package of basic liberal common sense, and goes along with the health clinics mentioned above.  Everybody agrees that education and healthcare are good antidotes to the "primitivity" of terrorism.  And hey, education and healthcare can't hurt, from a basic standard of living perspective.  Then some people add economic development and other people add democracy and suddenly what cures terrorism is for "them" to be more like "us."  Which... seems kind of circular.  Education doesn't stop the U.S. from bombing weddings, doesn't close Guantanamo Bay, doesn't cut small arms supplies from Militant A to help fight Militant B.  But those are things that Mortenson's argument allow us not to think about.  Although I don't agree with Mark Juergensmeyer that secularism has created terrorism, he does have a much more nuanced understanding of terrorism-in-society, and his book is a decent antidote to this line of thought.  This facet of liberalism doesn't seem to have changed since the Dutch were trying to justify colonizing Indonesia with the Ethical Policy.  And basically, I just don't think it's enough.  Saying off-handedly that "oh, education will solve it" basically implies that properly-educated people are above this foolish behavior and there's no need to look at the behavior any deeper, because it'll just die out on its own when we hit them over the head with our logic hard enough.  Again... I don't buy it. 

I think this is particularly important:

“The way I’ve always understood Greg,” Callahan reflects, “is that he’s a symptom of Afghanistan. Things are so bad that everybody’s desperate for even one good-news story. And Greg is it. Everything else might be completely fucked up over there, but here’s a guy who’s persuaded the world that he’s making a difference and doing things right,” Mortenson’s tale “functioned as a palliative,” Callahan suggests. It soothed the national conscience. Greg may have used smoke and mirrors to generate the hope he offered, but the illusion made people feel good about themselves, so nobody was in a hurry to look behind the curtain. Although it doesn’t excuse his dishonesty, Mortenson was merely selling what the public was eager to buy.

This is a 2007 video that sockkpuppett (Luminosity) and sisabet made for Vividcon - the theme is the depiction of women in Supernatural, and the song they used is "Violet" by Hole (which should tell you in what direction the video's going).  It's extremely graphic - but of course this was all on the CW - and potentially triggery.  It's called "Women's Work."


As I don't watch Supernatural, I defer to cofax7 for some extra words: "I've been aware for the entire time I've watched the show that there were problems with the presentation of women, but this vid really provides the ammunition for that argument. Because even if the male deaths total the same number (which I don't know), the fact is that they are filmed entirely differently: they are clothed, the camera doesn't linger on them, they're not swimming, in bed, in bedclothes, bathing. Women in peril are sexy, and in a different way than the Winchesters in peril. Dean on his knees is sexy not because he is in peril, but because we know he's going to get up and kick ass in just a moment, because the show has identified him as the Hero. Whereas none of the women have that protection in the text."  More commentary on sisabet's LJ here.

My boss is trying to find me a new office, because this office is slated to be occupied by the secretary with all the students' records on Sept. 15.  My new office will hopefully have a phone and a lockable door.  I will only be too pleased to move.  As it is, with my door open, I'm subjected to all sorts of delightful conversations between Professors JL (whose office I'm across from) and JM (who always visits).  JL is actually a nice, (sort of) hard-working guy.  If only he didn't have to entertain JM every morning, because this is all JM's fault.  Both are in their sixties/seventies.

Among the topics of conversation: 

• Colonoscopy 
• Anaesthesia
• Asking girls from Eastern Europe where they have sex (at this point I shut the door)
• The many young Eastern European girlfriends of some old man
• The similarities between JM and Nebraska runningback Rex Burkhead (now named "mini-JM")
• Is football a big deal at the big high schools?  Could teenaged Eastern European girls on exchange programs go to a game?  (JM's entire career has been devoted to bringing girls from Eastern Europe to UNL)
• "You know how those Arabs are," blah blah blah (I managed to purge the substance of this conversation from my memory)

I wish they could just IM each other.  Silently.

In other news: no, you lie, piece of crap.  I'm so tired of South Carolina.  

You know what's weird?

I actually like the Pumpkinhead series.  The original, the cult classic, is the first one I saw.  It was both horrifying and hysterical.  One of those movies where you can't look away, want to laugh, want to scream... jeez, it's just great.  I've also seen Blood Wings, which was sort of unmemorable but not bad, and I just finished watching Ashes to Ashes, which was, well... they decided to do a CG monster instead of a guy in a suit, and that was a mistake.  But the music and cinematography were still scary, and extremely Silent Hill-inspired, so I still enjoyed it.  And now I'm watching Blood Feud.  Which means by the time I finish Blood Feud, I will have seen them all. 

It's a concept that really appeals to me - Pumpkinhead is the community monster (demon, for the religious types that populate these movies - often as hypocrites) who lives on rage, and it gets summoned by people who are trying to right some perceived injustice - with the help of the very haggard, very voudou witch of the woods.  Simple.  Now before you start calling Pumpkinhead the next Crow, just don't, because Pumpkinhead is not some film-noir-wannabe with goth makeup and all that b.s.  Pumpkinhead is set in the boondocks of America, not to put too fine a point on it.  Blood Feud is actually about the Hatfields and McCoys (ha!).  This is Pumpkinhead.  He ain't pretty.  And instead of a standard-fare revenge extravaganza, the Pumpkinhead series actually deals with the complications of vengeance, grief, and rage.  I may be exaggerating Pumpkinhead's moral, uh, philosophies, but... Pumpkinhead is something special.  For example, vengeance is always undertaken for a crime that would qualify as manslaughter, not murder.  It always hurts innocents.  Then of course there's this: "The secret of course is that the person who called Pumpkinhead into action becomes the next Pumpkin."  Well, either that or it'll eat your soul. 

Witch: What you're asking for has a name.
Ricky: Pumpkinhead.
Witch: That.

update: oh shit, Blood Feud has a goo-ood Pumpkinhead.  Seriously, whoever makes these movies... god-damn.  The series is 10x as good as the average Sci-Fi Saturday movie because whoever makes them clearly has a healthy respect for the monster and the plot.