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Nietzsche, New Orleans, and 'Nam
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by Herb Ruhs, MD, Unknown News
Sept. 13, 2005
In 1968 I was sitting in a dark, crowed movie theater watching Dustin Hoffman play an old man who was captured as a child and raised as a Native American. I was wholeheartedly identifying with the Native Americans.
I was on a home visit back to the US after spending two years living in a Vietnamese village, enduring with reasonable good humor the horror and terror of living in a war zone dominated by the US Army. But I was just a poor understudy to my friends in the village
who had lived their entire lives in the midst of war.
They were not hardened to tragedy, but somehow they had learned to be able to make fun of it. Americans have little personal experience of war, and what they do know is from the perspective of being soldiers under arms in foreign lands. I find that the hardest phenomena to explain to my fellow Americans is how people do adapt to even the most horrible things and conserve their humanity in the process.
For instance, one night I was squatting on my porch watching a clear night sky filled with the pyrotechnics of a nearby battle when my neighbor stopped by for a neighborly squat. After watching the show for a while he asked me, "You have any thing like that in America?" When I answered no he replied, "Well, I guess Vietnam beats the hell out of America."
Of course the Vietnamese words he used were even more rich in irony, allusion, deliberate ambiguity, and poetry than I can do justice in my translation, but that is the nature of the language. Meanings within meanings alluding to the cosmic angle of mundane events. You'd have to speak it to begin to understand. It is, after all, a language many thousands of years older than English.
| Back to my watching Little Big Man. Comes the point in the movie where the US Army is attacking the village and a mother is pictured being shot while running away with her infant clutched in her arms. Without knowing I spoke, in a soto voice, to myself, "That's just |
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like Vietnam." Meaning that it was a scene that strongly evoked the tone of my recent past.
Apparently my voice carried in the deathly still theater, because I immediately saw some crewcut types jumping over the seats in front of me looking very threatening. Apparently some people took my little outburst as some kind of political statement. Luckily I was able to drop to the floor behind the seats and scoot on my tummy for the emergency exits.
I think my would-be assailants got the wrong guy, or so it seemed to me as the sounds of screaming and wanton violence washed over my back as I crawled across the sodden theater floor. You see how twisted my war experience made me. I thought that was very funny. Still do. I need to see the rest of the movie sometime.
We see pictures of fellow Americans' bloated corpses rotting in the sun and gnawed at by rats, and because, I think, we have never seen this sort of thing before it freaks us out. Stop and think about it. Dead bodies looking like over inflated blow-up dolls, putting out a smell that takes days, even weeks, to be convinced that you have finally washed it off, is not that uncommon an experience in this world.
The first couple of times I encountered this, it was pretty bad, but after a while it was just what was. It is merely the truth about what is happening.
Granted the horror of New Orleans is grand even by battlefield standards, but something like this is happening in the world, somewhere, nearly all the time. For much of the world it is relatively normal.
What is unusual is that these are Americans, and many of us identify with them very strongly, and the fear touches our hearts, and we hurt deeply, for a change.
If my apocalyptic vision turns out, unfortunately, to be premonitory, then there will be more New Orleans, coming soon, to a town near you. Get a leg up on your survival skills, grow a thick skin. Besides, it is hard to be compassionate and helpful when you are disabled by horror.
I can't bring myself to read much Friedrich Nietzsche, way too twisted for my taste, but I have to agree with him that "What does not kill us makes us stronger." Looks to me like we are going to get much stronger soon.
Stronger does not mean that we do not react with horror and revulsion. Stronger does not mean that we cease to care about the suffering of others. Stronger means that we take in the horror, the revulsion, the terror, and digest it properly so that we are not overcome by it, not reduced to a state of helpless uselessness. The key to this, as in much else, seems to lie in avoiding taking one's self too seriously.
© by the author.
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I can't bring myself to read much Friedrich Nietzsche, way too twisted for my taste, but I have to agree with him that "What does not kill us makes us stronger."
Looks to me like we are going to get much stronger soon.
Stronger does not mean that we do not react with horror and revulsion.
Stronger does not mean that we cease to care about the suffering of others.
Stronger means that we take in the horror, the revulsion, the terror, and digest it properly so that we are not overcome by it, not reduced to a state of helpless uselessness.
The key to this, as in much else, seems to lie in avoiding taking one's self too seriously.
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Previous articles by this author:
Habits of successful modern cannibals
by Herb Ruhs, MD, Unknown News
Yet another, higher dose of pain
by Herb Ruhs, MD, Unknown News
The war of one against all:
The roots of our enslavement
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Class warfare, anyone?
Why class war is not a fiction but a fixture of our lives
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Why "Free Speech" does not matter
by Herb Ruhs, MD
When all else fails, try the truth
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Murder by medical device
by Herb Ruhs, MD
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Granted the horror of New Orleans is grand even by battlefield standards, but something like this is happening in the world, somewhere, nearly all the time.
For much of the world it is relatively normal.
What is unusual is that these are Americans, and many of us identify with them very strongly, and the fear touches our hearts, and we hurt deeply, for a change.
If my apocalyptic vision turns out, unfortunately, to be premonitory, then there will be more New Orleans, coming soon, to a town near you.
Get a leg up on your survival skills, grow a thick skin.
Besides, it is hard to be compassionate and helpful when you are disabled by horror.
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