pictures, scary people, long lost friends

Jessica was telling me recently about one of her favorite photographers: a war photographer, a photojournalist by the name of Ron Haviv. She was talking specifically about his Blood & Honey collection, a photo essay of the chaos that overtook Yugoslavia following the end of the Cold War.

Funny that she should mention him now, given the world's (and my own) preoccupation these last few weeks with the end of the Cold War. It is easy to forget that the Soviet Union and the Communist Bloc, for all their badness, kept certain horrifying nationalistic, ethnic-cleansing, tendencies in check. (Such a horrific term, 'ethnic cleansing.' Honestly I can't imagine a more horrific term, for all its mundane connotation of purification.)

I've been looking at these pictures (can't seem to stop looking at these pictures) and feeling a little overwhelmed by our capacity to inflict pain upon one other. They make me think of the Rwandan genocide, and how I was old enough in 1994 to have known what was going on, and yet I did not, any more than I understood what was going on in Eastern Europe. I was old enough that I should have known was was going on, but I wasn't paying attention. Five years later, during the summer of 1999, I was house sitting for a friend and read his copy of Philip Gourveitch's We Wish To Inform You. I spent much of the rest of that summer reading about Rwanda, trying late at night to understand the hatred and rage that must have been percolating beneath the surface of that country before the Hutus rose up, spurred on by Radio Rwanda, and slaughtered 500,000 Tutsis. (And not with the systematic, horrific coldness of the gas chambers, or even with the physical distance of guns, but rather largely with machetes. Can you imagine the force it must take to cut someone down with a machete?)

Looking at Haviv's pictures brings up similar feelings of not quite despair, but an incredibly uncomfortable mix of fascination and frustration, sadness and fury and impotence -- how is it that we continue to do this to ourselves?

And I've been thinking about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's pending arrival here in New York City, epicenter to his frightening hatred of this country I can't help but love. I've been thinking about Jerry, who until recently served on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, where Mohammed will be put on trial. I remember how, in the days following 9/11, the courts reopened and Jerry couldn't seem to shake a sore throat and a hoarse voice. I remember how this sore throat and hoarseness dragged on and on, after days and weeks and months of breathing in Ground Zero smoke and dust and ash.

And I've been thinking about our own homegrown extremists, the ones who begin to balance out the Khalid Shaikh Mohammeds of the Middle East, at least in rage and hatred if not yet in action. I'm remembering last August's controversial DHS report on the recent rise of rightwing extremism, and of the man who thought it was okay to bring a loaded rifle to a Presidential event, and of the man now sitting in jail after having gunned down Dr. Tiller in the foyer of his church, and of the hordes of teabaggers with their "Obama is a Nazi" rhetoric and their overblown sense of self-righteousness and self-pity. I'm thinking of the recent poll indicating that nearly 1 in 3 conservatives in New Jersey either believe or don't know whether they believe that Obama is the Antichrist. I'm thinking of the Secret Service's report that the number of death threats against our current president is unprecedented, and how when George W. Bush was in office and we left-wingers were fit to be tied, the most extreme of us was a bereaved mother camped outside Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. I'm thinking of Fox News and Glen Beck joking about killing our Democratic leaders. And I'm thinking about our current Republican leadership standing by these people with the guns, these people arguing that our duly elected president is not American or is the Antichrist or is a Communist, that he's going to steal our children and kill our grandmas, that his attempt at health care reform is another Final Solution.

I've been reading Chaim Potok's The Promise, and am reminded of Reuven Malter's rage against the extremists in his yeshiva, and his frustration that all extremists sound so much alike. And I am reminded of Rachel Maddow's recent interview with Frank Schaeffer, former rightwinger and religious leader turned apostate, during which he says, "What surprises me is that responsible Republican leadership and the editors of some of these Christian magazines do not stand up in holy horror and denounce this. You know, they're always asking, 'Where is the Islamic leadership denouncing terrorism? Why aren't the moderates speaking out?" Well I'd challenge the folks who I used to work with, and I would say to them, 'Where the hell are you? This is not funny anymore.'"

On another note, I recently reconnected with a girl I met in Paris twenty years ago, and for whom I babysat regularly during the months our families overlapped there. She was a wonderful girl, smart and adventurous and kind, and I still remember fondly recommending books for her to read, cooking dinner for us (boiled spaghetti and jarred tomato sauce and boiled broccoli, probably), listening to her practice the violin, spending New Year's Eve together with our families.

Turns out she's still smart and adventurous and kind, and a writer! This piece, published earlier this fall, moved me almost to tears.