A civics lesson

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A Canadian Member of Parialment discovered that a WWII veteran had not voted for him; the MP, Tom Wappel, wrote to the Veteran to berate him.  This was my reply.

 

Almost fourteen years ago I called the constituency office of my MP, then a Mr. Paul McCrossan, to ask if he could help me with my citizenship application.  I opened my query, rather sheepishly I recall, by saying that I was not even a citizen yet, and so I could not have supported the MP in the past.  Mr. McCrossan's assistant chuckled and told me, “Oh dear, it doesn't matter if you're a citizen or not, much less if you supported him.  If you're living in this riding, he's your MP.  Send us a letter and let's see if we can help you.”

 

I was a student of political science at the time, but those simple words were my first real life lesson in Civics — the words still ring fresh in my ears.  Four weeks after I mailed the letter to “my” MP, I got a reply, this time from the Secretary of State, then David Crombie, telling me that the matter had been brought to his attention and the issue had been resolved. 

 

I fell in love with Canada then.  Not simply because of the help – a simple question of timing that, though necessary and much appreciated at the time, ended up not being all that crucial after all – but because of the attention.  Here I was, an immigrant, a recent arrival; my adopted home owed me nothing, so far as I could reasonably expect, except a minimum standard of treatment as a human being.  And yet – my MP and his office had clearly gone through the trouble of making representations on my behalf; the office of the Secretary of State had made the necessary calls; and here I was, a newly-minted citizen, entitled to a passport and, more important, to vote.  As if to drive the point of the lesson home to me, Mr. McCrossan or his office was never solicited me for support because of that help; nor was there ever a letter especially addressed to me, saying, “Remember your citizenship application.”

 

A country that so treats its people, I said to myself then, deserves not just respect and gratitude, but my love and devotion.

 

In the past fourteen years, as I have learned more about my country and its history, my respect for and devotion to Canada have only deepened.  It is with pride that I speak to my non-Canadian friends of all that we, as Canadians, have achieved in the 134 years of our history.  Building and maintaining a country so vast geographically and diverse demographically is not easy; to do so while taking part in the great struggles for freedom and survival this century must have taken a heroic effort.  It is with awe that I think of all those who risked, and gave, their lives in those struggles, so that the country of which I am now a citizen can hold its head high in the community of nations with a just sense of its place in the world.  Whether standing before Soldiers' Tower at the University of Toronto, or the Vimy Monument in France, it has been an honour for me to present my respects, officially and personally, to the dead and the alive, who made my being here possible.

 

I have spent the last six years in the service of my country, in Canada and abroad (as a diplomat).  I am often asked why I do what I do (the financial sacrifice, truth be told, is considerable).  Well, you can trace this all to that first lesson in Civics, those two simple sentences uttered by the assistant to my then MP, fourteen years ago.

 

It is a lesson that Tom Wappel, a current MP, has yet to learn.

 

My dismay, indeed grief, about the episode is profound.  If it were possible, in Canada, to construct an antithesis of democratic behaviour by a public official, this would be it.  It would be difficult to find greater contempt for the electorate or indeed the Parliament short of promoting the dismantling of parliamentary democracy itself.  Forget Burke; this is Tammany Hall.  The Rotten Boroughs could not have produced a more rotten fruit.

 

Am I exaggerating? 

 

The secret ballot, lest we forget, is one of the most important principles of democratic government.  And I know something about this: my first voting experience was in Iran, when I was fifteen (which used to the voting age in Iran).  I still recall having to run from one corner of the voting room to another, trying to hide my ballot (without much success) from the curious eyes of the spies sprinkled around the place.  I had intended to spoil my ballot, truth be told (not voting was not an option, really), but ended up having to vote for the least offensive candidates. 

 

That, Mr. Wappel, is one reason I left my homeland and settled in Canada.

 

(In fact, the “secrecy” of the vote is so sacred a rule of political behaviour in Canada that it has become axiomatic in polite society: my best friend does not ask me how I vote.  It is simply rude to do so.  But I guess manners are not a prime consideration for the sarcastic pen of the Honourable Member.)

 

But if asking about someone's voting habits is rude, it is outright obnoxious for a public official, on public payroll, to refuse help to the public on the grounds of that vote – or, even more egregious, of the expressed desire to vote one way or another in the future.  Mr. Wappel is an elected representative and I merely a junior official; but we both are servants of the same master.  What would he say if, let us say, a consular officer refused to help a Canadian in distress abroad because of that person's anti-abortion or pro-capital punishment views?  Or, more to the point, if a female officer refused to help someone who, as did Mr. Wappel a decade ago, appeared to question the value of women's work?  Unthinkable; we serve all Canadians.  Well, I guess not unthinkable for the good MP.

 

All of this, of course, begs the question of the lack of judgement of a man who puts his contempt for the Canadian democratic tradition in writing, sarcastically, in a letter to an 81 year old veteran.  A politician this dense is on a political suicide mission.  The Liberal caucus should seriously consider giving him a helping hand by pushing him out into the wilderness, where he belongs.

 

The perils of reopening the debate on capital punishment

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This was an open letter to the contenders for the leadership of the Conservative Reform <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Alliance party, first published in May 2000 in Toronto's The Globe and Mail.

I write to you not simply as a Canadian, but as an Iranian-Canadian.  This is the first time in the thirteen years I have had the privilege of being a citizen of this magnificent country of ours that I hyphenate my citizenship.  It is the first time in the sixteen years I have lived in Canada and under Canada’s benevolent protection that I find my cultural background of some importance in respect of the message I wish to impart.

You see, I write on the subject of capital punishment.  I write to ask you not to open this debate again.  

Twice in one generation Parliament has spoken.  Each time, the debate on capital punishment wounded and scarred the social psyche and pitted brother against sister, friend against friend.  Each time, it focussed our attention on all that was ugly and wrong in us and our souls, to the detriment of peace, forgiveness and charity.  Each time, it forced us to pit moral choice against principles of accountancy (does it cost more or less to keep a convict in prison rather than to put him to death).  Though the outcome was edifying, the debate was not.

I ask you not to open this debate again not only because a society can ill afford such repeated assaults upon its moral tranquillity.  The country is at peace, the crime rate is falling, fewer monsters lurk in the shadows of our society and even in the US, for heaven’s sake, they are re-examining their attachments to Old Sparky and its more humane progeny.

I ask this of you because I know something of state-sanctioned violence.  I know the violence it inflicts not just on the murderer to be hanged, but on the body politic, on justice, on equity, on humanity. 

This is why I write to you as an Iranian-Canadian.

When I left Iran in 1983, that country and its people were wracked by revolutionary fervour, a vicious invasion from without and civil unrest bordering on war within.  It was a society bent on exacting revenge – or retribution, the terms are in large part substitutable – for ills historical and recent.  It was a society whose only voice was of anger, whose only instrument was the bayonet.  It was a society where the spilling of blood – one’s own in martyrdom, or that of others in vengeance – had become a sacrament.  It was a society for which death imposed by the state was literally an Article of Faith.

That was the society I left behind.  From that environment, where violence had dominion, I came to Canada, where violence had no place.  And by that I mean official violence; state-sanctioned violence; state-sanctioned death.

No matter how much you limit the application of the death penalty, no matter if you insist on restricting it to a worst case scenario – a Paul Bernardo or a Clifford Olson – no matter if you put in place safeguards against the murder of innocents – and executing an innocent man is no different from murder – the moral principle at the root of punishment of death is the same.  For either a state accepts death as an instrument of policy or it does not.  The moral choice is as stark as that. 

I lived most of my childhood in a society in which that moral choice was in favour of death.  State-sanctioned death.  The thing is, once the moral choice is made, once the floodgates of official violence are opened, drawing a line in the sand will be as useless against the torrents of vengeance, of more violence, of more death as, well, a line in the sand.  Once it becomes acceptable for the state to kill, once society becomes inured to the daily reports of hangings, gassings, electrocutions and lethal injections (stoning and beheading considered outré these days), the inevitable question of “why Bernardo and not Homolka” will begin to haunt the executioners. 

For, why stop at pre-meditated murder?  Why stop at cop-killers?  Why stop at kidnappers and rapists and drug-dealers?  Why stop at those above 18?  Why stop at those with full mental faculties?  Why give murderers on death row the benefit of endless appeals, of constitutional protections, of “getting off” on technicalities?

Blood will beget blood.  The charity and forgiveness of this vast, pacific land of ours will give way to hardened hatred and base moral ugliness.

As it did, in the country of my birth. 

And I know something of state-sanctioned violence, the damage it does to the conscience of a people.  The damage it does to the conscience of each citizen.

Now, in Canada that moral choice was made twice in the last generation.  Twice the representatives of the people in Parliament assembled turned down death as an instrument of national policy.  Twice the Body Politic was convulsed and then relieved to find itself purged of state-sanctioned death.  Twice the country stared into that moral abyss of putting one of its children to death and thought itself better than the men whom it judged.  Twice in one generation Canada paid heed to the wise words of Churchill, uttered eighty years ago, that the moral strength of a people is to be found in how it treats its worst.

I ask you to respect that choice.  I ask you not to open that debate.  Leave the country at peace, as you would find it if you were to become Leader of the Opposition.  And if you become Prime Minister, bequeath a country to your children – to our children – that proudly checked the punishment of death at the door before entering the great community of civilised nations and refused to leave the room to retrieve it.

I ask you not to open that debate so that I can give my children the gift for which I left my birthplace: a society governed by laws and inspired by hope.  For in a society that chooses death over life, hope is the first casualty.

The US, the CIA, Iran and Mosaddeg

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<?xml:namespace prefix = o />Reuel Marc Gerecht attempted in an article entitled “No, the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />CIA did not mess up Iran” to underplay the importance of CIA activities in Iran (and elsewhere).  This was my reply.

 

Gerecht makes a number of valid points, both about the domestic political dynamics of Iran at the time of the 1953 coup d’état and also about Iranians’ incessant search for the “hidden hands” that would explain Iran’s woeful state – and that would, in the process, deflect the responsibility or blame for the mess away from Iranians themselves.  It is therefore probably true that the CIA did not mess up Iran. 

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But it is not the whole truth. 

 

For although the “well-mannered, striped-tie-wearing Yankees” who did not speak Persian could not have toppled a popular Prime Minister without the active participation of a significant part of either the population or the religious hierarchy, the coup would also have been unthinkable without US support, both moral and financial.  And although Mr. Gerecht is partly correct in his assessment of the reasons for the rise, the fall and again the rise of the star of Mossadeq in Iran’s post-revolution political discourse, he is on less sure footing when discussing the deep scars of the 1953 coup left on Iran’s national psyche.  The CIA, and the United States, cannot so readily absolve themselves of the mess they are, at least partly, responsible for in Iran.

 

Few characters in Iran’s inglorious history of the last two centuries have captured the imagination of this ancient and proud people as much as Mossadeq.  Indeed, his only rival is the Ayatollah Khomeini.  But whereas the Ayatollah Khomeini towers over the landscape of contemporary Iranian politics for having led, and won, the Islamic revolution, Mossadeq represents – at least for the re-emerging middle classes and also the diaspora – one of the most tragic “might-have-been”s of Iranian history. 

 

He was an aristocrat of the first rank, who also became a paragon of democracy.  He was a reformist par excellence, holding back the fires of revolutionary republicanism in 40s and 50s Iran, while pushing for a constitutional monarchy – the type of monarchy that he had seen in practice in Iran’s ancien régime when he served as MP and Foreign Minister in the 1910s.  His nationalisation of the Iranian oil industry – whatever its economic merits – still ranks as one of the great expressions of Iranismus, an Iranian national identity, this century.  And his brilliant defence of this act before the International Court of Justice became and remains a defining moment for a country that for much of the past fifty years has had at best a rocky relationship with international law.

 

Mossadeq is significant not because the Iranian revolution has run out of gas and needs new heroes.  Far from it: the revolution continues, though in a different guise; and new heroes are born every day.  Witness Khatami, Nouri, Hajjarian, Kadivar, Ganji, Shams – the list goes on. Rather, though deeply flawed as a politician and limitlessly naïve as an international statesman, Mossadeq was and continues to be the brightest beacon of democratic leadership in the otherwise sorry history of the Iranian constitutionalist history.  The coup that toppled him and brought back the Shah did more than put an end to the premiership of an erratic aristocrat that governed Iran from his bed.  The coup killed the dream of the possibility of a constitutionalist democracy in Iran.  The uprisings of 1963, the desperate terrorist acts of the 70s, and then the Islamic revolution itself, were born the day the nationalists lost – the day it was proven to all that a constitutional monarchy cannot function in Iran.

 

To be sure, it is a sickness of old societies to look at past glories and see, responsible for their current dire circumstances, the hands of foreign agents and internal traitors.  Iran is no exception.  The ready willingness of Iranians to ascribe all their ills to the secret machinations of the British or the Russians or the Americans – or the Zionists – while claiming the credit for the most minute achievements of Iran in its 6000-odd year history is not unique to that country.  It is not surprising that along with a dozen other internal problems over the last two centuries, the 1953 coup is considered by most Iranians to have been of purely foreign origin.  The rôle of many key clerics in undermining Mossadeq and in supporting the Shah and the military government that succeeded him is a subject that is discussed, if at all, with a great deal of caution. 

 

However, what Mr. Gerecht conveniently ignores is that the coup would not have gone forward without the active backing of US dollars and without the sure knowledge that the US government would support the post-coup government.  More important, the coup of 1953 should not be seen as an isolated act. Popular governments are not overthrown overnight.  In the course of many months before the coup, the democratic government of Mossadeq was increasingly isolated internationally – an isolation in which the United States government was both actively and passively complicit. Between the instability caused by Iran’s economic isolation; money, logistical and planning support from the CIA; and diplomatic approval from Washington, the government of Dr. Mossadeq had nowhere to go but into prison (or before the firing squad, as did his foreign minister, one of the most popular political figures of modern Iranian history).

 

What is more tragic is that Mossadeq genuinely considered the United States as an anti-Imperialist friend.  But, carried away by anti-Communist paranoia, the United States bizarrely considered this nationalist aristocrat, himself a major landowner just south of Tehran, as a potential Soviet puppet.  Mossadeq was blind-sided by the US support of the coup.  So were the intelligentsia and the nationalists.  The dream died.  And with that death, two things began: first, a simmering hatred of the US, the fires under which were stoked by the “capitulation” regime imposed in the late-60s and 70s for American military personnel.  The cauldron finally boiled over, for the United States, on 4 November 1979.  And second, a (misguided) belief that western-style constitutional monarchy is unviable in Iran.  That cauldron simmered until 1 February 1979; it is still boiling.

 

The United States is not solely responsible for the mess in Iran.  But it is a truism that no historical event has a single cause.  The UnitesStates and the CIA are at least partly responsible for the overthrow of a democratic government, ending constitutional monarchy in Iran, thirty years of dictatorial rule by the Shah, and the Islamic revolution.  To be able to move forward and forge a healthy and democratic society, Iranians must be able to accept their share of the blame for the mess.  To be able to understand Iran and begin to establish a healthy dialogue, leading to an equal relationship with Iran, the United States must also accept its share of the blame.

 

 

Fantasia 2000

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Last night I set the dubious record of being stood up no less than four times by two different dates (and I thought double booking the evening would spare me the indignity of being alone on a Saturday night).  After waiting by the telephone and frantically calling the dates’  respective cell-phones, work, home, friends, relatives and manicurists, I finally gave up and decided to go to a movie, Fantasia 2000, playing at an IMAX theatre near you.

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Near.  Well, in a manner of speaking.  The theatre is exactly 12 kilometres from my apartment (I can see the building from my balcony.), and exactly across downtown from me.  I thought, naturally, that any of five major highways that pass near my place would quickly take me to the IMAX complex, so I dilly-dallied, moped around, felt sorry for myself for having been stood up, called the dates’ internists and divorce lawyers, and having failed at nailing down my dates – and of course frustrated that I was not going to nail them either – I gave up and ten minutes before the start of the movie I set out in the direction of the great IMAX screen and Fantasia 2000.

 

Imagine my surprise, gentle reader, when I looked at the map and found out, to my shock, horror and dismay – OK I exaggerate – that I had to go through the city, on normal city streets, to get to the famous theatre.  I won’t bore you – not, at least, more than I have already – with the details of how I got lost smack in the middle of the red-light district (get your minds out of the gutter), made a dozen illegal left and U-turns, ran two red lights, and finally, 30 minutes late, parked the car on the sidewalk and ran in to find out how much of the movie I had missed.  Well, I had made an error and was just in time.  Ticket, seat, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and disappointment all happened in such a flash that I had hardly time to catch my breath.  Soon boredom set in and to divert myself I started counting how many times a minutes I was breathing.  To relieve the tedium, I was itching to call my dates’ parole officers, but decided instead to busy myself with my Chinese finger puzzle – always handy at times like this.

 

I can’t tell you exactly what was wrong with the movie.  By now, you will have read ad nauseam about the unfinished project that the first Fantasia was, how they wanted to have different versions of it and how the project never got off the ground until the phenomenal success of the restored version in the 80s, etc. etc.  I shan’t bore you with all that.  Suffice it to say that Fantasia 2000 has neither the charm nor the panache of the original.  In fact, it is painfully banal.  Perhaps this only reflects our own times ….

 

The original, if you recall, began with Bach’s Toccata and Fugue, with abstract light and colour representations to illustrate the music. 2000 purports to begin similarly, this time with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.  However, the images soon lose their abstraction and turn into a good versus evil, colour versus darkness, butterfly versus vulture representation.  My first reaction would be to suggest that the music was at war with the images – the first movement of the Fifth Symphony does not evoke a good versus evil image in my mind.  But that would be quibbling.  At a deeper level I am bothered by the fact that what was purported to be abstract ended up being so concrete and value-laden.  That too would be quibbling.  The images were simply not compelling.

 

The images in the next segment, based on Respighi’s Pines of Rome, were much more so, but still unsatisfying.  Humpback whales breaching, and then slowly flying over the ocean and icebergs, a little baby whale getting trapped inside the iceberg, and then entire pods of whales taking to the sky, going through the clouds and breaching in space … Interesting, except that, I thought, the writers of this segment had seen Star Trek IV too many times.  Besides, whales are singularly uncute.  Don’t get me wrong, I like whales.  In fact, some of my best friends are whales.  It’s just that whales are majestic, weighty, grave, graceful – but not cute.  And in a cartoon like Fantasia, you need cute, like the baby winged horses, or the dancing mushrooms, or even the sugarplum fairies of the first Fantasia.  Not too cute, mind – but at least some cute.   I think a baby dolphin would have worked better.  Other types of whales would have distracted me not to think of Star Trek.

 

I could go on.  The yoyo-playing flamingo is nowhere near as interesting or inventive as the hippos in tutus of the original.  There is nothing as enchanting as the Waltz of the Flowers or the Arabic dance of the little goldfish in the first Fantasia.  There are no dinosaurs.  The best thing in the whole movie is the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which they have kept from the original.  And as to the finale?  What can I say, the ghouls of the Night on the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Bald Mountain in the original gave me nightmares for years, while Ave Maria convinced me to go out and become a Catholic.  Well, almost.  That is, they had punch, impact, verve.  What about Fantasia 2000?  To be sure, Stravinsky’s Firebird is a wonderful piece of music, but the visual impact of the segment was not strong.  And the stag that carried Mother Spring around on his antlers?  Can anyone spell Bambi?  A bit of originality would have been welcome.

 

I guess, on the whole, if you have been stood up and are feeling extremely sorry for yourself, it is not a disagreeable movie to see.  But then, you might as well put on the CD of Beethoven’s Fifth in the comfort of your home and save yourself the trouble of getting lost and getting traffic tickets on your way to the IMAX experience.

II

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He remembered the conversation again six months later, when his leg had healed and he was tried, and convicted, for insubordination and cowardice.  And then again under the braided leather whip of the state flogger as he delivered the 150 lashes he had been sentenced to for the crime of hesitating to kill a fellow human being.

 

Who was the enemy and who was the friend?  A soldier whose life you have spared should not shoot you in the back; your team leader, whose honour you have saved, should not put you in the brig for cowardice and insubordination.  That had been the final straw.

 

How could he tell the difference?  Would he have to live his life always looking behind him, fearful of turning his back lest a dagger be planted between his shoulders?  In a land where Fear has dominion, where men walk with their backs against the wall, afraid of exposure and betrayal, where every look has but one question, AWill it be you who will betray me?@, the soul of man withers away.  The body can suffer, and survive, the lashes of braided leather delivered with rage BAwhat did I ever do to you that you hate me so?@; it can recover from prison and shattered bones; but the spirit of man dies where Trust is dead. 

 

And so it was that twice decorated for bravery in action and one of the best snipers and commandos of the Iranian army during the eight years of wanton slaughter that some euphemistically referred to as the Iran-Iraq Awar@, Hessam finally decided to leave homeland and kin and to become a refugee in a land he had heard of only in fairly tales.  He told no one, not even his mother, when he left <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Tehran.  He knew every peak, every pass, every pathway of that wild region of Western Iran where it joins Northern Iraq and Southeastern Turkey.  He walked in snow and braved treacherous passes, slept in caves and lived on nuts and dried fruits for a fortnight before surrendering himself to an astonished Turkish Gendermerie post.  In fluent Azeri Turkish he declared himself a refugee, showed his credentials (including pictures of his lacerated back, right after the whipping, and his medals B to prove he was not a mere draft-dodger) and collapsed from fatigue and cold.  The next day he was taken to a military hospital for treatment, which lasted all of two hours.  He simply needed sleep and a hot shower, that was all. 

 

As he was leaving, he noticed that his knapsack had been searched.  The only thing missing was his remaining bag of pistachio nuts; the Turks prefer Iranian pistachios to their own.  A bundle of money B about $10,000 in various currencies B had been left untouched.  In Ankara he lodged with a gentle Turkish family who, hearing of his ordeal, refused to take money from him, treated his wounded soul with care and love, and gave him hope that all was not rotten in the world.  He then presented himself to the Danish Embassy, showed his credentials (the pictures, but not the medals; a statement from the Turkish military hospital about the state they had found him in; and a testimonial from his adopted family) and was bundled off to Aarhus as a Geneva Convention refugee within two months.

 

There he met his wife (a Dane); there his children were born (all with the strikingly exotic combination of tanned skin, light hair and blue-green eyes); there he started university (at the age of 32, supported by the Danish state B he studies business management); and there, in that land in which he is still an alien, whose language he speaks with a strong accent, whose ways of life he has yet to fully absorb, in that land so far away from the land of his fathers for thousands of years, he will stay.  His exotic-looking Danish children will have a dim second-hand memory of another world accessible to them only in fairly tales (or horror stories); and they will see other cousins, equally exotic looking, spread all over the world following paths similar and different, who will also have dim memories of the land of their forefathers.

 

Among strangers he found friends, where among friends he had met only enemies.

 

The trick all along had been to know the difference.

I

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From where the sniper stood, the Iraqi soldier was only about 50 meters away.    A slight man, boy even; a shimmer of a moustache on his lips and a torrent of jet-black hair on top.  The fool is not wearing his helmet, the sniper thought.  The Iraqi got up – torso, neck and unhelmetted head now above the parapets.  The sniper raised his rifle and slowly brought the boy into the view finder.  The Iraqi, perhaps sensing doom, turned and and with eyes half focussed, looked straight at the camouflaged sniper.  The sniper held steady: no prisoners, that was the rule.  But in the view finder, he saw the boy’s eyes slowly realising what he was seeing; a moment later, and sweat beads were collecting on his brow; tears swloly collected, and a tear drop fell from the Iraqi’s long lashes. 

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The sniper lowered his rifle.  No prisoners, that was the rule; and let no one off.  But by now the two were looking at each other.  The sniper thought he saw a spark of recognition, a hint of gratitude.  No problem mate, he thought; as careless as you are, someone will get you eventually.  But not me, not now.  The sniper quietly hung his rifle on his shoulder, replaced and adjusted his paratrooper’s beret, and turned to run back up the hill, to the agreed pick up rendez-vous.

 

That was when he heard a crack, as of a dried branch snapping under foot, or a handgun going off at 50 meters.  He felt a deep burning sensation in his left calf, and then another crack, as of a dried branch snapping under foot, or the shin yielding to a bullet.  Teeth clenched in pain, anger and hatred, he turned on the shattered bone, breaking it in two other places, raised the rifle and delivered the fatal shot to the Iraqi boy holding a raised hand gun, still standing where he was, torso up over the parapets, unhelmetted head now splattered all over the trenches.

 

The sniper pulled himself under the shadow of a boulder.  The movements from now on were automatic.  Stanch the bloodflow; radio in for help; inject painkiller; wait.  Minutes, hours, years later, two of his comrades arrived to splinter his leg and haul his muscular frame up the hill and over to the rendez-vous point.  He was thrown over a mule and carried a couple of kilometres through craggy and dry mountainous paths.  Then an unsteady jeep, driven by an unsteadier youth of seventeen, over still more sinuous mountain paths pockmarked with mortar fire.  He was jostled this way and that, trying to listen to the conversation around him, trying to concentrate on where he was.  But all he could remember was the very last image of the young man he had just dispatched: a torrent of hair, eyes still brimming with tears of fear and gleaming in the sunlight; and a stupid, wicked grin showing yellow crooked teeth. 

 

At least, that’s what he thought he could remember.

 

They arrived in the field hospital.  He passed out.

 

* * *

It’s funny how I have never been able to tell this story in the first person singular.   I know I was there, because of fragments of memory, here and there, that trouble my days and deprive me of sleep at night.  I know because there were witnesses.  And I know because twenty years on, my leg still hurts from the old war injury – I can’t ever say that without recalling Basil Fawlty – and there was only one way I could have got that bullet in the back of my lower leg. 

 

Because “he” lowered the rifle, and “he” turned to walk away.  Or perhaps run away.  At least, that’s what they tried to pin on me, a year later, when I had recovered, when I had gone back to the Front, when I had refused orders, when I was arrested by the same comrades who had hauled me up the mountain that lost day, when I was lashed and chained and –

 

The charges of cowardice and attempted desertion did not stick, or I would not be writing this now, in the comfort of my home on the shores of <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Lake Geneva.  I’d like to think the military judge had a sense of justice, or of mercy, though the hundreds of others who had been consigned to the firing squad or the hangman’s noose by his hands bore witness to the contrary.  I made believe for many years that my friends did not lie under oath, though I would not have spent six months in the brig and suffered 100 lashes of an electric cable if they had not. 

 

And I denied, until only recently, that my “honour had been assailed” – a quaint Persian euphemism for rape – or, at any rate, I had persuaded myself that I had been at fault for not having fought harder against the assailants, though I had been shackled and beaten and semi-conscious when it happened.

 

An Ideal Husband

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The first movie in which I saw Rupert Everett was “Dance with a Stranger”, the tragic story of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain.  Everett played, to absolute perfection, the part of the caddish boyfriend who gets himself shot.  After that, but for a few forgettable or miserable movies (Q: Who can forget “The Comfort of Strangers”? A: Both people who saw it.), and after an interview with Attitude magazine in which he outed himself, apparently before Queer Nation did, his career seemed to have tanked.  The boy who had shown so much promise in his first movie, “Another Country”, was headed to another country than Hollywoodland.

But, of course, that is not what happened. Everett was excellent as the foppish Prince of Wales in “The Madness of King George”.  Though playing the by-now stock character of Lovable Gay Friend in “My Best Friend’s Wedding”, he stole the show and re-established himself as a serious actor.  And then he was the scheming Oberon in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”: Everett’s bored shrug when the lovers offer undying affection to one another deserved an entire Oscar category. 

And now comes “An Ideal Husband”, in which he plays the dissolute Lord Goring, Wilde’s stock stand-in for himself.  Inevitably, he steals the movie.  He does so against a cast of very accomplished actors struggling with one of Wilde’s heaviest plays, and despite a direction that does not quite know where to take the material: is this a morality play or a comedy of manners?  Much good to be said, then, about Everett; about the movie, I am more ambivalent.

Here is the plot (as if that mattered in a Wilde play): Lord Chiltern (Northam), an up-and-coming parliamentarian widely respected for his upstanding morality and ethics, is being blackmailed for a youthful (unethical) indiscretion by a Mrs. Chevely (Julianne Moore).  His wife, the lovely Lady Gertrude (Blanchet), is an unforgiving model of Victorian Morality who holds his esteemed husband to such high regard (“An Ideal Husband”) that her world “comes to an end” when she finds out, from the mischievous Mrs. Chevely (the pun, I am certain, was intended), about the source of Robert’s fortune.  There are the usual comedic misunderstandings and clever lines (though far fewer than in other of Wilde’s plays), marriage proposals and, of course, grand balls and white ties ….  I am not going to give too much away if I said it all ends happily.

Happily, more important, it ends.  This is not one of Wilde’s strongest plays.  There are no more than three good lines in the entire play – which, for Wilde, is a major failure.  The play is not terribly funny; I counted three or four times that I laughed out-loud.  And it has a Serious Undertone – made all the more serious by the direction, which appears to be fashioning a Social Commentary out of this yarn rather than a comedy of manners that, in principle, it ought to be.  Indeed, one feels that Chiltern’s (Northam is superb) admonition at the end of the movie is aimed at us, the viewers at the end of this century, rather than at the audience of the last.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with trying to see the serious side of Wilde.  After all, he was – or at least he thought himself to be – a dedicated Socialist.  Many of his fables are, in their own quaint way, social commentaries about the conditions in which the poor lived (though he had little notion of it).  In his plays, the comedy is always tempered by a serious sub-text, no doubt borne out of his homosexuality and the need to hide it.  “You forget my dear, we live in the land of the hypocrite,” he wrote.  It is a funny line, but it was a serious indictment of his society.  It is all too easy to see “An Ideal Husband” in this light, to note that all the most upstanding characters turn out, in the end, to have feet of clay (and if you miss it, the lovely Gertrude spells it out for you) and that the only person left with any integrity is the dissolute and foppish Goring.  In this context, and given that the play itself is unusually leaden, it is not strange that the director opted for some ambiguity in the movie: it is a comedy of manners, but there is Social Commentary in it as well.  The director dispenses with the usual mannerisms of Wildean stage productions, and the knowing, almost winking asides, in favour of Whispers, Mood Scenes and Serious Acting.  Why, even Everett plays down Goring; so much so that he is utterly believable, both in his dissolution and his later devotion for Miss Molly, Chiltern’s sister and ward.

And that says it all.  Wilde’s characters are really caricatures and not drawn to be believable; they should not be acted as if they were.  What is the harm, you ask?  The problem with such an approach is clear in this movie: the play is manifestly at war with the direction.  We are told Chiltern is an upstanding moral citizen, that Lady Chiltern is a woman unforgiving of sin, that Chevely is evil (more or less), etc.  And yet, none of this is established; none of it is developed.  In a Wildean play, where character means little and the aphorism everything, this would not be a problem.  In a movie that appears to me at least to attempt to delve below the words, to search out and display the sub-text, character becomes everything and the movie/play’s lack of development kicks you in the shin every time there is a reference to Chiltern’s ethics or Chevely’s lack thereof.  It is comic, and not a Social Commentary, that Chevely the blackmailer ends up, in the end, as the only one to keep her word of honour and not to have lied.

Go see the movie, by all means, but only for the acting and the sets.  And look for the Wildean aphorisms that, though few and far in between, still tickle and titillate.

We are the dead

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“What is the most valuable asset you ever had?” asked the Pupil.
“Trust in a friend,” replied the old Master.
“Don‘t you mean a trustworthy friend?”
“No, that is easy to come by.  The challenge is to be able to place your trust in him.” 
We live behind bars, barriers, dams, and walls of our own making.  Does anyone ever get the chance to break out of their emotional prison cells and to express themselves freely?  Perhaps; and perhaps that is the condition we label madness, or lunacy, or insanity.  Sane people, I would venture to guess, stay within the imaginary walls that are more difficult to breach than the securest of concrete prisons.  I suspect the reason to be that we can never fully trust one another: betrayal is the hallmark of mankind.  The walls that keep us within ourselves, also protect us from the others, much like the way child molesters are put into solitary confinement for their own protection.  We are all in protective solitary confinement.
How impoverished we are.
Perhaps we are afraid of betrayal from within; perhaps we are afraid of ourselves, the intensity of our emotions, the controlling effect of our senses.
How often have I looked at someone and felt that there is nothing in the world I would refuse to do for her.  Nothing.  My senses were alert to her slightest discomfort; I noticed the slightest emotional discomfort, and suffer along.  I became bothered by her silence; her mood dictated mine; her words, thoughts, face, smell dominated my world and shaped my existence.  A slight change in her tone of voice, the look in her eyes, the way she sat or talked or interacted with others, each minutiae of change could betray volumes of anguish and suffering and cause just about the same for the me.  Perhaps it is this intensity, this attachment, that we try to avoid.
***
When he died, I did not feel anything.  An overwhelming numbness enveloped and pushed aside all emotion.  Nostaligic memories was all that I was left with.
What I should have felt, though, was not nostalgia and the occasional bitterness that was, I suppose, inevitable.  I should have felt pain; I should have suffered with him, but I could not. 
Why had I not felt pain?
I did not feel pain, I believe, because I felt dead.  It is not just me, it is everyone.  Reg may have been killed, but we are the dead. 
Oh, we roam the streets and drive cars and eat and sleep and have sex ‑‑ we do everything living beings are supposed to do, but we are not alive.  Our souls are dead; our humanity is dead; we are dead.
For how else can we account for the brutality that we impose and inflict on one another?  What cause, what idea, is worth the price of a human life?  I am not talking about those who depart with it willingly, for valiant or foolish, to them, the price is high.  No.  I ask this of those who take life for an idea, an ideal ‑‑ a conjecture, at best.
My head hurts and my eyes are burning.  I cannot ‑‑ do not want to write any more…
What kind of person does it take to take a life to prove a point?  What certainty of infallibility, what certitude, what righteousness does it take to pass such deadly judgment on another human being?  I suppose it has always been there, but I had not wanted to see it.  As with people in any other movement ‑‑ sane, rational people ‑‑ I had seen just what I had wanted to see, and dismissed the rest.  But the signs were there, in full view of everyone, we just had to open our eyes; and that, often, is the most difficult thing to do.
***
A half moon arisen, a city fast asleep, a seagull aflight ‑‑ I know, even though I cannot see it, for I hear the flutter of the wings.  Moonlight dances on the waves, a bone chilling breeze sweeps into the shore from the mighty ocean.  I have to close my window.
I had the nightmare again last night.  Well, I had a dream, which I do not remember very clearly, except that I woke up shaking with horror and could not go back to sleep, so, I suppose it was a nightmare.  Dark figures dancing around a fire.  I could not make out what was burning ‑‑ I knew it was something important ‑‑ because of the dancing figures, and I could not see the figures clearly because of the fire; there was music, which was drowned out by the cries of the dancers.  Dancers?  I am still not sure they were dancing.  It was too grotesque.  And I knew it was violent, even though in the smoke and the fog it was hard to tell.  I tried to go closer, but I could not.  Was I afraid?  I do not know. Maybe I was just not curious.  Then they raised the fire ‑‑ the object that was burning, and I turned my head away.  I did not want to see it.  And then I could make out the music, and I did not want to hear it.  And then I could see their faces, and I did not want to know them.  Then I woke up.
…
I cannot feel anything.  I have grieved far too much for far too long; I have mourned, I have cried, and now, I have no more tears left.  I have no more grief.  I do not even feel dead any more ‑‑ for dead implies life before expiration, and I do not feel that I have ever been alive.  I feel like the cold gray rocks upon which Tennyson‘s waves break; they sit patiently, bearing with fortitude the weight of an Ocean and the crashing of the wild waves of time, their edges softening, but still waiting, waiting for that one ship to come too close, for that one man to take the wrong step, and then they devour their victims, coldly, silently and passively.
I am scared because I, too, am now waiting for my victims.  I have no one in mind ‑‑ like the rocks, I do not know who will pass me next ‑‑ but I do know that if I feel as cold as those rocks, I will claim my own victim in time.  That is the nature of things.  Maybe if I felt some sorrow, some sadness ….
Evil lurks in my mind.  Like an assassin pacing impatiently back and forth on cold cobblestones of a dark misty alleyway, all I can think of is pulling the trigger.  Vengeance; the thought of revenge began as a small idea, but now it has mushroomed into a creed; a cancerous tumour expanding mercilessly in my thoughts, awake or asleep; a malignant infection, debilitating, all‑consuming, all‑embracing.
When I first saw it in my own eyes I drew back.  It was a passing moment.  The hardness, the dark depth that nearly drowned my consciousness in unforgiving malice, vanished as soon as I recognized it and was scared by it.  But like an annoying noise or habit, I have become used to the almost daily flashes of the thing, the monster, that inhabits my soul.  There is evil, pure evil; it no longer runs through my mind.  Evil lurks within me.
It is an unsettling experience, getting used to the evil within.  At first I resisted it.  I tried to run away from it.  I did not look at myself in the mirror; I ran away from “bad” images; I shut “bad” thoughts out of my mind.  But at night, when I went to bed, evil was an eager and faithful companion.  When I felt grief, it sympathized with me.  When I mourned my friend with eyes that no longer bore any tears, with a heart that no longer felt any pain, and with a soul shot through with confusion and anger, it held me up and nourished me. 
You are a sly one, but a faithful companion!  A weaker man would have given in to your wiles many a moon past: I have already seen too many moons trying to stay awake to avoid your allure.  A weaker man would have sought consolation from you.  But not I.  I know you; I have seen you in the mirror; but I shall not be yours, not yet anyway.
I became aware of my humanity, oddly enough, at the moment when I realized I could take life.  The look I saw in the mirror, MY LOOK, was the look of a murderer.  It was, at that point, just a flash, and I had no inkling of the future frequency of the visit.  Until then, I used to think that when faced with the choice of killing someone and being killed myself, I should have the courage to accept death rather than break my own proscription against taking a life.  But that morning, in a flash of appalled recognition, I saw my capacity to take life ‑‑ not just to save life, but for more unsavoury reasons, for revenge.  I retreated in horror then, but I have been visited by that spectre time and again since that morning encounter, and I have accepted its presence.  Now I can only say that when faced with the choice of killing someone, and not killing someone, I should like to have the will to resist the force of evil. 
But vengeance is a terrible master.  It is merciless to both its victims, the killed and the killer ‑‑ one loses his life, the other his humanity.  And just like night and day, when we become cognizant of the one at the prospect of losing the other, I first became aware of my humanity at that brief moment when I was close to losing it.  Now I am ever closer to its loss.
Ali is aware of this.  He has seen something in my eyes that I see but fleetingly myself, a look, a ghost even.  He told me I was not in good shape, and he was right.  How could a cold gray rock be a good shape for a human being ‑‑ a former human, now gone, now dead, now a mass of frozen lava sitting on a shore waiting to destroy anything that had the mischance of crossing its path?  Ali was worried about the look in my eyes, but I was worried that I had eyes.  Rocks sit passively, patiently, and do not kill unless trod upon.  But I had the nature ‑‑ if it can be so called ‑‑ of a murderous cliff and the hunting instinct of a wounded tiger.  I would not sit passively for my victims, I would seek them out; I would not wait for them to get close to me, I would call on them, like the Sirens, to come to me and to crash on my deadly jagged edges.  It would not be random, but by choice and design ‑‑ my choice.  I would look into the vast ocean, see the ship I wish to sink, and quietly lay myself in its path; and I would not feel any pain, and not have any remorse.  And on to the next ship to sink, the next skull to crack open, the next life to take.
If we are dead, then taking a life would not be such a sin.  If our souls are dead, then I would be putting an end to a mere chemical process.  And after that, no more pain, no more brutality, no more violence, no more unleashing of pent up anger, no more random throw of the darts, no more bloody pants ‑‑ no more death.
“If we are to change anything, it must be intellectually, and not by violence,” Ali said.  He was reading my mind, or my journals.  I looked up, but he turned his eyes away from me.  He looked out at the dancing moonlight; another insomniac fisherman, and his fishing boat broke the liquid silver pattern; the moon frowned; Ali sipped his tea. 
“The look in your eyes in not human.”  He shuddered.  “It‘s still cold in here.” 
He started a fire in the fireplace and went back to the couch, but it did not do him any good.
“Are you concerned for me?”
“No.  I‘m … I‘m scared of you.”