I began the week a sort of rodeo bull out of the chute, but by hot Thursday of a warmer week than usual I had slowed down to barely a trot.
Had I overdone the exultant long walks in the growing heat of day? Or has the vision factor proven an inadequate
explanation for my recent almost chronic fatigue?
I still have no results from the sleep study; my doctor is on vacation and she won't be back for another week. She had looked tired herself when I saw her the week before
my night in the sleep lab.
"There's always so much to do," she'd said. "I try to concentrate on each patient when I'm with them, but all of the time stuff is coming in and piling up. And my children need a mother, too."
"Life is hard for all of us," I said, and touched her lightly on the shoulder as she left the exam room.
Since watching this year's Oscar-winning documentary,
The Cove, I've meant to write it up and recommend it as must-see for its exposure of the atrocity of
Japan's annual deliberate slaughter of thousands of dolphins, whose extremely highly mercury-contaminated flesh is sold to unsuspecting consumers.
The reason for the high level of mercury contamination is that dolphins eat at a very high level on the oceanic food chain, and humans have put a lot of mercury into the oceans. Very few people in Japan know what's happening in the hidden cove. The men engaged in the enterprise, though they claim to think it's okay, have gone to great lengths to try to keep observers (especially observers with cameras) out of the area. The film crew's accomplishment in producing
The Cove is astonishing. The story is riveting.
But the film shocked me, and I'm still shocked, apparently to the point (until today) of not being able to say anything, or
knowing what to say. The stupid, wanton destruction of even one (let alone thousands annually) of nature's intelligent creatures....
In Hitler's Berlin bunker, early on the morning of April 29, 1945, der Führer and Eva Braun were wed. At about 3:30 in the afternoon the next day, each of them bit into thin glass vials of cyanide, and Adolph also shot himself in the head, just to make sure. Their bodies were wrapped in a blanket and carried into the garden of the chancellery, doused with gasoline, and burned.
Goings-on in the bunker during the final ten days of the Nazi regime are dramatically portrayed in the extraordinary 2004 German film,
Der Untergang (Downfall). Its factual basis includes the published memoir of Hitler's 22-year-old secretary,
Traudl Junge, who was in the bunker throughout these days until a day or two after her boss's suicide, when she finally left and wended her way through the invading Soviet troops.
For its excellence as cinema, including
Bruno Ganz's masterful performance as Hitler, and its credible (if still unbelievable) look into the bunker in those final days, I recommend this film, too, as must-see.
The day after Hitler's suicide, his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, and his wife Magda had morphine administered to their six children and (as the movie makers chose to portray it) Magda herself pressed each sleeping child's jaw to crush an ampoule of cyanide between its teeth. (This action is shown in heart-stopping deliberation for each of the six children.) Then the parents walked out into the garden and silently faced each other. He was dressed in his official regalia, she wore one of her fine dresses. Joseph raised his pistol and shot Magda in the heart, then shot himself in the right temple. Underlings burned their bodies too, but perhaps not so well as Hitler and Eva's bodies had been burned....
At any rate, the equally excellent 2005 documentary,
Das Goebbels-Experiment (whose narration consists almost entirely of Kenneth Branagh's reading from Goebbels's diaries), ends with photographs of the burned bodies of the entire family laid out on adjoining tables. You can see on Goebbels's right leg the charred brace he wore for a deformity, the result either of club foot or osteomyelitis. In this film, Branagh narrates a statement of Magda's that she didn't want her children to survive into a world in which National Socialism would no longer exist. (I have subsequently learned of testimony that she'd indicated as early as a month before the end that she didn't want her children to live to hear that their father had been a mass murderer, and she hoped they would have a better life through reincarnation.)
The 2006 German TV miniseries,
Dresden, had a week before reminded us of the fire-bombing of that German city by the British and American air forces in February 1945. Perhaps 135,000 people died there in those three nights of Allied bombing, which was done as a strategic favor for Josef Stalin, an even greater mass murderer than Hitler.
Dresden is the locale of Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel,
Slaughterhouse-Five.
The bonus material for
Der Untergang pointed out that a million people had starved to death in Leningrad during the Nazis' siege of that city in 1941-42.
Die Fälscher [The Counterfeiters] is a 2007 German film based on the true story of master counterfeiter
Salomon Smolianoff's being allowed to live, and live relatively plushly, in concentration camps in return for helping the Nazis "create" millions of pounds of British currency for their war effort. When his camp was liberated, its general population at first assumed Smolianoff and his cohorts must be Nazis and almost killed them, but they were offered food and drink and relented. An excellent film in its writing, editing, acting.
The very next night we watched the oddly romantic 2006 film
Zwartboek [Black Book], which centers around the expropriation of wealth from Dutch Jews by members of the Dutch establishment (including the Dutch resistance movement). The Jews were decoyed to a place they had been told they could flee the country, then machine-gunned, their bodies looted then buried in mass graves.
And (as we learned last night from the 2007 documentary, "
Nanking") in December 1937, Japanese soldiers had committed tens of thousands of rapes (often followed by the victim's being butchered by bayonet) in Nanking during the first weeks of their occupation of that Chinese city. About 200,000 civilians and 90,000 prisoners of war died there as well.
When it comes to numbers, there's those six million Jews who were shamed, robbed, beaten, slashed, shot, lynched, starved, gassed, "medically" experimented on...murdered. (And let's not forget that we have treated black folks similarly here, as my recent reading of Timothy B. Tyson's 2004 autobiographical book,
Blood Done Sign My Name, reminded me. White supremacy has been American as well as Nazi. And the election of Barack Obama doesn't prove that we're not still infected by it.)
"You have a fleck of pastry on your lip. Do you want me to flick it off, or kiss it off?"
This question occurred to me as I washed my sticky hands in the men's room at the local bakery this morning. I could see in the mirror that I had a fleck of glazed blueberry turnover on my parafiltrum.
The possibility of asking a woman a question like that (whether she had a fleck on her lip or not) might have been suggested by the image of the strawberry-blond, say 24-year-old woman in the bakery shop who had served me the turnover. Her eyes were big and blue, her face freckled and tan, good bones and muscles. Maybe I fantasized her shapely lips applying the proposed remedy?
I had eaten the pastry in a little alcove whose entrance through the wall from the main part of the bakery had looked to me like a mirror as I approached it. I had remarked to the trio sitting at a table in front of it, "Hey, is that a mirror you're sitting by? I guess not, for I don't see you guys in it. Or me either!"
Question: If a woman proposes the flick or kiss alternative to a man, how likely is it he'll opt for the kiss? And if a man proposes it to a woman...?
And how would the likelihood be affected by factors such as the perceived attractiveness of the proposer, the proposer's smile or tone of voice, the time of day, the light?
I left the bakery and went back to the auto spa, where they were washing and inspecting my wife's car. I asked the even prettier, dark-haired, say 22-year-old woman behind the counter there if she could give me some paper and lend me a pen.
There was only one chair to sit on inside, at a tall round table at which a nice-looking, blond-haired woman of about thirty-five was already sitting and reading a magazine. "Is this chair available?"
She said it was, so I sat down and started writing. I quickly filled the front and back of a sheet, and stopped to relax. The magazine was now lying on the table, and I could see on its cover the upside-down-photograph of two shapely young women in skimpy bathing suits.
"Do you mind if I look at the magazine." I pointed at the figures on the cover. "I've got to check this out."
"Ha, it's not real," she said.
"The photo's been touched up, you mean?" I said.
"I'm sure it has. Blemishes removed. Even pounds taken off. The swimsuit section is discouraging. They shouldn't publish something like that just as we real people who have children and don't have time to work out anymore are about to start going swimming ourselves....No," she said, nodding at the cover of the magazine, which still lay where she'd left it, "real people aren't like that."
"Yeah," I said, "I'm old enough to have discovered that a few times."
I stood up and pointed across the road. "Say, have you ever been to that bakery over there?"
She didn't even know there was one.
"Straight across, the first shop with the awning."
I told her about the fleck of pastry I'd seen on my face.
"Anyway," I said, "it got me to thinking...Could I read you something?"
She listened, then observed, "A man asked the question by a woman would be much more likely to choose a kiss than would a woman asked it by a man. But you never know...."
We went back to waiting for our cars to be ready, and I started drafting what I might say about my recent immersion in dark movies, The Goebbels Experiment, The Cove, Dresden, The Counterfeiters, Black Book, Downfall,
and Nanking.
I'm still morally stunned, by
The Cove more than by the other films. I've become desensitized to what happens in a war, but the intentional slaughter of friendly, well-loved dolphins for monetary gain is beyond me.
The wanton destruction of even one (let alone thousands and millions and tens of millions) of nature's intelligent creatures (from dolphins and other intelligent non-human creatures to other humans) is brutal because the perpetrators are (at least in theory) capable of morality.
That is, though "brute" originally referred to a beast, or non-human, it has come to refer to a savage or "inhuman" human, which is a nice paradox, come to think of it. Humans are (in theory) capable of being human, but we're so often [morally]
inhuman.
As for the original, non-human brutes, can we fault them for devouring the animals lower than they on the food chain? I don't think so. The food chain (below the human level) is amoral and therefore not itself [morally] brutal, but if "God" created it, then isn't God Himself brutal—that is, a brute? Absent God, the brutes of nature are the human ones who exercise their inhumanity.
My wife's car was ready first, and as I was leaving I touched my table companion on the back with the tips of two fingers. She turned around, smiled, and said, "Nice talking to you...."
I thought I heard her say, "...honey."
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