CSotD: Hearts of Stone, and of Feeling
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Turkish cartoonist Halit Kurtulmus Aytoslu is not the only cartoonist to file a quick overnight response to the bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester last night.
However, he makes the most profound statement, neither simply weeping nor raging in abstract defiance.
There is in these moments the dichotomy Shakespeare described in Macbeth, when MacDuff learns his wife and children have been murdered for political reasons:
MALCOLM
Dispute it like a man.
MACDUFF
I shall do so,
But I must also feel it as a man.
I cannot but remember such things were
That were most precious to me. Did heaven look on,
And would not take their part?
It is a brilliant passage, with Malcolm using "like a man" in the sense of macho boldness, while MacDuff uses it in the generic, non-gendered sense of the word, for "humanity."
MacDuff, too, expresses the sense of abandonment that a loving, paternal God did not intervene. "Eli Eli lama sabachthani?"
Aytoslu reverses this response, depicting terror as a demon's game, and, in this cold assessment, channels both fury and acceptance: As angry as it makes us, as horror-stricken as we are at each outbreak, this is our reality.
This is how we now live.
Seigfried Sassoon — a WWI veteran known to his mates as "Mad Jack" for his insanely bold forays out of the trenches — voiced with contempt the icy indifference of those with no stake in the game.
If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,
I’d live with scarlet Majors at the Base,
And speed glum heroes up the line to death.
You’d see me with my puffy petulant face,
Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel,
Reading the Roll of Honour. ‘Poor young chap,’
I’d say—‘I used to know his father well;
Yes, we’ve lost heavily in this last scrap.’
And when the war is done and youth stone dead,
I’d toddle safely home and die—in bed.
While, in the wake of the Easter Rebellion, Yeats wrote of those who, like himself, had held themselves aside, but could not remain unaffected:
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
Much of my response to terrorism was shaped in the early 80s by my contact with Irish ex-pats, some from the North, including a couple burned out of their home in the Catholic ghetto by a Unionist mob, as well as older immigrants for whom the Troubles were as distant as they were to me: It's one thing to care, but quite another to have been immersed in it.
There has never been a time when civilians were untouched by war, but there was indeed a time when the bulk of killing took place between armies. Those days are long gone.
World War II was a sort of balance point, in which victory came on battlefields but also in which nations could tolerate, and in turn inflict, the most pain on civilian populations.
After that, in Algeria, in Vietnam and elsewhere, small unit violence took the place of major movements.
Today, our armies seem more like heavily-armed police, swatting away at this or that isolated outbreak, with few major targets and fewer yet of those in which an all-out attack seems to kill as many combatants as it does civilians.
There are still wars; make no mistake. Syria, Nigeria, Iraq, Sudan and other venues still see the seizure of ground, along with all the barbaric pillaging, rape and genocidal slaughter that come with it.
But terror, as Aytsolu depicts it, is a random game of lights and bells and then the next ball is flipped into play.
My friends most directly in the path of Nationalist and Unionist violence in Ulster were surprisingly cool about it. You were, they would note, statistically in more danger of being mugged and shot in Detroit or New York than you were of being blown up in Belfast or Derry.
They went about their lives with appropriate, but not overwhelming, caution: "It's perfectly safe," one fellow told me, "so long as you know where you're going and get there afore dark."
In 1983, I spent an afternoon with Tomas Cardinal O'Fiaich, who, on one hand, spoke of the frequent meetings of interfaith groups and their efforts to lure young people away from militancy and into job training, while, on the other, told of often stopping his car near a checkpoint to make sure young men were simply searched and sent on their way, rather than being kidnapped and murdered by the authorities.
However, he told me of an equally unacceptable situation, which was the indifference of those not directly in the line of fire:
One thing that strikes me is that the Catholics of the South of Ireland, the southern part of my own diocese even, they want to distance themselves from the violence of the North. They're inclined to say 'God, keep it up there, as long as it stays away from us, we're OK.' There's a certain attitude that I find a little bit unChristian in certain areas of the South.
It's a terrible situation; the sadness and suffering that so many families in the North — Protestant and Catholic alike — have come through in recent years, and I mean, it's not a thousand miles away, it's not in Afghanistan or Iran or Iraq. We shouldn't distance ourselves from any suffering, but at least it should be easier to distance ourselves from those than from something in Ireland. Yet they do try, even from something which I think Christian charity demands that we try to be helpful with.
Today, to paraphrase Phil Ochs, "You don't have to go to Manchester. Manchester is coming to you."
As is Derry. If it's not quite where you are yet, just wait a bit. It'll get there.
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