Posted 2 years, 8 months ago around lunchtime by oso
This past week in an email exchange with another blogger I was reminded just how shitty it is to be a moral relativist. To really believe, deep down in your bones, that there is no absolute meaning in anything. Abogado (back when he actually wrote on this weblog) laid it out pretty well here. Luckily, I rarely think about such things these days as I now focus that part of the brain on the three inch valley between a woman’s buttocks and her back:
Lyndsay, who is nominated to sit on the constitutional court and who has long been a civil rights lawyer, faces the punishment of one who has also carelessly sinned. When her husband - who has finally, in retirement, gotten to pursue his love of archeology - leaves her for a tour guide who has been showing him Mexico’s ruins (another destroyed civilization that once thought itself immortal?), she believes it is because of a long-ago forgiven love affair she had indulged in. The message that a transgression can be forgiven, yet the hurt remain unsalved and waiting to take revenge, should discomfit any white South African too complacent about the national reconciliation.
Tony Epirle’s review of “Get a Life” by Nadine Gordimer
Here is my question of the day. In a way, it seems like one of the most recurrent themes in modern lit/film etc:
Do we inherit responsibilities with circumstance?
Maybe you have Armenian friends and they tell you, full of emotion, about the Armenian genocide of 1915 and about how those Turks still call it war, not genocide. Or perhaps you’ve been following this news story about how the Chinese are so upset with the Japanese because the Japenese President paid a visit to the grave of the nation’s emperor who ruled during WWII. Or, more likely, you probably have a friend who is in favor of reparations to the ancestors of slaves by the ancestors of slave owners.
The point is, we inherit the positions and transgressions of our forefathers. Nothing new about that; the bible is full of examples. But as history becomes more persistent and more primary-sourced, the individual becomes blurred with the circumstances that created her.
I am white. I am male. The caucasians before me were guilty of horrendous crimes and oppression. The men before me, likewise, oppressed women as unequals. Am I therefore obligated to live my life differently than my neighbor who was born black and female? Will my own children be judged by what I write here?
Sometimes I’m at a place like In ‘N’ Out, a hamburger joint here in California. The restaurant is filled with people of all walks of life. East and South Asian children of H-1 immigrants, Blacks whose great-grandparents spread from the South in 1879. WASP skater kids whose ancestors risked all looking for something better in the west. Latinos, full of their own European, Middle Eastern, Jewish, and Indigenous genetic stories. Gap-wearing suburbanites whose relatives were once Jews, Italians, and Irish, but are now just called white. Sometimes I look around and all I see is history in motion like a giant wave which just builds and builds but never crashes.
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Wow. You write this and I write a post about how stupid parents in Colorado are for being scared of opera.
In other words, great post.
Thanks. If those parents are fearful of Faust, I wonder what R. Kelley’s Trapped in the Closet would do to them …
jajaja… uyyy!!! flor!!!! perdón por pisarte!!!
Es qe son namas 5, pero ya puse a San Diego como lugar favorito… ok?????
y te la paso!!, jajajajaja…. Saludos.
hey oso, you started out this post very sexily, talking about that valley and then just dropped it! talk about a giant wave building but not crashing!
Catarf,
Tengo un nuevo dicho: “No memas.” Or more specfically, “no me memas.”
Jennifer,
“before they are served by the stud animal.” Sometimes the Oxford English Dictionary can be so poetic.
So many roses to stop and smell. . and yet so little time!
“Do we inherit responsibilities with circumstance?” Yes. You are especially guilty of blog’s death. You white male person, you… By the way, love this sentence: “Latinos, full of their own European, Middle Eastern, Jewish, and Indigenous genetic stories.” So short yet so loaded. I wish I could write like you, then again, I think it’s wrong for me to aspire to write like a white man, but I love you anyways. Oso!!!! You rock!
Weird, David. I was just thinking about this last night (about identity and responsibility). I just saw “Munich” last night. As you remember, I live in Morocco, so there I was: a half-Jew half-Christian current atheist watching an American film, dubbed into French, about an Muslim-Jewish conflict, while sitting in a theater in a nominally Muslim country. Identity all of a sudden became very fluid for me. You are “the other” and “the other” is you.
i knew my parents were to blame for most everything I came to love about myself
It crashes.
So you’re saying you want corn rows and Phat booty jeans so that you can eradicate the oppression caused by your forefathers? Is it because you wore that dress that one time?
We certainly inherited stereotypes but I would hardly call them “responsibilities” that you have to adhere to unless you mean we ought to be breaking those stereotypes.
Cad,
I don’t understand how someone as technologically savvy as you uses Internet Explorer.
Seyd,
Please remember that you love me when I write an upcoming series of posts on bi-racial relationships. Are you really a “post-blogger” or did you just want to coin the phrase?
Mary,
I love people with the cajones to declare themselves atheists. To say, yup, I’ve thought it over, and really, nope, doesn’t exist, sorry. I’m sure most Moroccans love to hear that. I want to watch Munich, but my friend/girlfriend, Revaz tells me that I have to watch Match Point first so that we can talk about it.
Metin,
Beautiful! Are you a lyricist for an indie band? Do you want to be? I need someone to make me famous.
Joel,
Have you been taking classes with Samuel Huntington?
Patti,
You pretty much hit it on the head. What I am saying is that I’m pondering getting corn rows, wearing flowery summer dresses, and playing the tabla. Identity construction is fun.
Sorry to burst your bubble bro, but you have nowhere near tha rhythm necessary to play the tabla. On the other hand, you would look pretty sweet with corn rows.
I obviously got nostalgic for both Phish and Nepal. I can also see the corn rows:
Did I write “it clashes”?
I said, and I repeat: It crashes. Oh, yes, it crashes.
I was about to ask the same thing to Cad, why IE, why? Then again, you use Safari, is it really better than Firefox or you just want to stick to everything mac?
I look forward to the bi-racial relationships series, we definately need a white man’s perspective on that matter. No, wait, aren’t we bombarded every day with white men’s perspectives? Never mind…
I am really a post-blogger. I will focus now on commenting on other people’s blogs.
Joel,
I must ask you to explain yourself.
Seyd,
This seems to lend support to the argument that you should still be blogging.
Nah, I am too a male, though my parents’ question it every so often. Enough males blogging out there, one less would not be missed. We do need more immigrant vegan anusim lesbian trans women of color blogging, and I am determined to find them : )
I forgot to say, I don’t use Firefox on my mac because it takes up too much RAM. But it looks like things are starting to shape up. Meanwhile, after trying to do justice to what you wrote Alán, i can easily say that I hope to one day write like you.
Hi Oso,
I’m writing from Delhi University in the Indian capital. Fitting that I am writing from the city which has been invaded time and time again, which has seen so much bloodshed.
Oso, no one should have to suffer or feel guilty because of the crimes of his or her ancestors. It is wrong to suggest that we “inherit the transgressions of our forefathers.” And if one makes you (or tries to make you) feel bad because “white people” committed crimes, you should not let them. They are wrong.
Oso, where does this end? Humans have done horrible things to other humans for thousands of years. If we extend your logic, then the Irish should hate the British because of colonialism (e.g. potato famine). In fact, all Europeans should hate all Europeans! Hindus and Buddhists should hate Muslims because of the Islamic invasion of the subcontinent. Buddhists should hate Hindus because Brahminism made a concerted effort to wipe Buddhism from the subcontinent. The Chinese should hate the Tibetans because Tibet conquered China for several hundred years. Practically everyone in Asia should despise the Mongols because of Genghis Khan. And Indians should hate the British, the Portuguese, etc… where does it end?
In America, especially in universities, it is all-too-common for minority groups to hold other groups responsible for crimes of history. I’ve seen African Americans who hold all “whites” responsible for a slave trade they had nothing to do with (even if some of their ancestors did). Or Mexican Americans angry that James Polk invaded Mexico in the 1840s. This is not right. Again, see the previous paragraph. This will never end and every group has done something bad at some time or another.
It’s interesting to contrast what you write about with my experience in India: India is not like that. But it is not that India has a gentler history than America. It’s simple: in India we would all be dead if people had to suffer for the crimes of their ancestors. Indian history is essentially a story of invasions: the Aryans, the Afghans, the Turkic Muslims, the Mongols/Mughals Muslims, the Marathas, the Rajputs, the British, the Portuguese, the French, the Chinese, etc. Some Muslims did horrible things to non-believers. Similarly, some Hindus have done horrible things to non-Hindus (e.g. most recently Ayodyha, Mumbai riots in 1991, etc.). And let’s not forget intra-Hindu caste repression. There is so much history of violence here, that we as Indians instinctively know that there would be a civil war if we held all others responsible for the crimes of history.
My point: if some whites committed crimes historically, you are not the inheritor of that tradition. And you should not believe that you are.
I have seen a city besieged by itself; a town commit suicide, and a island under terror. So I don’t have as bright a view.
Worlds end. All the time. Southern California may seem very different from any from these places, but sometimes a scratch, not even that deep, reveals what is roiling underneath the surface. You don’t have to listen that hard to hear the sound of different histories crashing and colliding.
The belief that one can live separate from one’s ancestory is an invention that emerged from the “discovery” of your continent (or as Derek Walcott more elegantly put it: “Amnesia is the history of the New World.”) Plus you are in California, my friend, where selves are constantly being recreated. But don’t be fooled — you’re not, are you? — you’re very much still on this tragic planet.
Bah. Ignore the grammatical and spelling booboos.
Actually, scratch that: I kind of like the word “ancestory.” A mash-up of “ancestry” and “history” or of “ancestor” and “story.”
I would claim it, but it has already been invented.
LMAO! I can’t believe you said that! I’m at work…that’s why. :p~ I’ve tried sweet talking the Tech guys with here with cases of Mountain Dews and Reeces peanut butter cups. . .but alas. . i have yet to convince them to give me the “Admin” password to download. *le sigh*