A Trinity of Social Injustice

I don’t often go the cinema.  Perhaps it is that I am cheap.  Or that I am affronted by the whiff of popcorned butter.  Or the assault of the shockwaves of sound.  Most likely, it is that there is nothing there to see.

Except when there is.

A trinity of social injustice playing at the little hometown cinemaplex.  

My knowledge of history is fragmented, skewed, and somewhat detached from actual reality.  For that reason alone, I hate learning history in the movies where some director has taken license to recreate some supposed truth . . . if there ever was a truth to be known that was recorded by the poor and the losers.  

“Lincoln” was powerful and griping.  At first, I didn’t know all the principle characters.  I didn’t know my history.  My ignorance was my hobble.  I could not appreciate the intricacies.  I had to come home to read.  I will return to watch again.  It was frightening to see up close, in my face, the politics of the 13th Amendment.  How it nearly failed.  Who the champions for “ney’ and “aye” were.  And the reason why.  To watch the wheelbarrows of severed limbs dumped into the lime pit behind the soldier’s hospital in the Nation’s Capitol.  To look for Walt Whitman, and not see him, reading to, comforting, holding a broken soldier dying from trying to free a slave.  To watch the lobbyists bribe, cajole, threaten, plead with the lame duck Democrats to cast a vote to violate their allegiance to their slave-master God.  To wonder whatever has happened to the Party of Lincoln for it to become The Party of Hate, the Republicans of today, and likewise the promulgators of hateful bigotry of the Democrats of then into the Party of Equality for all today.  Sobering, gut-wrenching.  Humbling.  Leaving me to ask how and why did it take so long, before and after and still yet, racism camouflaged by the politically correct.  The forces to suppress equality seem to have the intensity of infinity.

The next day was “Django Unchained”.  I did not know what to expect.  Other than the ubiquitous injection of the “N” word.  The story line pre-dated the Civil War by a few years.  The story was told by a freed slave, in search of his still-in-bondage wife, and the horrific violence that ensued.  Yes, there was the gentry.  With their house niggers and their field niggers, and their niggers for fighting sport.  And the niggers who sucked the asses of that gentry and white trash holding their Bibles and beating run-away niggers.  A story of social strata formed on ignorance and bigotry and religion and hate.

Today was “Les Miserables”.  The film version of a musical with a story encased in rhyme and rhythm, the love and despair, the plight of the miserables at the fringes of the  aristocracy.  I was overwhelmed with the feeling I was watching “Occupy Wall Street”.  After reading recent accounts of the FBI investigation of OWS as a subversive terrorist threat, after learning how complacent the FBI was with the major financial institutions to protect them, after seeing these confirmations of the blatantly coordinated and brutal suppression attacks on peaceful demonstrators, and realizing the about-to-be reality of a contemporary “Les Miserables” because of the intrenched ideology of a renegade Tea Party Nation, I felt sickened.  The lady behind me was crying.  As I bought my ticket, the patrons were all old, all buying senior tickets to “Les Miz”.  Perhaps the young don’t want to know.

Three stories of social justice.  Or rather the evil of social injustice.  In each case, a rationale based on ignorance and bigotry.  Rationales reinforced by religious beliefs held with filial allegiance.  

Three stories told to people of today for entertainment.  As if today was separated from all yesterdays.  

Yet today, those Tea Party Republicans spawned by the Democrats of yore, will bring down the United States Government to spite the “liberated slave in generations to come” that now holds the office that Lincoln held.

What will I learn from this repeat of history.

Perhaps not to go back to the cinema. 

Image Etched

Those images that one can see but for only a fleeting moment can be indelibly etched into the eye of the mind.

A particular stretch of WA 129 descending down into the little town of Asotin, WA was narrow, twisting, and demanding full driver attention.  But I rounded a hairpin curve and could see straight ahead of me over to  the next ridge.   What I quickly recognized as tomb stones standing in stark relief against a brilliant cobalt sky were indeed tomb stones.

Another sharp corner was quickly approaching, but my eye flirted momentarily upward to the right.  

The canopy cover and the silhouette images of mourners standing beneath.  Almost beyond perception, positioned overhead,  the chalky whiteness of a waxing gibbous moon.  The Old Man up there overseeing the transition of yet another being planted on his naked butt-cheek  of a  barren bluff overlooking the entrance to his Hell's Canyon.  

Mourners.  Silhouettes.  Living symbols of the dead who haven't yet died.  

A snake of a river flowing below. Deceptively tranquil, emptying the guts of a hell of a canyon.  Letting jet skies pollute in a trinity of ways.

Perhaps the dead saw that requisite flash of light at the moment of passing.  

The look through the vagina of his new mother into the next world. 

Only the depths of Hell's Canyon would know.

I turned the next corner.  

Image etched.

Ghosts

The house is entombed with a silence of death.  

Then.  

Subliminal softness of  a subdued shuffle.  Non-distinct.  Hairs hackle on my neck.  Hand on my mouse . . . freezes in place.  

I listen.  

Wherefore doust thou ghosts dwell in the haunts of these thine walls?  

I slowly turn.  

Cat meanders, shoulders shifting in a bullying prance.   He looks annoyed. Pissed would be more apropos. 

Then,  subliminal softness of subdued shuffle again.   

My eye catches the glint of movement.  

Up.  High.  On top of cupboards.  Where garlands of plastic rickrack catch the settling of the unlimited infiltration of loess.  

The sparrow is panicked.  

Frozen.  

Then oscillates again with the frantic.  

That damn cat!  

I block open the door.  

In time the frantic escapes.  

The cat dozes on the patio swing.  

Ghosts, again, are subdued.  

London

He went to London to be with his friends.

Images in my mind swirled in a syncopated cacophony of myths, memories of movies, recollections of books,  imaginations of ambiences of London.  

To London I will likely never go.

In person that is.  In virtual reality I am on my way.

I think of little Oliver Twist, the movie incarnation of Oliver Twist.  A plaintive little boy from the country, dumped into London, hired out to an undertaker to lead the funerals of children.  He was so young, so naive, so tender, so angelic, the epitome of empathy stumbling along in that death march in his oversize boots, frumpled hat, and hole-infested coat.  The sanctimonious clergy in sway with the chants and burning incense to escort some little coffin-bound offspring to the nether-land of hoped for imagination.

I think of little Oliver Twist, escaped to a salvationist respite of a gang of thieves inspired by the old heathen himself, Fagan.  I think of Oliver’s lessons in pick-pocketery.  I think of him watching and listening to the sizzle of sausages browning in a stolen pot, where all his mentors are sequestered away in the depths of some rejected triumph of England’s industrial revolution.  

I think of little Oliver Twist, rescued by a man who lost his daughter, who sees her face in the face of an arrested pick pocket, who transfers Oliver to the environs of heaven on earth.

I see London as a cinematographer showed me London.

I think of another boy who went to London who makes me think of Oliver.  And Oliver makes me think of him.

I hear the bells.  The incessant, the seemingly never-ending of the peeling of bells.  Bells in celebration of royal weddings.  Bells in auditory despair in funerals of fallen royals.

I watch the pageantry of pomposity. Archbishops with flanks of accolades sashaying  down central cathedral isles.  Incense migrating to vaulted ceilings.  Massive pipe organ pipes shaking the very foundations of the bishop’s throne with harmonic vibrations of renaissance anthems. 

I listen to the boy choirs singing with prepubescent purity.  I relish the Gregorian chant.  English choral music gives me the chills of awesomeness.

I watched an Olympic epic of British Empire proportions.  I envy the sanity of the National Health Service.

I feel the smugness in my admiration for the secularization of London.  The British Humanists . . . Of which I give my allegiance.  England, emerging as a freethinking nation, as a leader in the rational world.

I think of London where I will never drive.  I am not suicidal. 

I long to be a part of London.  I long for the fog.  I long for the belonging.

The Queen is my queen too.

I wonder of London.

Wonder if the national mindset is one of making fruit salad, or fruit smoothie.

I wonder of a London in the inevitability of co-mingling of colors, creeds, persuasions, principles, traditions, aspirations.  I wonder of the strength that will emerge from which it never had. 

I wonder of how it  really is to be as an “other” in London.  In this era of emersion of things inclusive.

I wonder if I will ever know.

My imagination tells me London is on the move.  That London is an assimilator.  That London knows, accepts, tolerates, affirms.  That London harbors the Oliver Twists of yore.  That London is welcoming and nurturing of the Oliver Twists of this contemporary day.  That London is a venue of fulfillment.

For my friend went to London to be with his friends.