Words&Dirt

“Democracy may offer a good chance at safeguarding individual liberty and freedom, but democracy is no guarantee against human frailties, particularly when the democratic process of decision making is muddled by fear and animosity. With each branch of government and the citizenry playing their parts, dislike and mistrust led to the mass incarceration of 110,000 Japanese-Americans, a choice upheld three times during the war by the Supreme Court when a single Japanese man from each one of the West Coast states challenged relocation. And according to most accounts, the fighting in the Pacific was unparalleled for the atrocities and basic meanness evidenced by both Japanese and American forces. The Japanese tortured prisoners of war. American soldiers lopped off ears from dead ‘Japs’ and knocked out their gold teeth to keep as souvenirs. In an interview some forty years after the end of the war, Sergeant E.B. Sledge recalled the state of mind that overcame American forces in the jungle fighting of the Pacific: ‘We had all become hardened. We were out there, human beings, the most highly developed form of life on earth, fighting each other like wild animals.’

If the human spirit faces its greatest struggles under duress––torn by conflicting impulses to ravage and yet to preserve––war may be the crowning challenge. In Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, Hamlet muses about man’s potential: ‘What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!’ Where Abraham Lincoln had called on his countrymen to express ‘the better angels of our nature’; where E.B. Sledge found himself surrounded by a uniformed company of ‘wild animals’ brought low by a ‘hatred toward the Japanese’; and where Hamlet ends his musing about human nobility by characterizing man as ‘this quintessence of dust’; a World War II veteran named Robert Lekachman savored a different, guileless remembrance of the war generation: ‘It was the last time that most Americans thought they were innocent and good, without qualifications.’

There may be no good way to fight a war. There may be only trying to do good in an endeavor that tugs everyone’s soul toward the abyss. When Americans went to war in 1941, many of them meant to do good, and many of them did.”

––American Stories: Living American History, Vol. II: From 1865, by Jason Ripper, pg. 174-5

“‘Roach isn’t an insult. We’re the ones still standing after the mammals build their nukes, we’re the ones with the stripped-down OS’s so damned simple they work under almost any circumstances. We’re the goddamned Kalashnikovs of thinking meat.'”

––Echopraxia, by Peter Watts, pg. 301