"Frankenstein" -- Did Mary Shelley Predict Nuclear Weapons?

Mary Shelley

There are many voices contributing, in many ways, to the effort to extract us from nuclear peril.

Some voices come from the past.

For the past several weeks, I have been reading the novel Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. It is marvelous and prescient. It was first published in 1818. I became interested in Frankenstein after it was singled out by Paul Johnson as a watershed cultural event in his book, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830.

For me, as for most people, Frankenstein means the "monster" portrayed by Boris Karloff in the movies. But of course "Frankenstein" is the scientist, the one who imparts life to an assemblage of inanimate parts; indeed, the novel's full title is Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, and the story is really about this man.

Frankenstein is about a man who is so carried away with what he finds himself able to do that he is heedless of the consequences. It is, indeed, a fable for the modern era; as someone concerned particularly about nuclear weapons, I find over and over that the words of the novel bring to mind the dilemma that human civilization finds itself in because of the activities of some among us who are most brilliant and privileged.

This morning I read a portion in which Frankenstein sees in himself one

whose selfishness,
had not hesitated
to buy its own peace
at the price,
perhaps,
of the existence of the whole human race.
                 (Frankenstein, Chapter 20)

Can there be any more precise description of the nuclear weapons states?

Who is this Mary Shelley, who two hundred years ago could have so brilliantly summed up the predicament that we would face in 2018?

Just a few chapters of this wonderful book remain - I find myself rushing forward to the conclusion, while simultaneously jamming on the brakes so that I can relish every word.

How will I satisfy myself when I reach the end?

Two possibilities suggest themselves: The Last Man, another Shelley novel, about what happens when human society brings itself to the brink of extinction; and the great account of the Manhattan Project director J. Robert Oppenheimer: American Prometheus.


Please share this post . . . .

Crime Without Remorse: A USA Specialty

Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment is about an individual student in 19th century Russia who murders an old woman. But it also tells the story of the USA . . . .

Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

I sat at an antiracism training sponsored by the ELCA Sierra Pacific Synod last week. One of the participants said, "Our country - we adopt the attitude that nothing we do is ever wrong." I thought it was a simple, elegant explanation of what is meant by "American exceptionalism." It certainly resonated with me, as I have been thinking about the question, "What is it that we as Christians need to face up to in this country? at the most fundamental level?"

I've been reading Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment again. This time I'm enjoying reading it in an old paperback edition -- the same one that was around our house when I was growing up. Every time I read it I'm struck by layers of meaning that I can't remember noticing before. 

As I began reading, I recalled that a few years ago Edward Snowden was given a copy of Crime and Punishment by his Russian lawyer. At the time I suggested the attorney was using the book to subtly raise the question, "Where are the real crimes that we should be focusing on?"

I noticed three things as I read Crime and Punishment this time:

Jacques-Louis David,
The Emperor Napoleon in His Study
at the Tuileries (Art Institute Chicago)

(1) It's about politics. I had never before taken seriously the importance of Napoleon as a model for the kind of actor on the world stage who is "entitled" to bring about suffering, because it is offset by his great accomplishments. Perhaps to us readers today, Napoleon is a caricature; but at the time the novel was written, he had transformed society, and people who wanted to do things in the world pondered his example very seriously. (Consider: who are the "big players" that people look up to today?)

(2) It's about relativism. The murder committed by the book's protagonist is about as horrible as you could imagine. The book relentlessly zeroes in on him and his physical, emotional, and moral state. And yet . . . . I was struck by this statement, a kind of throwaway line from another character in the book: "It's as well that you only killed the old woman. If you'd invented another theory you might perhaps have done something a thousand times more hideous." (Bantam paperback, p. 396) (Consider: what are the theories we use to justify suffering by other people at our hands today?)

(3) It's about our resistance to remorse. Up until the very last pages, the protagonist is unable to simply say, "I was wrong." (Consider: why can't we admit we were wrong? what are we afraid might happen?)

I wonder: what would happen if students were encouraged to read this book and given the following guidance:  "Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment is about an individual student in 19th century Russia who murders an old woman. But it also tells the story of the USA . . . . " ? ? ?


Related posts

With drones, people become just dots. "Bugs." People who no longer count as people . . . .

(See Drone Victims: Just Dots? Just Dirt? )











Now that it is available online, every American should read the Justice Department memo approving the targeted killing of Anwar Al-Awlaki. Let's face it: the Obama administration and the rest of the U.S. government know that they have a big problem: they want to go to war against anyone they suspect is an enemy -- and skip the rule of law. They wish that a miracle could happen and everyone would just let them do it.

(See A Layman Reads Obama's "Targeted Killing" Memo )

A big Hollywood production of Ender's Game is scheduled for release on November 1. It's a perfect opportunity for us to ask: Are we happy seeing our schools turned into "Battle Schools"?

(See "Ender's Game" and the Militarization of Youth: Can We Talk About This? )




"Once the boat went to full pressure, there was really no other option."

(See In Whose Machine Will YOU Be a Cog? )








Svetlana Geier, translator of Dostoevsky's "elephants" (The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils, and Raw Youth) into German.

(See Would You Buy an Elephant from This Woman?)

"Education for Peace"? or "Education IS Peace"?

Education is peace when we value methods, humanism, formal literacy, listening, experimentation, and meta-analysis.

The UN International Day for Peace 2016 has been tied to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Quality Education is goal #4.

People working for peace are intensely attuned to the way education impacts peace efforts -- and also war efforts.

Hence, a major section of A Global Security System: An Alternative to War is "Spreading and Funding Peace Education and Peace Research," and education about peace is viewed as central to "Creating a Culture of Peace."

A problem is that individuals, groups, and states recognize the power of education and often co-opt it, hoping to be able to treat humans as instruments of their power.  For instance, schools become pipelines for the military. In many locations, peace groups have begun to push back against the militarization of schools. (See, for instance, the Chicago Veterans for Peace "Education not Militarization" project.)

Denial of education is another (and, thankfully, vanishing) form of the co-opting education by individuals, groups, and states. Thinking about common factors in successful education for peace requires us to consider the ways in which (a) denial of education; (b) hindering of education; (c) slanting of education; and (d) wholesale co-opting of education are all part of the overall threat to peace.

Let's face up to the impossibility of peace without education -- in fact, to the virtual congruence of peace and education! -- and expand our commitment to making education the real thing.

Some food for thought:

(1) Methods that work - The US is experiencing a crisis in education; in my opinion, it's because we have made every teacher a free agent, responsible for rising or falling by their own test results. If we were as serious about our education as we are about our business and industry, we would recognize a responsibility to equip teachers with methods that are proven to work. Not just a list of what is to be taught, but the actual methods that have been proven (see (6) below) to be successful. (Yes, I recognize this represents a wholesale change in the way the job of teaching is currently structured in the US .... )  An important value in a quality education is equipping teachers with methods that work.

(2) People, not machines - That said, our analytic and mechanistic outlook can lead us to view people as little more than another set of tools ... instruments ... input-output boxes. This is especially true now that people everywhere are connected 24/7 to the Internet. Jaron Lanier has delved into this problem in You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. An important value in a quality education is recognizing the whole person.

(3) Literacy - Often what we think of when we think of "education" is literacy - being able to read, being able to write, being able to speak, and basic math skills. Unquestionably, an important value in a quality education is literacy -- literacy opens all doors. At the same time, it is essential to recognize that even the barest literacy is developed within a context, and that context can have just as much importance to the outcome as the formal literacy itself. Hence the succeeding points . . . .

(4) Listening - I spent 17 years in classrooms listening to teachers, but it has only been late in life that I have begun to listen to people -- particularly in that "people, not instruments" sense of point (2) above. Could there be any more important skill in learning to live in peace? How do we see this skill being taught in our schools? In addition to literacy, an equally important value in a quality education is developing the ability to listen to people.

(5) Experiments - The ultimate education is one which encourages people to be successful experimenters. As the world becomes more and more sophisticated, there is more and more temptation to believe that there is no real need to discover truth, that truth is just sitting around, ready to be consumed. In my opinion, the single greatest value in a quality education is that of conducting experiments in the hope of discovering truth.

(6) Meta - Now more than ever, we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. Yes, we need to be able to go to the source and discover our own truth . . . and, yes, we need to be able to scoop up the abundance of knowledge and experience that others have put at our disposal and make the most of it.(This is, itself, a sort of experiment. It requires choices about what learnings to look to, and how many are needed to find a common truth. This is quite a bit different than simply absorbing a pre-packaged tutelage that is shoveled at you.) An important value in a quality education is being able to learn from what others have learned.

(To be continued . . . . )


Related posts

It will benefit us antiwar activists in the US to attend to and reflect upon the importance of these Sustainable Development Goals to achieving the goal of ending war.

(See PEACE DAY 2016: What comes first? Demilitarization? or Development?)












I wondered at how we could have covered all that in just a minute or two -- the time it takes to go a few stops.  After all, when I walked onto that bus we were strangers.

(See Listening for Community (A Chicago Encounter))




"You may not understand every word, you may feel uncomfortable, you may have to spend time later trying to figure it out or to humble yourself now and ask for help; you may have to work at it. But in the long run . . . a Spanish speaker is what you are . . . because that's the community you're a part of!"

(See Don't speak Spanish? "Sure you do . . . .")



I wonder if, years from now, we will be thinking back to today and feeling surprise at how little we thought about some of the developments in our world, and in our country, and how we talked about them even less. Someday will I have to explain to my kids, or to my kids' kids, why it was that "people just weren't talking about it" . . . ?

(See Why Weren't People Talking About It? )





"To see the atom bomb museum," I said. And again I wondered, what can a child in Nagasaki think when they see a person from the US who has come here to see the atom bomb museum?

(See Encounter in Nagasaki )









I don't think Alanna and I ever talked about what it must be like to be trying to escape a shower of sparks and hot ash. But she seemed to know that the sparks and hot ash are too important a part of the picture to be left out.


(See The Children Are Waiting )

Would You Buy an Elephant from This Woman?

Svetlana Geier, translator of Dostoevsky's "elephants"* into German
*The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment,  
The Idiot, The Devils, and Raw Youth

I watched the film The Woman with the 5 Elephants again the other night.

I have recommended it to many people. I thought that my recommendation had to do with the fact that it is about the novels of Dostoevsky (the "five elephants" of the title), or because it shed new light for me on people in Ukraine caught between the Nazis and the Soviet Union during World War II.

Svetlana Geier

The Woman with the 5 Elephants is about those things, but watching the film again reminded me there is something else that I really love more about it.

The Woman with the 5 Elephants is really about the beauty of this old woman. Watch how she keeps going . . . cooking with her family . . . traveling with her granddaughter . . . working away with her editor on her translations.

And, yes, there is a tremendous beauty in her ability to boil down all that she has seen and experienced and worked on to some simply-stated truths.

We live in a society that worships youth. But it is old people that are really beautiful!


Related posts

I love to walk around North Pond here in Chicago and notice the asters as September stretches into October. They make me think of my mom . . . .

(See Asters for Eva )








Who are we? The United States, personified by its "great man" President Obama, is a kind nation that is riven by a belief that it should have the ultimate power over life and death, that every being on earth is somehow of lesser importance.

(See Reflecting on America's Split Personality (Moscow Airport Summer Reads) )











I wonder if, years from now, we will be thinking back to today and feeling surprise at how little we thought about some of the developments in our world, and in our country, and how we talked about them even less. Someday will I have to explain to my kids, or to my kids' kids, why it was that "people just weren't talking about it" . . . ?

(See Why Weren't People Talking About It? )

PROBLEM: How does an entire country exorcise a national delusion?

It suddenly occurs to me that everyone in the US should be studying the behavior of England toward India, and asking ourselves, "What might this tell people in the US about coming to our senses?"

The Sikh parade at the Gateway to India on the occasion of the departure
of British troops from India on 28 February 1948. (Source: Wikipedia)

Long ago, my sister Elaine told me of two statements made by the poet Stephen Spender when he was lecturing at the University of Connecticut, both concerning E.M. Forster.

The first is that Forster was the kind of person who you thought of when you were wrestling with a profound moral problem.  You would be lying awake at three in the morning, and you would ask yourself, What would Forster say about this . . . ?

The second is that Forster's novel A Passage to India changed public opinion in Britain overnight when it came out in 1924.

E. M. Forster, by Dora Carrington
(Source: Wikipedia)

I recently re-watched the 1984 David Lean film based on the book. I found it entertaining, and it certainly showed the racism and imperialism of the British in India. But I didn't quite see it as earth-shaking.

Then I picked up the book itself, and read it carefully.  I was particularly intrigued by the role of the one character in the book who seemed un-infected with ideas of racial and cultural superiority, or by the desire to enjoy power.

I hope people will read the book. (I've appended some study questions below.)

A Passage to India is about a delusion. It's about a specific delusion troubling one single character in the book, but its larger message is that somehow an entire country had let itself be taken in by a delusion about race and culture and power. And it reminds that -- before too much longer -- something was done about it by the British, at least in part, at least with respect to India.

Of course, the departure of the British from India in 1947 was the consequence of many forces, and most of the time we think of the activism that occurred in the years immediately leading up to their departure, the Quit India Movement led by Gandhi. But what was done along the way to prepare the ground?

At a time when the US is reaping the consequences of decades of violence and dominance it has inflicted on Iraq and other countries of the Mideast and South Asia, does A Passage to India hold clues for an exorcism of the US national delusion?

At a time when the US is waking up to the fact that black lives matter, is A Passage to India one resource to be used in spurring what will certainly be a long, difficult course of change?


Related Posts

The United States is like that alcoholic family member, for whom every circumstance is an excuse to hit the bottle. Except, with the US, the bottle is violence.

(See It's Time for the United States to Stop Hitting the Bottle)

Anyone who has had to write a speech knows that the hardest part is to land on the main idea. Once you've got that right, the rest practically writes itself.

(See "The way to respond to ISIS is not through violence." )





Maybe a good next step is to read Coates' book and sit with it . . . listening to what comes up . . . but not jumping immediately into "solving."

(See On Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates (A Confession))

Eventually, in large part due to Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, the United States was converted from a country in which a small number of people thought slavery needed to be ended into a country determined to act to end slavery. This literary work took the movement wide, and it took it deep.

Why is a novel an important tool for creative resistance?


(See Creative Resistance 101: Uncle Tom's Cabin )




Study Questions for A Passage to India

(1) Mrs. Moore becomes a symbol in the book. What does she represent? (Why?) ... How important is this symbolism to the book? ... Did this symbolism feel convincing to you?

(2) Where does Mrs. Moore "go"? (Something seems to change. What is it?)

(3) Forster depicts the social and interpersonal reality of institutionalized domination. How "new" (revealing) do you suppose this was to the British public in 1924? ... What is special about the way a novel is able to illuminate this?

(4) Does Aziz feel real to you? How so? ... Relative to his subjugation by the British, is he just a "dreamer"?

(5) Do you think Forster understands/respects Indian culture? (Is it necessary to this undertaking that he do so?)

(6) Where's the hope? (Does it lie in the behavior of some individuals? Does it lie in a political idea?)

(7) Michel Foucault and Edward Said both make the point that observing (and describing, and related activities) is concomitant with power dominance. In this novel, the observer becomes the observed. What does this bring up for you?

(8) Fielding points out the distinction between Adela's interest in "India" and interest (or liking for) actual Indians. What does this bring up for you?

(9) There's scant reference to organized Christianity (particularly missionaries) in the book. Does the book bring up anything for you about mission work in new contexts?

(10) Having now read A Passage to India . . . what will you do differently?

Hunger Games II: What does it take for coal to catch fire?

Anthracite coal miners - Hazleton, PA
at the time of the coal strike of 1902

I've been reading the Hunger Games trilogy because I think we need to pierce the veil of popular entertainment culture and figure out how to use it to change the world we live in.

When I started Book II -- Catching Fire -- I thought this was going to be an "action" tale -- all about combat and weapons. But what really got my attention was the depiction of oppressed coal miners.

Of course any Hunger Games fan knows District 12 is the coal mining district, and that coal mining is a terrible job: "The claustrophobic tunnels, foul air, suffocating darkness on all sides. . . . [A]fter my father and several other miners were killed in an explosion, I could barely force myself onto the elevator." (II, p. 5)

What's really interesting is the way Book II depicts people becoming aware of their own oppression, including the forces of state repression, and developing consciousness of the need to resist.

It first jumped out at me the protagonist wonders if she should've acted differently -- if that would have allowed everyone in her coal mining district to remain safe. Her friend sets her straight:

"Safe to do what?" he says in a gentler tone. "Starve? Work like slaves? Send their kids to the reaping? You haven't hurt people -- you've given them an opportunity.  They just have to be brave enough to take it. There's already been talk in the mines. People who want to fight. Don't you see? It's happening! It's finally happening! . . . " (II, pp. 99-100)

When I read this, I thought, "Oh my gosh -- Germinal!"

Emile Zola, Germinal

Way back in the fall of 1978, when I was a sophomore at Harvard, I took a wonderful course on 19th century European history with a visiting professor -- Simon Schmama. I wrote a paper on the forces of repression depicted in Germinal -- Emile Zola's novel about an uprising in the French coal mining region in the 1800s. I wrote pages and pages about it -- I remember the moment when I handed in the overdue term paper and Prof. Schama said, "It's very late . . . and very long!" -- and I wish I still had a copy of it. But I also know everything I learned in doing it can be summed up in one sentence: the police are here to keep us in line; and that it begins with "subtle" hints, and by stages becomes full-on suppression of rebellion.

Sure enough, Catching Fire explores this exact phenomenon. As the rumblings of dissatisfaction in the mines increase, the state responds:

"The square has been transformed. A huge banner with the seal of Panem hangs off the roof of the Justice Building. Peacekeepers, in pristine white uniforms, march on the cleanly swept cobblestones. Along the rooftops, more of them occupy nests of machine guns. Most unnerving is a line of new constructions -- an official whipping post, several stockades, and a gallows -- set up in the center of the square." (II, p. 128)

"Justice" Building. "Peacekeepers."

And it is from this point that the rest of the plot of Book II develops . . . .

Coal . . . on fire . . .

Now, I'll admit that Catching Fire does also contain "action tale" plot elements -- combat and weapons -- but what I think is really valuable to all of us in the peace and justice field is how it is exposing millions of young people to questions like:

* Is the way that many people are treated fair? Is it acceptable?

* What does it take for people to stand up and resist their own oppression?

* What does the state try to do to stop them?

(Okay . . . off to buy Book III!)


More on the Hunger Games - Germinal connection: 

‘Suzanne Collins on the Books She Loves’

"Comparons Germinal and Hunger Games"


Related posts

Granddaddy Melker probably would have been proud to have mined any kind of coal. But he was especially proud to have been an anthracite coal miner.

(See "I was an anthracite miner . . . . ")














People in Illinois are standing up against the attempt by Governor Bruce Rauner to gut services in the state.  Courageous people are demanding change in "Moral Monday" protests.

(See PROTESTS IN ILLINOIS: Do these people look like they're gonna back down? )





When will more people begin to ask about the connections between inequality and the military-industrial complex?

(See WHERE'S MINE? Inequality in the US and the Military-Industrial Complex )

Two themes -- hunting vs. healing and the socio-economic underpinnings of war culture -- are just a few of the many that have leapt out at me as I've ready Book I of The Hunger Games.

(See Hunger Games: Hunting vs. Healing)

I recently wrote that "the means available to us today for eliminating war vary greatly from those available from those working to eliminate war in decades past." One of those means is popular literature and film!

(See War Resistance: Is "The Hunger Games" Laying the Foundation That We Want? )








The outstanding aspect of the "global hibakusha" phenomenon that I learned about at the World Nuclear Victims Forum in Hiroshima was that in situation after situation, great harm is done because someone has the attitude that "these people don't matter."

(See GLOBAL HIBAKUSHA: The Result of the "People Who Don't Matter" Mindset )

In Praise of Nonconformity: Vagrants, Misfits, Rebels, and Liumang

The Vagrants: A Novel by Li Yiyun

I've just finished reading The Vagrants: A Novel by Li Yiyun.

Now the first thing I'll say is that everyone should read everything Li Yiyun writes. I particularly like the stories in the collection, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl.

A couple of things about The Vagrants struck me particularly.

One is that this novel is gives a very realistic account of people in China being swept up in all kinds of different ways in a political campaign. I've read a lot of fiction from China that deals with this issue, but I've never read anything that does so while also conveying the feeling of private life and inner life so convincingly.

Another -- and this is what inspired this blog post -- is that I found myself taken with the central character -- a boy named Bashi -- despite the fact that he is an odd duck . . . a nuisance . . . and potentially worse. (Bashi isn't the only "vagrant" in Li's novel.  In fact, just about everybody who is described has broken free of the moorings of that crushing social system, or nearly so.)

I kept thinking to myself, "This Bashi is just like all those odd boys in Flannery O'Connor novels and stories -- the abrasive Enoch Emery in Wise Blood, the stuck-in-his-ways Francis Tarwater in The Violent Bear It Away." Those were characters who made me more and more anxious with each page I read, because they not only had wacky ideas, but they were living them out. I read a lot of O'Connor in college, and wrote quite a bit about her works, and it's only just now becoming clear to me what I really felt as I was doing it.

Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor

These characters often cross the line from "different" to "criminal." (As I said, anyone reading The Vagrants will wonder when Bashi is going to do something really awful.)  After all, Flannery O'Connor didn't just subject me to Enoch Emery and Francis Tarwater, she also made me witness the sadism of "The Misfit" (in "A Good Man is Hard to Find").

Thinking about this has put me in mind of one of my favorite films, City of Sadness. In it, the patriarch of a Taiwanese family describes how his family were always liumang -- operating at cross-purposes with the authority being imposed by the Japanese occupiers in the first half of the 20th century, or by the officials sent by the central Chinese government before that -- in short, anyone who tried to tell them what to do.  Liumang is common Chinese vocabulary word, which we students were taught meant something along the line of "juvenile delinquents" or "bad apples," and in etymology it has some of that flavor of "unmoored." But it was the pride with which the old man in described his family's traditional liumang status that made me thing of it as something to valorize.

The film's subtitiles translate liumang as "gangsters." Take two minutes to click on the City of Sadness trailer above, and see what it feels like to you. Yes, there is a definite element of racketeering. But there's also a feeling of simple, youthful, impulsive, bad behavior. Sort of The Godfather meets Rebel Without a Cause. meets Rome, Open City. (More about this aspect of City of Sadness here.)

I guess the lesson for me in all of this is that we need vagrants, misfits, rebels, and liumang. And that while anxiety is worth noticing, that's not the same as saying it's undesirable, or should be shunned.

So: here's to nonconformity! And to the anxiety it creates . . . .


Related posts

 So as I watched Ziggy for the first time last night, I asked myself, "What is it? What is it? What is the frisson that one feels? It's part charisma, part sexuality, partly the thrill of gender-bending, partly adolescent rebellion . . . . But what is it that Ziggy did (and does) for so many people?" (It can't be a single thing, can it?)

(See "You're NOT alone!" (Ziggy the Subversive) )


The very act of free expression, itself, has become so hazardous ... what you say hardly matters . . . "He could not help feeling a twinge of panic. It was absurd, since the writing of those particular words was not more dangerous than the initial act of opening the diary." (From 1984 by George Orwell)

(See Building Metropolises of Self-Censorship )





I believe that once the Church comes out of the closet -- that is, once we start speaking quite openly about the difference between the world as we find it and the world as we believe God wishes it to be -- there is no way this old world will be able to stay the same.

(See Let the Church Out of the Closet )









In a composition suggestive of a yin-yang symbol, a woman in a burka (but wearing audacious red glitter platform heels) is surrounded by genie-ish tableaus of the many male obsessions/pastimes that some of us rail about frequently -- sexualized pop singers, professional sports -- as well as some that we probably should rail about more (such as patriarchy in religion and political violence).

(See VIOLENCE: " . . . and the women must live with the consequences . . . " )







Posterboard and markers: $21.79
Leaflets: $7:50
Bullhorn: $99.99
Standing up for peace and justice when everyone around you is saying "Get a job!" and "GO F**K YOURSELF!": PRICELESS!

(See Dissent: PRICELESS!)

Hunger Games: Hunting vs. Healing

The Hunger Games is everywhere. (What is it good for?)

The kids are back in school, and my mind turns to the question of how we are preparing the next generation to create a better world.

In particular, I'm fascinated by The Hunger Games trilogy -- with sales of something like 50 million copies of the book and global box office over $500 million for the first film, plus who-knows-how-many-dollars in tie-in merchandise sales -- and I want to know: Is The Hunger Games laying the foundation that we want and need for resistance to war?

I've just finished Book I. It's clear to me why so many people can't stop turning the pages of these books, and it's obvious that there is an enormous amount of material that addresses the real world problems of war in our 21st century world.

I'll just mention two big themes here.


Hunting vs. healing

Healing plants -- including boneset, which "was introduced to
American colonists by Indians who used the plant for breaking
fevers by means of heavy sweating." (Wikipedia)
See "The Eupatorium Story; Joe Pye Weed, Boneset and White
Snakeroot-Part One" for a fascinating dive into these
and other healing plants.

A major theme of The Hunger Games is the way people dissociate themselves from injury they are causing.

As the protagonist talks about the upcoming "contest," her friend tries to reassure her:

"Katniss, it's just hunting. You're the best hunter I know," says Gale.

"It's not just hunting. They're armed. They think," I say.

"So do you. And you've had more practice. Real practice," he says. "You know how to kill."

"Not people," I say.

"How different can it be, really?" says Gale grimly.

The awful thing is that if I can forget they're people, it will be no different at all.

" . . . if I can forget they're people . . . . "

(This is a constant concern to those of us who are alarmed about the way modern warfare, particularly using drones, is accomplished by placing a veil of separation between the person doing the injury and the victim.)

There is a striking contrast between the call to hunt and harm, and the urgency of acts of healing. Katniss' mother is a healer, who cares for the people in the community who have suffered the most grievous injurious. In Book I we learn that Katniss' first impulse is to flee these situations. But we also see her learning the importance of being a healer, herself.

The contrast between hunting and healing in The Hunger Games is hard to ignore.


Socio-economic underpinnings of war culture 

Philipinos cutting lettuce, Salinas, California, 1935.
(Photographer: Dorothea Lange.)
Sourced from "A Photo Essay on the Great Depression"

You aren't more than a few pages into The Hunger Games before you realize that what this is really about is a system that combines violent repression and economic oppression, all through a complex of social structures and cultural practices.

Among many telling details, there is this conversation between two allied contestants in The Games who have the rare opportunity to learn from each other about their respective homelands:

"I'd have thought, in District Eleven, you'd have a bit more to eat than us. You know, since you grow the food," I say.

Rue's eyes widen. "Oh, no, we're not allowed to eat the crops."

Permanent hunger and permanent war are all wrapped up together.


These two themes -- hunting vs. healing and the socio-economic underpinnings of war culture -- are just two of the ones that have leapt out at me as I've ready Book I of The Hunger Games. What do you think? Please share your comments below.

As for me, I'm off to buy Book II . . .!


(Psst! Check out these 8 Hunger Games lesson plans, resources, and activities, too!)


Related posts

I recently wrote that "the means available to us today for eliminating war vary greatly from those available from those working to eliminate war in decades past." One of those means is popular literature and film!

(See War Resistance: Is "The Hunger Games" Laying the Foundation That We Want? )

What's really interesting is the way Book II depicts people becoming aware of their own oppression, including the forces of state repression, and developing consciousness of the need to resist.

(See Hunger Games II: What does it take for coal to catch fire? )





 

When will more people begin to ask about the connections between inequality and the military-industrial complex?

(See WHERE'S MINE? Inequality in the US and the Military-Industrial Complex )







With drones, people become just dots. "Bugs." People who no longer count as people . . . .

(See Drone Victims: Just Dots? Just Dirt? )

More than anyone else, the beneficiaries of permawar are the politicians who thrive on the power to make and control wars. The number one prime beneficiary is the President, as well as presidential aspirants. But it doesn't end there . . . .

(See J'ACCUSE: The Beneficiaries of Permawar )