Views from a Back-Town Road
OUR NEW DANCE WITH DIMINUTIVE HORRORS
The recent coverage of the school shootings in Florida dwelt in length on the destructive power of guns and bullets. The reports described how bones were shattered and bodies torn. Back in the early ‘90s I was working in Vilnius, in the Soviet’s recently opened KGB photo files. This was tough work. And after as many weeks as I could manage without a break I decided to fly to Florence for a week. Friends from Berkeley were spending the year there on a long-planned vacation. The flight from Vilnius back to Frankfurt was long, long in many ways since it was a trip away from months in the ruins of Soviet and Russian terror.
I needed the break. For before the trip I had been working upstairs in the old KGB headquarters, in one of the rooms where they kept the photographs. The jail cells were in the basement. And a grim corridor of terror and coercion they were. The main floor still had some of the architectural elegance from then days when it was a czarist outpost. The building itself had been built around 1900 as the headquarters for the Czarist police in the days when Russia ran all the way from the Pacific to the Baltic.
I worked upstairs. ‘Upstairs’ was more than a building locale. It was a destination, perhaps a more feared destination than the cells in the basement. It was where people were taken to be interrogated after a few days processing in the basement cells. The stairway going from the main floor to ‘upstairs’ was enclosed in a wire mesh placed there by the KGB to prevent people from leaping to their deaths on the way up to interrogation.
It was upstairs that the photographs and snapshots of the killed and captured partisans and resisters were kept. Unlike the Nazis the Soviets were never that organized. So the photographs – many on the lacey-edged photo stock usually used for snapshots of birthday parties and weddings – were lying loose in cardboard boxes. But what the Soviets lacked in organization thehy more than made up with in sheer brute endurance. When the irresistible force of history is on your side, as Marx and Engels preached, just hanging in there is an inevitable march to the socialist future.
Once I got to Florence and settled in my first move, as usual, was to get a reservation and ticket for the Uffizi. The collection of late Medieval and Renaissance paintings includes many studies of the Crucifixion. The paintings are grim. But after months in the photo archives I realized that I was looking at the paintings very differently, this time with experienced eyes. The artists who produced them lived in a world where public executions and the public infliction of pain were purposeful and common. The artists could draw on their own experiences of cautionary, public spectacles. So they were visibly gruesome by design. The same design that led the Soviets to enlarge and post the pictures of the bodies of the resisters they killed in their own native villages.
Yet what struck me so forcefully was that these historic paintings – at their most grim – were almost humanely censored when contrasted with the photos I was poring over week after week. Nothing – nothing – portrayed in our recorded past has the destructive force of bullets. And what made the destructive force of the bullets on the bodies of the victims I spent so much time living with so horrendous was the realization that the guns used by the KGB’s troops and the ordinary Soviet troops back in the late 1940s were like pea-shooters compared with the weapons being turned loose in our schools and theaters today.
We have these weapons, I must conclude for lack of any other reason, because many people want to have them. And they don’t have them just to have them. We have them – we manufacture and buy and have them – not just to have them, but to be able to use them if we decide we want to. There is an old American virtue wrapped up in the few words of a simple phrase. We talk now and them, or at least we did during my younger years, about the value now and then of cracking a few skulls. Cracking a few skulls as a way to show our ability to keep the country in order. And, as our video games and movies indicate so frequently, not just to crack skulls as in the past but actually now to blow them apart. Visibly. Since visuals of late have become supremely important , and since firing guns produces little have little by way of visuals once outside the gun barrels, we applaud the film makers’ special effects workers who use lots of flammables to turn killings into screen-filling, colorful explosions that send flames rolling across the scenes.
I don’t know why people buy guns. I don’t know if they buy them to use them. But my impression – and it just that, an impression – is that having them and knowing that they are available and working is comforting. That comfort – and the desire for that comfort and the knowledge that it is right at hand if needed – has been a key pillar in the colonial empires that Europe’s capitals imposed on the rest of the world since the middle 1600s. And they did it with the with the whole-hearted support of their academic, financial, religious, and social institutions. After all, at the start of World War I in 1914 these capitals held something like 70% of the world’s peoples in slavery or semi-enslaved situations. And our own Gulf, Caribbean, trusteeship, and Philippine lands were our own very profitable part of it. We are perhaps the largest arms manufacturers and exporters in the world. My own family began its march to prosperity in 1916 – before our entry into World War I, while we still were officially a neutral nation – with the construction of a munitions plant that was assembling 500,000 three-inch shells every month. And this the town builder’s search for profit and standing, not national defense.
So, a la American, we protest the school slaughterers. But our protests of distress about the victims of the shootings seem transient rituals, effectively little more than a shadow dance, a recreational interlude in a nation determined to save, or renew, what is left of our American empire. I hope I am wrong, and look to be proven wrong. But I don’t think I will.