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2003-12-27
It's been two months since the last entry. It's amazing how quickly time can pass when you're trying to stop it slipping away. Remember the strategy of Lieutenant Dunbar in Catch-22, to try to be as bored as possible to make your life seem longer? He was, of course, risking his life every day in bombing runs over Italy.
I'm having trouble waiting for the other shoe to drop. Ever since September 11, 2001, I've been waiting. Waiting for what, I'm not sure. I don't want to be caught off-guard by the next disaster. But I also suffer a different kind of uncertainty, from the fear that everything may soon go terribly terribly wrong. The fear is not unfounded, but it's not certain, either. I feel like I can't do anything until I'm certain yes or certain no. It's like standing in your living room, the stationwagon filled with your belongings, listening to the radio to see if the tornado is coming your way or not. I was eight when I did that, but it does indeed feel the same. But only for an afternoon. This has been, what, two years now? My hope had been that if the Democrats could at least hold the Senate in 2002, it would be a little more certain. But that didn't happen.
I can't link to it because it's not on line, but I spent the afternoon reading an article in The New Yorkerabout the exhumation of the mass graves of the Spanish Civil War. The article framed the exhumations around the question of finding and possibly exhuming the grave of Federico García Lorca, but in the context of thousands of unidentified bodies of innocent people, the fascination with the disposition of the bones of one man, even an internationally renowned author, seemed...trivializing. Of course the slaughter of a literary genius is a horrible crime, and a loss for the whole world, but as I read the account of the discovery of the four actual skeletons from the small grave whose exhumation the article's author witnessed, the importance of those murders seemed to grow inside my mind, until they loomed just as large as the murder of Lorca, and there were, of course, hundreds of thousands of additional deaths.
Worsening the effect was the fact that the current government in Spain, headed by Áznar, is still in some sense the heir of Franco, would really rather not examine this period of history, and in any event certainly refuses to fund the exhumations even as they fund a commemoration of a pro-Nazi militia. Our ally.
The story of the Spanish Civil War always breaks my heart.
--Melissa O, at 01:11
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