you brought it on yourself miss twiddle

I haven't seen anything about Remembrance/Veteran's Day today, which is a little odd, though perhaps not so, given the college I'm at. But I've been thinking about it, which is odd, because I usually don't think about this kind of thing.

A few weeks ago, I got my hands on an Angela Brazil novel: The Luckiest Girl in the School. (If you're a DWJ fan, it's essentially a Millie book). It was set during during WWI, and, I think, written then, too, although there wasn't a date anywhere. The war was not important to the story, particularly, but it was there. The boys were off in the trenches, and their sisters were knitting them socks and praying for them. That was all. But what was really absent was a sense of the purpose of the war. There wasn't even much anti-German sentiment, or any sense that it was an important war, or that anything terrible would happen if it should be lost. If it had been a fantasy novel, I would have said that the war was simply a plot device to reform our Heroine's straying brother. That's one thing.

Wilfrid Owen is the other thing. Dulce et decorum est is a poem that I've known for a long time, and has always meant a great deal for me. When we studied the poem in AP English, it was during the 2004 elections, and tensions were running high over our war. There was a girl in my class who didn't like the poem because it was "politically biased, and freedom isn't free" (voglia_di_notte you will remember this). I thought that this missed the point then, and I particularly think so now. There is a strong anti-war reading of the poem, but I think its most obvious position is not anti-war but anti- the kind of attitude towards war in Luckiest Girl in the School, which must have been a common attitude in Owen's era. But the point is that war is too terrible to be "just there" and provide an opportunity for girls to improve their knitting skills. Its too costly to be the means to make a generation of boys into men. Just dying for one's country isn't enough, nor is fighting for the glory of one's country. That's the message that I read: that you had better have a very powerful reason for war, because the consequences are so unpleasant.

It is interesting that is saying that the ends must justify the means. That the ends cannot justify the means is one of those truisms, up there with "you can't understand what it is to be happy until you have experienced hardship and misery" that everyone agrees is correct. But here's an example of that turned on its head. With war, the means are so horrible that the end has to justify them, because nothing else can. (Of course, one could say that the means are so horrible that no end can justify them, which is quite possible, in my opinion.)

World War I is a war that we don't like very much, now, because its ends, far from justifying its horrors, seem to only have lead to worse horrors, and another war. The problem is much older than Vietnam and Iraq, you see. So what do we do on Rememberance Day? It's hard to argue that we should't honor the sacrifice because it was a sacrifice to a wrong cause, or a mistaken cause, or an immoral cause. But honoring such a mistaken sacrifice seems to perpetuate that idea that the sacrifice is good in and of itself, even if it is a waste. Soldiers can't be blamed for fighting in an unjust war (but unjust, I mean a war where the result does not justify the life it expends), but it no longer seems right to me (if it ever seemed right) to honor them simply because they fought. That's exactly what Dulce et decorum est is about. I would pity them, but that would be condescending. Perhaps this is the point of Remembrance Day: to remember without judging. (Oh how glib that sounds!)

I got read the first two Lois McMaster Bujold books today (Shards of Honor and Barryar): nice girl from modern progressive space-world falls in love with a fascist regressive patriarchal militarist man from a highly stratified traditional semi-space world. She gives up her own life to marry him and then lots of Politics ensues. Just the right thing to read for the last week of vacation.

But why are people (okay, women, mainly) in these books so ready to give up rational life as soon as they're confronted with someone spouting rhetoric about Honor and Duty and Loyalty. I understand the appeal of this sort of thing to a point, but I can't imagine becoming a second-class citizen because of my gender for it. And it always (in my limited experience of reading this kind of sci-fi) seems to be women falling for military/feudal men. I haven't come across the story of a geeky, pacifist 'ansible technician' who ends up in a traditional society and decides to go in for the cult of honor and glory for the love of a beautiful woman who can embroider his shirts with nice folk-embroidery. Is it because women are supposed to be more emotional creatures more susceptible to alpha males than beta- or gamma-males are to females? (Does that make any sense at all? Maybe it's getting too late for me.) Is it just the "knight in shining armour" phenomonon? Or is the thought of civilized men regressing in bloodthirsty irrational Beowulf-types perhaps much more unpleasant than woman picking up embroidery hoops?

I am of course not actually doing anything. Why am I so lazy? WHY?

I have been poking around on HP Lexicon, however.

This essay is fascinating, although I think she draws perhaps too many conclusions (I mean, can we really say that Terry Boot must be an evangelical Christian by his name alone?) and it was written pre-HBP:
http://www.hp-lexicon.org/essays/essay-secrets-of-the-classlist.html

And this essay is seriously in denial:
http://www.hp-lexicon.org/essays/essay-dumbledore-vivens.html

I also listened to this bit of interview with JKR:
http://www.crusaders.no/%7Eafhp/interviews/connection/13.%20Snape.mp3

So… Snape falling/having fallen in love is a Very Significant Question, and has something to do with a redemptive pattern, and will all be explained in Book 7.

To which I say, therefore, Snape is not evil. Obviously.

I'm sort of worried that I want Snape to be on Harry's side in the end so much. I really will feel let down and betrayed if he turns out to be a loyal Death Eater, or, more likely, an utterly amoral Slytherin opportunist. It certainly isn't that "oh, there must be good in everyone" sentiment. Snape is a nasty, bitter, unpleasant person. I had him for a quartet coach once, actually, and it was a horrible experience. On the other hand, being a loner and hating everyone I meet I can identify with. I think it would be pushing it more than little a bit to say that I want Snape to be redeemed because that will prove that I can be redeemed too: I don't really think I'm in need of redeeming.

I suppose it's because he's a fascinating character -- the most interesting character in the whole series. He's also a tortured and angst-ridden character: I like those, too. And I'm a naive romantic this way. I don't find the Evil Side attractive because it's rebellious and edgy and alternative: in fact, Slytherin-apologists, wannabe Death Eaters, and Voldemort-adorers kind of bother me, because I am not really a moral relativist that way. There are things that are wrong, and torture, murder, and tyranny are rather high among them. I don't wear teeshirts that say "Voldemort Votes Republican" and "Bush is a Death Eater" because I like the Republicans. Evil that is glamorous and lives in a mansion and can trace its ancestry back 700 years is still evil. I must retract some of this: there is something attractive and exciting about the DEs. I suppose danger is thrilling, and absolute power, and charismatic and cruel leaders who are as likely to torture their subordinates as their "enemies" have some sort of draw. Hierarchies are exciting things. I've always been fascinated with hierarchies, and who has power over whom. I still am. For me, this is all the same pull that fascism has: so simple, so powerful. The power, I think, is the main thing. But, I believe that we can do better than that. I am a child of the Enlightenment; I can recognize that this sort of primitive power-structure and I can fight against its attraction.

I can see this in Snape, as well. He was a sort of twisted idealist, I think; when he was in school, the old, shadowy darkness must have seemed more meaningful than the bright-lit cheer of egalitarian New Hogwarts represented by Dumbledore. But if the darkness is more exciting, the light is preferable for actually living. I want Snape to realize this, or to have realized it. It's all very well for Barty Crouch to be deluded; Lucius Malfoy, in spite of his name, has a stake in the hierarchical power-driven world. But Snape… he invents his own spells; he makes potions: creates things. There is an element of knowledge to his character, and an intellectuality that means he should be able to realize how worthless the vision that Voldemort presents is.

So it seems that girls are supposed to write, or to make up stories. At least, there is a certain tradition of this being the case. (This is actually kind of related to what I wrote yesterday.) Is this because girls are inherently prone to fancy whereas boys are inherently realistic? Of course! Not to mention that girls are designed for quiet pursuits like reading and writing, boys for activities like physical play*. That's why Muscular Christianity had to come along: all of that studying scriptures and being kind to thy neighbor was just too feminine for real men.**
*Early medieval noblewomen were much more likely to be literate than their male counterparts, in fact.
**This I am not making up.

One would think that we would not find this sort of thing on the editorial page of the New York Times. But between John Tierney's periodic "women are actually happier to cook, clean, and raise children while their husbands support them" columns and David Brooks' "we are ruining America's boys by forcing them to become girly and intellectual when they clearly aren't meant to be" ones, one is uncertain what decade we are in already.


Yesterday, Brooks took up a new thread in this argument that was strangely familiar to someone who has been getting increasingly more furious at him for the last year or so:

( Virtues and Victims )

So I think a normal person would not be feeling woeful during her spring break. Exhibit A that I am not normal?

I finally got Maureen Dowd's Are Men Necessary and read it, yesterday. It's a lot like her columns, which means that it gets a bit wearing after chapters and chapters of it. It also didn't really have anything I didn't already know about or worry about. But if Dowd is right, and I suspect she is, mostly, the outlook does not seem to be good. Of course, I don't need her to tell me that.

It's interesting to have read Mary Wollstonecraft, and now read this take on the "anti-feminist" movement. The similarities in what they describe are frightening: weren't things supposed to significantly change in 200 years? But more depressing, for me, is the party that can be blamed by both authors: women themselves. Dowd isn't writing about Fundamentalist sects for the most part, or even about such things as anti-choice legislation. She's concerned with the educated women who don't want careers, but who do want to be adored and pedestalized by men for their beauty and charm. It's a return to a desire for the 'illegitimate power' that Wollstonecraft's women used to get their way in an utterly patriarchal society. When that's all that one can get, it's understandable. But to choose it over equality? But my (admittedly small) anecdotal experience tends to confirm this: all of those girls in high school (and now, in college, though less noticeably, to me) who expected flowers and constant attention from their boyfriends: often it seem(s)(ed) like they want(ed) worshippers, not companions. I'm probably going off the wall here and will offend someone, as I tend to do when I attempt to talk about this sort of thing, so I'll shut up.

The other thing I read yesterday was the second book of the Bartimaeus Trilogy, by Jonathan Stroud. (Yay for Middle School Fantasy!) I had read the first, and am now wondering when I will get the chance to read the recently-released third. The series has several things going for it:
a) An Alternate-Universe English setting. This is always a good thing. In fact, when I think about it, just about all of the fantasy novels I really like [Diana Wynne Jones, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel, the Mairelon books, Harry Potter, Caroline Stevernmer] have alternate-universe English settings. This one is a 20th c. world, where the British Empire has more or less conquered Europe (having beaten the Prague-centered HRE sometime in the last century or so) and is still holding onto North America, as well.
b) A dystopically corrupt System. I'm not sure why I have a fondness for reading about fictional Evil Oppressive Governments, but they always do seem to make it more interesting. In this case, the magicians rule the empire, and everyone else subsists in a sad, downtrodden, impoverished sort of way. But although we do now have a semi-main character attempting to lead a rebellion and all that, the more main character is a part of this government, and quite in support of it. There's also something that feels very real about all of these self-serving, corrupt wizard-officials. Probably it's that none of them quite measures up to, say, Cheney, or Ashcroft, or Rove.
c) Footnotes. Although not as copious as those in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel, one of the narrative voices -- the titular djinni Bartimaeus -- footnotes himself rather a lot, usually to a pretty good comic effect. This is a good sign: Jonathan Stroud is not taking himself entirely seriously.
d) A thouroughly obnoxious main character. In some ways, Nathaniel, the young protagonist, is an anti-Harry Potter. Actually, he's more like a young Tom Riddle, except that he doesn't need to take over the world to create that society ruled by brutal wizards: he's already a part of it. It was fascinating watching Nathaniel become less and less compassionate as he became more aware of his power and it's possibilities in the first book; in this second one, he is really repulsively callous and arrogant (although I suppose that he's due for a moral turn-around in book three, as this is a children's series). And this, surprisingly, does not bother me. I disliked Artemis Fowl, who was much the same way, because clearly we were supposed to admire his "bad-boy" ways. Here, we aren't. Nathaniel is not irredeemable, but he's in need of redemption, and until then, the author doesn't expect us to particularly admire him.

This afternoon, I swear, I am going to start my paper. And practice. Yes. I really will.

C. accosted me at dinner last night, which meant that I had to talk to him, and thus had to read Thus Spoke Z. later. On the other hand, he's the first person I was able to talk about Notes from Underground with in terms of a novel, and not as philosophy. That isn't entirely accurate, as it implies that in class, we looked at it purely as a non-fiction-esque commentary on society/nature of humankind. Which we did not. (We did, however, get hung up on lofty reason vs cheap happiness, which was utterly pointless, as everyone simply congratulated themselves on picking lofty reason, totally ignoring one of the central points of the novel (in my opinion) for one thing, and for another… I think I shall get into this more below.)

Now, cut and sectioned off for ease of ignoring:
( Notes from Underground )

( In which I philosophize )

( In which I look down on others and rant about them )