the 'hood

The first time I set eyes on him, he was stomping up the footpath outside my office window, but on recollection, I’m certain that I’d sensed his presence even before he actually appeared.

A scowling slab of meat for a face and a vicious determination in his stride, he wore prison ink that covered the length of his heavily muscled arms and legs. He was a picture of rage, directed at nothing and no one in particular but at everyone and everything in general. Intimidation radiated from his body in waves, making a visceral impression, even through the glass.

Keeping up the animated pace in their hyperventilated walk-run was his mate, a wiry, undernourished version of the same, with a missing tooth or two thrown into the bargain. Together they looked as if they'd shared a cell at some point in their histories, and it was painfully apparent who had first choice of the bunks.

Somewhat counter intuitively, and I can’t say precisely why, but I came to the conclusion that the two of them were a couple. It wasn’t difficult to imagine that there was probably a good deal of very rough foreplay leading up to the inevitable forced entry that each in his respective role lived for. Stand over men, a love story.

We had just moved into the quiet, tree-lined neighborhood, and the vision of these grunting, power-walking Neanderthals in tracky dacks trodding the walkway couldn't have been more out of place with the surroundings. Some minutes later, they passed by a second time, and I realized that they were doing laps. It occurred to me that if they’d chosen this block, our block to use as their personal drome, then it was conceivable that they lived in the area as well. We might, in fact, be neighbors.

The idea was disturbing, and it took a good bit of the shine off of how happy I was to be calling this our new home. In the subsequent days I was haunted by visions of the butch Aussie Sopranos showing up to the block association meetings, eating all of the cold cuts, and forcefully cutting the queue at the dessert table. That kind of bullying at a communal pot-luck can be terrifying, and I began doing the calculus in my head of how to deal with this imagined new threat.

In the end, and maybe this was just a trick I played on myself to feel more at ease about the situation, I reckoned that despite their aggressive and menacing outward appearances, they were essentially harmless, muscled up, but probably all theater really.

The second sighting, and the first actual encounter was a few weeks later, just a street or two away from home as I walked the dog. At a distance, I spied them coming my way on a collision course, and with an animal of their own. Naively, I thought I'd take advantage of the situation and make the usual small talk with fellow dog owners, just to break the ice. You know, how old is yours, is he/she a purebred, do you live in the neighborhood, what do you think of the new zebra crossing at the children's park, et cetera.

I gathered immediately that these boys weren’t the neighborly kind, nor were they much for chit chat, and neither was their pooch as it turns out. The notion of owners and their dogs bearing a resemblance to one another may be a tired cliché, but it proves to be the case far too often to dismiss as mere coincidence.

While our Staffy cross Cattle Dog is a taller, leaner version of the ground chuck we all know as the English Staffordshire Bull Terrier, replete with the Australian working dog's pointy ears, square jaw, and an intelligence in the eyes gleaned from being only slightly removed from the wild Dingo, the boys were escorting the albino Brit version of the purebred Staffy that looked more like Tommy Cooper after a three day bender. An angry bleached pork roast with pegs would be a flattering description of the beast at the end of their rope, and you couldn't have picked an animal more likely to be accompanying this dynamic duo. The attitude from the three of them was as strong as the smell of cordite after a weapon has been fired, and while I did my best to carry through with my plan for a bit of polite conversation, the dogs had an agenda of their own.

Despite being restrained by their respective leads, the four leggers took up a mutual dislike and immediately proceeded to tear into one another with a vengeance, forcing both the thug and myself to pull them apart. I was fortunately saved by the fact that it was broad daylight on a busy street, but the hot glare and the aroma of steroids in the wind was enough to let me know that malice was a hair's breadth away, and I had better watch my step in future. With a few guttural noises that could almost be mistaken for human speech escaping his clenched teeth, and a threatening look back over his shoulder as the massive neck swiveled on it's base, the crim and his entourage were off again, with me feeling as if I'd dodged the proverbial bullet, for the moment at least.

Round three was a more casual affair, but one that foretold of enough peril to send me contemplating another real estate search just two months into our arrival at the house of our dreams.

One morning, a few weeks after the day of the dogs, I awoke early and with coffee in hand remembered that I'd neglected to retrieve the mail from the previous afternoon. I decided to venture out the front door quickly in my bathrobe and slippers, but the minute I poked my head out, ready to make a dash for the mailbox, there he was, just as he’d been at the first sighting, trudging up the footpath.

As he saw me, he slowed his march, almost passing in slow motion, and drew a forced and vicious smile complimented by a mad gleam in his eye, as if to say, "I know where you live." So much for morning pleasantries, with the net effect that I took to looking cautiously both ways before leaving the house by the front door. It’s not the desired feeling one wants about their home, their sanctuary; no mention of the psychological effect on my manhood.

Now it should be said that I'm no shrinking violet, nor am I a small, non-athletic, timid bookworm, frightened of my own shadow. I'm quite capable of handling myself physically, and can be a threat in my own right when the situation calls for it, thank you very much, but neither am I an ultimate cage fighter with a dark childhood of abuse, a non-existent pain threshold and a bitter grudge against the world. These are the subtle distinctions that I imagined to exist between myself and my malignant new neighbor. The damage to my fragile male ego notwithstanding, I had every intension from that point on of keeping my distance.

Our final encounter began innocently enough. It was several weeks later at that point, and again, I was dog walking, but this time just after dark. I’d decided to let our little prince off leash that night, as he had been so good of late at sticking close, coming when called, staying out of trouble in general, and he dearly loved going free range.

We’d had a good long tour of the streets in the village, which were pretty deserted at that time of the evening, and we were on the home stretch when suddenly, at the far end of the block, I spotted the gorilla and his roast headed our way. I must have frozen for a moment, because by the time I reached to secure my pup, he’d taken off in a headlong dash to meet his adversary. The fight was on for the animals, and even though both the menace and I arrived at the scene simultaneously, less than a few seconds into the skirmish, he chose to dive in feet first, kicking at my boy with an abandon.

Now there are few things in the world that inspire blind and ill-considered bravery more than the protection of loved ones, and the abuse of an animal, even in an attempt to break up a fight, probably makes it on to the list as a very close second. Against all rational thought, I reached with one hand to grab my dog’s collar, and with the other shoved the brute away from the melee. Being the clever beast that he is, my mutt broke free and headed up the street on the trot, fleeing the scene. My escape, however, was halted abruptly by a thudding body block that sent me sideways and the sight of a fist the size of a Christmas ham traveling rapidly in the direction of my face.

I can tell you from experience that fear is a very powerful motivator, and the fight or flight syndrome is well documented in describing the two options that present themselves instantly when danger strikes. What I discovered completely randomly on the streets of my otherwise quiet and peaceful neighborhood is that there are alternatives to the dichotomy of combat or humiliation.

My first and most urgent task was to remove my mug from the path of the flying ham, which I did with greater agility than I would have expected, given my complete lack of experience with street fighting. Even more unexpected was the comic relief that this goon unwittingly provided, miraculously transforming the otherwise frightening circumstances that I was finding myself up against into something more farcical, if no less threatening.

After missing with his first thrust, he retreated somewhat into a pose that bore no small resemblance to the Incredible Hulk, and with his fists raised in what appeared to me to be a boxing stance from the early age of pugilism as an art form, he uttered the immortal words, “Am gonna smosh yow foice in!”

Now I’d be lying if I said that this creature didn’t strike a fair amount of fear in me, mixed with the irony of suffering a potentially fatal, and most probably severe injury in a street fight, over a dog skirmish, in my pristine and otherwise sedate neighborhood, just a few meters from home. The truth is, however, that while rattled by the events that unfolded in a matter of minutes, and finding myself in a jeopardy from which there were no immediate signs of being able to retreat unscathed, either physically, nor certainly with my dignity intact, all I could muster up was an uncontrollable laughter.

As a tribute to the power of comedy, my outburst bore the gift of disarming the mongrel momentarily, and I’m not speaking about his dog. “You fink dis is funnay, do yas?”, he managed to blurt out along with a bit of flying spittle.

While I couldn’t completely erase the smile from my face, which I rightly perceived was further enflaming an already dangerous situation, I could offer up a bit of a surrender in the hope that it would cool his obvious irritation at the fact that I was taking him less seriously than he was accustomed to experiencing when his powers of intimidation were in full bloom. In a gesture reminiscent of Italian soldiers after the invasion of Sicily in WWII, I raised my hands, palms open, turned my body slightly to the side to avoid any further blow that may already have been coming my way and said with as much sincere conviction as I could muster while still uncontrollably amused by his grunt, “I’m not going to fight you.”

He hesitated, as if pondering how someone could back down and hold their ground at the same time, all the while showing amusement in the face of his formidable and violent threat. Like a Warner Brothers cartoon, the wheels were turning over in his brain and beginning to seize up with the contradictions, and as what one might loosely call the mental process was unfolding, he began to visibly and audibly snort.

In his obvious confusion and frustration, I decided to capture the moment and try a rational approach, although looking back, I can’t say what made me think that reasoning would have any effect. “This is a bit absurd really, and after all, we’re neighbors.”

I have no idea what the reminder of our living in the same community triggered in him, but I saw his face and his entire body language change instantly. He dropped his fists and and I reached out my hand. “Let’s put this behind us.”

He hesitated, then reluctantly shook my hand and turned to walk away with his last word on the subject, “Keep yow dog on 'is lead!”

Relief doesn’t begin to describe my emotional state at that moment, and while I was still a bit shaken when I arrived at our door to find my little troublemaker sitting obediently and even sheepishly on the step, I had a strange feeling that I’d just received a great lesson about human nature and preconceptions, especially those based upon appearances.

Later that evening, when I could more calmly reflect upon what had happened, it occurred to me that the man I had encountered in the street was in the end probably just reacting to what he perceived as a threat to his own precious pet, and that while all the trappings of his appearance that I’d observed over several weeks may well have pegged him for what he had been at some point in his life, for the life he had experienced and how he habitually reacted when challenged, he might have moved into the sedate and pristine neighborhood for the very same reasons that we had, perhaps even to try and become someone other than the man he had been.

Despite living only a few houses away, we never encountered one another again after that night, but I did see him from a distance a month or two afterward. He was walking with a woman who appeared to be quite pregnant and a small child. The three of them were holding hands, and the little boy had their white Staffy on his lead.

A short time later, as I was driving along our street on the way home, I spied him helping a couple of moving men load a truck that was parked in front of his terrace. There was a realtor’s sign out front announcing that the home had been sold, and I caught myself wondering what people in his new neighborhood would be imagining when they saw him stomping up the footpath, maybe even with his skinny mate, doing his morning exercise.

downandunder

a couple of stories about energy

Months ago, before the disaster now unfolding in Japan, and just prior to the most recent federal elections here in Australia, I attended a rally in Sydney by various environmental groups attempting to force politicians on all sides of the political spectrum to address the issue of climate change, place a price on carbon, and create an emissions trading scheme. Having been an active participant nearly 40 years ago in a campaign to eradicate nuclear power as an energy option, I was surprised to see in attendance at the rally, and specifically at that rally, a group of people who were placarded and advocating nuclear as the solution to the changes that manmade carbon dioxide was making to our climate.

Along the parade route I had the chance to engage a woman who was holding one of the pro-nuclear power signs aloft and asked her why she thought that nuclear was a viable alternative to coal and natural gas, as opposed to the renewable energies of wind and solar that we were and are advocating. Somewhat surprisingly she drug out the often heard line here among conservatives that the contemporary No Nukes crowd were nothing more than a misinformed 60s and 70s political holdover, and that the technology had advanced to the point that nuclear power was not only completely safe, but the best option financially and the cleanest alternative for the environment, as proven by the number of reactors in Europe, where the Green movement really began. Now this was coming from a woman who otherwise identified herself with the Left, or what one may laughably call the Left in Australia, so I was more than a bit taken aback, and I asked her, if nuclear had somehow off of my radar become such a safe alternative, where did the members of her group and others advocating building more plants intend to store the waste by-product of fuels with radioactive half-lives of millions if not billions of years? Her answer began with the word, "Well . . . " and ended in silence.

I marched on, not thinking at all about the potential for a major seismic occurrence and what cataclysmic events might be set in motion for a nuclear power plant as a result, only about what I considered to be a non-negotiable and unquestionable roadblock to nuclear power ever being a safe alternative to carbon-based or preferably renewable energy fuel consumption, and I naively thought that such a considerable and to my mind virtually unassailable argument was enough.

I was told the other day about a friend, an otherwise intelligent artist who was spreading the story from an article he'd read in an '07 market research report about the carbon footprint of manufacturing a Toyota Prius and the subsequent carbon output needed to replace it's batteries at the end of their too short lifespan as being larger than the energy savings generated by the increased mileage of the hybrid vehicle over the whole of it's likely usable period on the road. The report suggested that in the end, a Hummer, or a Range Rover with its greater lifetime mileage was consequently, and perhaps counterintuitively better for the environment.

Now this report has been thoroughly debunked for the assumptions made in its argument, the errors in math, and any number of other aspects concerning the report, including the affiliations of the research company to those who have vested interests in their argument, but that didn't stop the story going 'round as if it were true.

http://www.pacinst.org/topics/integrity_of_science/case_studies/hummer_versus_prius.htm

Another very close friend pointed out the theory that the carbon energy producers and all the various interests who complete that chain have been operating on for years; that the truth of an argument is not the most important issue in terms of public opinion, rather it's the frequency that it's repeated, and if it's repeated often enough, if it's spread 'virally' in contemporary digital media terms, then it becomes true.

Use less energy, recycle whatever you can, invest in the development of renewable energy resources, support the pricing of carbon and emissions trading as a means of reducing our dependency on carbon-based energy, coal, oil, and natural gas . . . keep repeating those measures, and perhaps, someday, they'll be understood to be true . . . eventually.

In the meantime, I find it helpful to take every opportunity available to question those who have economic and personal agendas that have nothing to do with the truth about global climate change, as well as those who champion methods to generate alternative energy resources to carbon that have the potential to create repercussions harmful to our environment and our very lives. There are free and renewable resources at our disposal to exploit, if only we have the political will to quiet the dissonance of those with private interests and do what's best for the planet as well as for the people who inhabit it.

downandunder

hitchens and the king

Having read Christopher Hitchens' eloquent and clever critique in Slate of David Seidler and his screenplay for this year's Oscar frontrunner 'The King's Speech', I began to realise that there are two processes at work in the debate between these men, and that their points were illustrative of a discussion that arises again and again about films depicting the lives of real people, especially historically significant ones.

http://www.slate.com/id/2285695/pagenum/all/#p2

The film, by anyone's estimation is a masterpiece, masterfully performed, photographed, edited, but there is no denying that as a bio-pic the script takes considerable liberties with the historical facts.

Of course there's nothing new about cinema bending history to its will, but in this particular case, the screenplay in its zeal to gain the audience's favour for a man in personal crisis, to make him a likeable character whose story, whose plight we'll empathise with, even though he was the hereditary ruler of 25% of the world's people and wealthy from birth beyond our imaginations, paints George VI or Albert or 'Bertie' as a very different political being than he in fact was at the time.

The truth of the history as Hitchens unveils it would have certainly soured our sympathies for a leader, a man whose persuasions were, like his abdicated brother more in line with preserving the monarchy and his family fortune than in taking a moral stand against a Nazi regime that was enslaving Europe and murdering the continent's Jews, Gypsies, Communists, somewhat later Poles of all religious persuasions, really anyone they found in their disfavour. Moreover, there is strong evidence to suggest that Bertie went out of his way to influence the government into denying entrance to British governed Palestine by Jewish refugees fleeing war-torn Europe, and thereby sealing the fate of untold numbers to the concentration camps and death in the ovens of Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka, Jadwiga, Bergen Belsen, etc.

Once the die was cast, and war with Germany unavoidable, the leadership provided by the king as a voice to help rally Britain and to give strength to the inhabitants of an empire, at least those in England who were raised to feel comfort from the rule of a strong monarch, albeit a constitutional one, was undoubtedly an important factor in the war effort, and the film thoroughly engages us in the private struggle of the man in the process of overcoming a crippling disability to become the king. As Christopher points out, however, it is very dangerous for cinema, especially when it's executed with such a high level of creative skill, to pave over the serious cracks in the real lives of the figures it chooses to portray.

Balancing the tale of a man versus his deeds in the real world, or artistry and inspiring works versus the politics and personal behaviour of any individual has never been an easy task for the storyteller who seeks to inspire and to tell a compelling yarn to that end.

I think, however, the key lies in understanding that all characters, all men and women are a complex interweaving of good and questionable, and that if a writer or a director has faith in their ability to truly tell the story of a human being with all their shortcomings and attributes honestly on display in equal measure, then the reader, the viewer will in the end be all the more inspired by the narrative, and that honesty in all its shades of dark and light will have rendered the tale unassailable for its truth and the stronger story as a consequence.

Film may be entertainment, but it can also quite easily become a vehicle for ideology, and if we celebrate a motion picture's creative achievements, as will undoubtedly be done this coming Sunday evening in Los Angeles, then certainly we have a right, maybe even a duty to critique its manipulations of the truth along the path to providing us with those entertainments.

downandunder

have you ever seen an owl?

Have you ever seen an owl?

I don’t mean in a drawing or a photograph, but a live owl? They’re truly incredible to look at, the intricate pattern of their feathers, not really feathers as you might think of them, but more like fur, combed, ordered in a way that’s astounding, and they stare right back at you. It’s disarming. They’re larger than you expect them to be, that is, if you’ve only seen them in photo books, or as illustrations, especially the white ones. I saw one once in a short film directed by a friend, a colleague. There was a long tracking shot, and as the camera moved around the bird, it followed the lens with its eyes, its entire head swiveled. The wise, old owl. I think they have that reputation, or that myth is attached to them because they seem to stare right through you, as if they know something that you don’t, or maybe something about you personally that you thought only you knew for certain. They’ve uncovered your secret, and they’re telling you with their stare, they’re letting you know that they know. Wise indeed.

I think I’ve seen an actual owl. I think I’ve actually seen a real owl, but when I try and remember when, or where, I realize that I may have imagined it.

Another question. Have you ever seen a dead person?

Not someone lying in a casket in a funeral home, a relative or a friend that you’re mourning, although the viewing of the body probably isn’t done so much in our culture anymore. I mean have you ever seen a person actually die? There must be those who have seen many people die, soldiers, policemen, doctors, people who’ve had the misfortune to live in countries torn apart by war, or disease, but I’d be willing to guess that if you asked most people, people you know personally, they’d say no, they haven’t seen an actual person die, and considering how many people do actually die, that seems strange. Maybe most people who are confronted with death turn away, afraid to see themselves reflected in the face of the one who’s dying. That’s the way the story goes, the excuse we make for ourselves, and for others like us.

I think I’ve seen a person dying, but when I try to remember who, the image that I had in my head disappears, or becomes a scene in a movie, or a story I’ve told often enough to believe that it’s true, even though I realize that I may have imagined this as well.

I suppose the point that I’m getting at, the issue I’m contemplating, is how much of what we think we’ve experienced is really just a remembrance of something that never took place, or if it did, then we weren’t there to witness it taking place, but we’ve been told that it happened. Maybe we saw it happen in a film, or on television, while reading a book, or we saw it in our imaginations, and then it somehow became memory, but transformed to become the memory of our own personal experience, and as real to us as if it had happened, as if we had been there to see it happen.

When someone tells you a story about themselves, something that happened to them, how do you judge whether they’re telling you the truth? What if what they’re telling you is not the truth, but they believe that it is, because that’s how they remember it happening, as if they were there when it happened, as if it happened to them? Recently, I heard a character in a movie say, “Honesty is not synonymous with truth”. I was taken by the line when I heard it, but I didn’t fully understand what it meant at that moment, even though I knew that it was something profound, at least something thought provoking. I also knew it had been uttered by an actor who was not telling me a true thought of their own, or something that they believed in, but something that their character was saying, something that had been written for them to say that would have an effect upon me, me and the rest of the audience. In fact, I was so compelled to recall exactly what I’d heard the character say, that I found a copy of the screenplay and read it a number of times until I’d memorized it, all the while contemplating exactly what it meant. The character in the film was trying to convince a man she was having diner with, a man who would become her lover, her boyfriend later in the story, that she was a truthful person, even though she was confessing to having told a lie from time to time, “to smooth things over”. She was a truthful person, in her estimation, and even though she didn’t always tell the truth, she was an honest person as well. In other words, lying as a tactic in order to make things easier for herself, or for others, without doing any real harm, or at least no harm she was aware of, was understandable, forgivable, even a considerate thing, a kind thing to do.

So maybe truth isn’t as important as we’ve been led to believe, and maybe memory is as much a product of imagination as it is of any accurate recollection, any factual recounting of events, and there is the moral paradox of our age, perhaps of any age. We live in a world where the great storytellers are some of the most valorized members of our society. When they spin their yarns in the context of art, or entertainment, and when they capture us with their imaginations, allowing us all to borrow theirs to fill the empty space where our own might be, they are celebrated beyond imagination itself. In any other context, however, being caught in a lie can be met with humiliation, scorn, and if you don’t have enough money for a really clever lawyer, imprisonment. Truth is not absolute, as it turns out, but contextual.

Now think really hard. Have you ever seen an owl?

downandunder

the little girl in the window

In some way, I suppose that we're all damaged by events in our past. While it's true that we're also shaped by those joyous, illuminating, life-changing moments, a first kiss, the birth of a child, and others that we may barely recognize as significant at the times they occur, our characters, the essence of who we are as human beings is more a result of how we deal with the trauma in our lives. The psychic scars that form in the wake of those jarring confrontations we all experience with the way the world truly is, as opposed to our misperceptions and fantasies of how we'd like it to be are indelible. Pain, in the end, is more instructive than pleasure, and more lasting.

Sometimes the damage that we suffer as human beings, while intensely personal to each individual, is so widespread across a community, a race, a generation that the scarring becomes hereditary, and continues to mark the children who were yet to be born at the time that events have taken place. Even the children’s children are not immune, and the cultural psyche of whole peoples can be formed by experiences that are decades old, branding them arbitrarily as victims, or survivors, or simply as broken.

Anyone who's ever been through analysis will tell you that rediscovering the episodes where their personal damage first occurred, dragging those memories kicking and screaming into the light from the dark recesses of their minds where they've hidden them away from consciousness is an excruciating experience, but ultimately a liberating one, like the removal of an emotional cancer. The catharsis begins with the recognition of the occurrences that we’ve kept secret from ourselves, but there are some wounds that can never be completely healed, and for better or for worse, they define us. Those wounds become our character.

My wife is Dutch, and while she was born more than a decade after the Second World War in Europe, a good deal of who she is, of who so many of the children of those who experienced the events of that period firsthand are as well, was formed as a result of their families' histories. Sacha's mother, Adrie was born in the '20s to the daughter of a Christian family, and because she was illegitimate, and unwanted, she was raised in a home for unwed mothers, and later by loving strangers. Adrie's mother died of a respiratory illness when the girl was 3, and she once told Sacha about her earliest childhood memory of a woman, perhaps her mother, but she couldn’t be sure, in a hospital bed hugging her with a death grip, crying hysterically, and saying goodbye.

As a teenager, Adrie spent the years during the war shuttled between Rotterdam, where she was placed temporarily with an aunt and uncle, and a residence in the north of Holland. When the Allied bombing became overwhelming, she was sent back to Jet, her teacher and surrogate mother, who’d taken her from the orphanage after her own mother had passed. De Werkplaats where Jet taught, and where Adrie lived and studied was closed by the new government of occupation because of the socialist philosophies taught by it’s founder Kees Boeke, and Jet found a remote house where she and others could look after displaced children, including several Jewish babies who were being hidden from the Germans and their Dutch collaborators. As Sacha grew old enough to understand what her mother had experienced, and curious enough to ask, Adrie told her about how she'd helped keep the babies safe from soldiers who would come periodically to inspect their nappies. They were looking for the boys who'd been circumcised, and when sympathetic villagers would alert Jet that the Germans were on their way, Adrie would take the babies into a small boat and row out onto the lake nearby where she would keep them quiet for hours while the houses were searched. One of the boys who survived the war stayed with Jet Kirpensteyn as another of her special boarders, and like Adrie completed his studies at de Werkplaats Kindergemeenschap Bilthoven. Rolf became a lifelong friend to the young girl who helped save his life in the little rowboat, and later to her daughter.

Sacha’s father, Benjamin was born just after the turn of the 20^th Century to Jewish parents. His father was a craftsman who built railway carriages, and a member of the socialist workers party. Too young to fight in the Great War, and too old for the military in World War Two, Ben supported his wife and two children, Ab and Ita, by working for a printing company, a job his father helped him secure with his connections in the party. A handsome and charismatic man, Ben was able to acquire false papers for himself and his family before the Germans began deporting Jews to the camps, and he managed to find separate homes across the country for his wife, his son of seven, and his daughter, only four years old at the time. For the duration, they were disguised as Dutch Christians while he went to work helping to distribute an underground resistance newspaper Het Parool,‘The Password’. Ben would devote his life’s work to the paper, which became one of the country’s largest dailies after the war, and he served as its managing director in Amsterdam until his retirement in the early ‘70s. While Ben, his wife and children made it through the war physically unscathed, more than five years of distance took its toll on their family, and ultimately it did not survive. Ben separated from his wife a few years after their reunion in 1945, and the two children remained with their mother. Ben’s mother had died years earlier and his father remarried, and when word began to spread in early ‘41 that Jews in the cities were being detained, Ben’s father and his wife fled to the countryside where they were certain they’d be safe. A local farmer betrayed them for the reward of five guilders, and like more than 50,000 of their fellow Dutch Jews, neither ever returned from Auschwitz.

Adrie and Ben met one summer when she took a casual job as a receptionist in the building where Ben’s newspaper was published. Although separated by more than twenty years in age, they fell in love, and it would have been easy to understand the attraction. Ben was successful and exceedingly charming, and Adrie was tall, blond, and beautiful. They had both endured tremendous ordeals and were searching for fresh beginnings. It took five long years of trying for the couple to create the new family that they both so desperately wanted, and finally in 1956, Sacha, the girl that Ben called his golden child, was born.

For a while the three of them led a charmed life together in post-war Europe with summer vacations to Italy and skiing holidays in Switzerland, but beneath the surface was a recurring historical problem. Because Ben’s wife wouldn’t grant him a divorce, Sacha could not legally bear his name, and so like her mother before her, she carried the social stigma of illegitimacy. The reminders of Adrie’s own troubled childhood, along with rumors of Ben’s infidelities eventually drove a wedge between them, and as a result, family life became increasingly difficult for young Sacha, who was inheriting the damages that had been inflicted upon her parents long before her arrival.

By the time Sacha was a teenager, the house was not the most pleasant place to be. Her father had moved out for a time, and her mother had sought the comfort of a lover. Their pasts had caught up with them, and while Adrie, still the fragile abandoned child wanting desperately to be loved fell into a deeper depression, exacerbated by ‘60s era antidepressants, Ben sought solace away from home in his work as well as in his social life. The winter after Sacha turned fourteen, her mother, having had a few glasses of wine one evening, left the house and didn’t return. Sacha learned years later that her mother’s lover had refused to leave his wife and marry her, and the news had thrown her into an even darker despair than she’d been struggling with the past few years in her marriage. It was a freezing night, and when Ben realized that Adrie was missing, he contacted friends and eventually the police. A search was conducted, but it wasn’t until two days later that her body was discovered in a nearby wood. A little more than five years later, and just that long into his retirement, Ben de Vries died of a heart attack in an airport in the south of France, leaving his golden child alone in the world at the age of 20. Their new beginnings were overshadowed by their pasts, and tragically short-lived.

For most of 1942 and ‘43, Ben’s daughter Ita, Sacha’s older half-sister, had been living with a Christian family, her false papers identifying her as one of their own. She’d not seen her real mother or father for more than two years at that point, and out of caution, she was never allowed to leave the house for fear of her being exposed. Even if all the other family members needed to be away on any given day, Ita, at that time only six years old, was forced to remain behind alone with strict instructions not to answer the door to anyone. No exceptions.

She must have been a very bright little girl who grasped the consequences of breaking this hard and fast rule, and a very brave one as well because she’d left her family, her parents, her brother, and everything she knew to live with strangers, taking with her only a small poppen koffertje, a doll’s suitcase, carrying her few belongings.

One day while looking out of the window of her bedroom on an upper floor of the house, she noticed a man approaching the front door, and as he came closer, she recognized him as her father, whom she’d not seen since she was four. Ben had taken a great risk in coming to the home, but he felt compelled to try and see his young daughter, even if only for a moment. From her window, Ita could see her father at the door, and could hear his knock coming from downstairs, but she couldn’t cry out for fear of breaking the rules, rules that had been made for her safety. Sadly, he couldn’t see his little girl in the window, and for several minutes, she watched him in silence. After a time, Ben decided that it was no longer safe to wait for an answer, and he left. They wouldn’t see one another again for more than two years, after Holland’s liberation in the spring of 1945.

In literature, tragedy is defined by a character who is destined to destruction through some fatal flaw or by an overwhelming power, but in life, tragedy is more often the residue of history, events and circumstances that arise from our past to shadow our present, and if we allow them, our future.

Ironically, the components that draw us to tragedy are hope and longing, because even faced with a destiny of downfall, it’s human nature to try to cheat death, to conquer tragedy, and it’s that hope that we live for, that longing, against the odds, for things to turn out differently than we fear they might.

We are all damaged, but the antidote as well as the path forward is consciousness, and understanding. In the interim, the salve is hope.

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the case of Sarah

My first inclination was to say ignore her, and she'll go away. Stop feeding the frenzy by indulging in these quid pro quo responses and attacks, but then I thought about the conditions under which other demagogues have succeeded in capturing power in the not so distant past.

The easiest comparison of course, just for historical proximity really, is with G.W. Bush, but his ascension was as much a product of his political and economic pedigree, which just happened to have a finely tuned political machine built by his Father and Grandfather to mine the contemporary wave of populism that put him over the top.

Then there's Reagan, but again, the Madison Avenue support and manipulations of Donald Reagan were as much responsible for Ronnie being the 'tired old man we elected king' as any true people's movement. The era of image is everything, and there were plenty of puppet masters to help move his lips.

No, the more I think about it, the more I realise how many comparisons there actually are to Europe in 1931; the state of the economy, the warlike culture, the guise of patriotism that allows the most heinous of personalities to wrap themselves in the flag as a cloak of protection for their incendiary speech (Limbaugh, Beck, Malkin, et.al.), the lack of education undermining the ability for the lumpen to understand the truth, the propaganda machine spreading fear and hatred in order to profit personally (Murdoch, Ailes, and the whole Fox pack of brownshirts), and one charismatic voice who to a large number of angry, disenchanted people looks like them, speaks for them, and is just telegenic enough to win their allegiance.

If you think that the kind of fascism that brought Hitler to power couldn't happen to the declining empire called the United States of America, and that Palin, the soccer mom with a rifle and the face of a B level beauty contest winner, couldn't capture power, then you may need to read your history more thoroughly. As Santayana wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

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