Death Is Easy to Pronounce

Let me be clear about the title: I am not referring to the doctor-at-the-crime-scene testimony over a comatose body. The headline is a quote from a poem by Sampurna Chattarji, an Africa-born poetess living in India. She is one of many contributors to the fascinating newly released documentary called Voices in Wartime by the Seattle writer and director Rick King.

I went to its premiere at the Guild 45th Theater with a suspicion I’d see another political activist’s cry over spilled milk. That is, over the spill of wars (from terrorism to Iraq, and beyond) that this administration seems to enjoy spilling in gallons. Not that there is anything wrong with antiwar activism: It at least challenges the intellect of those who possess it and are willing to use it. That always creates the basis for a hope that the next unnecessary war will be stopped before it started.

However, this documentary is anything but an activist flick. Or, if you will, it presents a very different kind of activism. Activism of conscience, activism through metaphors and rhymes. It lets poets of all kinds and nationalities, of all different social, political, religious, and ethnic backgrounds speak about their authentic experience with war. From soldiers to war correspondents to war survivors, and anyone in between, you hear a clear voice that doesn’t speak the language of media propaganda. You don’t hear much about heroism, patriotism, sacrifices for the nation, or the victory of Democracy, Truth, and Justice. Instead, you hear about suffering, pain, resignation, gloom, hopelessness, and injustice.

The truth is that wars produce mass death. They do not produce justice, heroism, not even victories in the sanitized and polished sense politicians or generals love to use them to promote their political agendas or to speed up promotions in the ranks. That may be true about the wars told by politicians and generals. It is definitely not true about the wars told by those who survive them on both sides of the barricade. A victory in a war is a great illusion on the part of individuals who never fought one yet who have the unfortunate power to start them.

Politicians and mass media these days use double-speak. Poets use conscience. Through metaphors and imagination, they evoke a real picture of the war and a real sense of its cost to a human soul.  It is not too little too late at the time when the words of politicians lose their meaning and value, when patriotism has become a convenient cover-up for a nasty agenda, a weapon against legitimate doubts, and a dishonest answer to legitimate questions.

War never affirms life. It brings death. Of course, politicians have it easier. They call death in a war collateral damage, and then it is easy to pronounce. For poets, death has a face and annihilates the soul that makes us human. Such death for them is hard to live with. Rick King's courageous movie brings a fresh voice short of partisan demagoguery, a poetic voice of reason that anyone with conscience can relate to and appreciate.

Comments

[Scott Pralinsky]

It sounds like a moving documentary. I would love to see it. And your review is beautifully written. It certainly brings to my mind the questions I've been asking myself about the madness of war since I was a young boy.

Recently I ran across a quote from Albert Einstein. He said, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." After I read that, I began to realize that what we have been witnessing since the beginning of Creation is exactly this. When faced with what people perceive as a "problem," they try to address it with the same logic or thinking by which the problem was created.

How interesting it would be if we could rise to a place ABOVE where the problem was created and address it from a higher level of consciousness!

I think in all honesty we are moving collectively towards this ability. My earnest prayer is that we can survive as a race until enough of us together can see the madness in war and the mistreatment of other human beings, and move towards a place of compassion for one another.

[Antonio Deli]

Who is Sylvia - the goat?
Even i think much more about it, i do not know. I was born in 1981, Velvet revolution came when i was 8 years old. I remember that stopgap i lived in and see present time stopgap i live in. Personal freedom is something what depends on the stopgap ratio. Therefore Vaclav Havel could look for freedom in the communism era and me can look for the same now. The very first time I saw Vaclav Havel, speak from the tribune in the Square of Czech Paradise in Turnov at an impromptu speech about the better future lying in our freed hands and freed minds, I recollected a situation it happened five days earlier in little village Snehov. An older man, the Bolshevik, attacked me because of civil forum's flag on my chest. I did not know, what does it mean. And the Bolshevik knew my father fixed the little flag on my chest.. From that time i suffer by thoughts of this kind: Where the true lies? In coming years were people frustrated that nothing has changed in the fact, even they have a relative political freedom. It takes our personal freedom everytime - either economy or politics.
To the "Death is easy to pronounce - Politics and consciece." It is always so simply to call something the Death. But if you give it this stick - it will be more powerful. There is no diference between politicians and the Death. Both are living from their Names. Bush is living from the energy of people's nearsighted decisions in votes. It is all about our responsibility - were we really deaf and blind? ... I am cynical - but age of people civilization was ever tied up in bonds of blood.