Scary movies, scary life . . .

Psycho turned 50 yesterday. And the women of a certain age I know still fleetingly think about Janet Leigh sometimes as they step into the shower. Whoever suspected before Alfred Hitchcock's movie that closing that curtain and turning on the water could place one in the quintessentially vulnerable position?

AAAAAAAHHHHHH!

My sister was attending girl's boarding school when Psycho came out. Surely the adult who decided to show it to 500 sequestered girls as their Friday night movie treat was pretty psycho, herself. Paranoia is contagious at boarding school. Being scared is much more entertaining than trigonometry. After the movie, one of my sister's dorm-mates decided to playfully scare a friend who was taking a shower. The friend ended up in the emergency room. It was all very thrilling.

Thinking about Psycho got me to thinking about other scary movies. We do love them, don't we? It's such of a relief to know who or what, exactly, constitutes Big Trouble. Even if it's only pretend Big Trouble, and it's only for a couple of hours.

I remember watching Jaws from the back of a Charlottesville movie theater.When that enormous white fish reared up out of the ocean behind that puny little boat containing Richard Dreyfuss, Roy Scheider, and Robert Shaw, I watched the entire audience jump in unison. I left the theater that night chattering with strangers, bonded with them for life by having experienced together the vanquishing of the Big Bad Fish.

I was interested in the reaction to President Obama's Oval Office speech night before last. David Brooks complained on PBS afterward that it was short on specifics, as though the president should know the specifics of what to do. But then, maybe such knowledge is inferred by giving a speech from the Oval Office. As Dan Kennedy put it on guardian.co.uk,

There was something odd and silly about the idea of Obama's delivering a prime-time, televised address – his first from the magisterial setting of the Oval Office. The oil continues to gush, with estimates about the quantity revised upwards on an almost daily basis. What could he possibly say?

There was also much debate on public radio airwaves yesterday as to whether the war in Afghanistan is going well, what to do about the Gaza blockade, and how could a complete unknown possibly have won the South Carolina Democratic Senatorial primary? People argued and argued and argued, because nobody really knows what's going on, much less what to do about it. And we Americans prefer anything to the unknown, don't we? Or, even worse, the unknowable.

The great challenge of real life these days, as I see it, is to accept that destructive things are out there that cannot be vanquished or even understood in a couple of hours, the time it takes in a cinema. Life is scary; but it is not a scary movie.  We have to keep talking, keep learning, keep trying things. All our arguing, it seems to me, is merely running scared disguised as bluster.

This is Jaws in real life. And the truth is nobody knows what to do about it. The real question is do we, as American citizens, have the guts to face that.

Where is Alfred Hitchcock or Roy Scheider when you need them?

Fueling constructive pesky-ness. . .

Bob Bersson and Mohammed Hijjah both ate lunch at Harrisonburg's Clementine Cafe last Monday. In the basement lounge. In the company of about 25 people.

Mr. Bersson is Jewish and has lived in a Kibbutz in Israel. Mr. Hijjah, who was born in Palestine, was severely beaten by Israeli soldiers who were part of the force that occupied his home in 1967. In a conversation hosted by Harvey Yoder, each man said he was pro-Israel and pro-Palestine. Each man said the two-state solution was the only viable solution.

Bob Bersson attended the controversial inaugural JStreet Conference, held last month in Washington. He said that what has going on in Clementine's lounge was what had gone on there: a group of people had come together to take a stand that being pro-Israel doesn't mean being con-Palestine and vice versa. And then to start figuring out what that means in practical terms. Mr. Hijjah agreed.

Ruth Stoltzfus Jost brought up the House of Representatives' condemnation of the U.N. commissioned Goldstone Report, which found evidence of war crimes by both sides of the Gaza conflict. This was, she suggested, hard evidence of the power over our government of a conservative and entrenched pro-Israel lobby in Washington.

Sandra Rose then pointed out that grass roots forces (among them, those eating lunch with her in Clementine's basement) operate independently of any forces leaning on our lawmakers. "If we want [the two-state solution and peace in Gaza] to become real," Ms. Rose said, "we must make absolute pests of ourselves to our government."

The situation in Gaza, whatever one's politics, needs to heal, for it is generating well-documented crimes against humanity. The government hasn't seen fit to do much; so doesn't that leave it up to the pests?

Over the course of my life, I've taken part in lots of grass-roots pesky-ness; groups of citizens working on changing destructive situations into constructive ones. I started early, taking part in the Woolworth sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina, when I was twelve. Nothing in my own personal experience has made me feel a force for constructive change in Gaza could not be legitimately energized over lunch in Clementine's lounge.

As long, of course, as that energy fuels some practical pesky-ness.


NOTE: here's what Andrea Seabrook had to say about Going Rogue, Sarah Palin's just-out book:

Going Rogue starts off flowery, with slow descriptions of Alaska's frozen, crystal beauty. The story of her family and childhood is a standard American romance — hardworking, salt-of-the-earth people who raise their children and help their neighbors. But the book very quickly bares its true soul and purpose: It's full of anger as Palin lashes out at everything from the Alaska GOP to John McCain's campaign staff. In the end, Going Rogue comes off as a long (400+ pages), pent-up and resentful tirade from a politician who's angry with the spotlight that (she seems to believe) was forced upon her. — Andrea Seabrook, NPR Congressional Correspondent