Things that Can and Cannot Be Said

Things that Can and Cannot Be Said Read Free

Book: Things that Can and Cannot Be Said Read Free
Author: John; Arundhati; Cusack Roy
Tags: Ebook, Current Events
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don’t value their lives, and so they force us to bear the burden of genocide.” This is more or less a direct quote.
    JC: From William Westmoreland. 16
    AR: Yes, there was Westmoreland and then there was Saint Robert McNamara, who supervised the destruction in Vietnam and also planned the bombing of Tokyo, in which more than eighty thousand people were killed in a single night. 17 Then he became the president of the World Bank, where he took great care of the world’s poor. At the end of his life, he was tormented by one question—“How much evil must we do in order to do good?” That’s a quote, too. 18
    JC: It’s tough love.
    AR: Fucking selfless stuff . . .
    We had these conversations sitting at my kitchen table, in New York corner booths, in a Puerto Rican diner that became a favorite spot. On impulse, I called New Delhi.
    Wanna go to Moscow and meet Dan Ellsberg and Ed Snowden?
    Don’t talk rubbish . . .
    Listen . . . if I can pull it off, should we go?
    There was silence, and I felt the smile over the phone.
    Yaa, Maan. Let’s go.

[War] culminates in a kind of last ditch moral nightmare. People begin worshipping a mysterious slouching beast, following after, bowing down, offering gifts, making much of zero; and worse. Love of death, idolatry, fear of life; that roughshod trek of war and warmakers through the world, hand in hand with death. Long live death!
    They wouldn’t worship if they weren’t in love. Or if they weren’t in fear. The second being a state as devouring, at least, as the first. I think the clue is the second, masquerading as the first. Just as the beast is the ape of God; to do some things successfully, you have above all to hide what you’re up to. In this way fear can ape love, death can demand a tribute owed to life, the ape can play God.
    Such reflections are of course ill received by some: those to whom the state is a given, the Church a given, Western culture a given, war a given; likewise consumerism, taxpaying.
    All the neat slots of existence into which one is to fit, birth to death and every point between. Nothing to be created, no one to be responsible to, nothing to risk, no objections to lodge. . . . Life is a mechanical horizontal sidewalk, of the kind you sometimes ride at airports between buildings. One is carried along, a zonked spectator. . . .
    Every nation-state, by supposition, tends toward the imperial: that is the point. Through banks, armies, secret police, propaganda, courts and jails, treaties, treasuries, taxes, laws and orders, myths of civil obedience, assumptions of civic virtue at the top. Revelation in fact urges on us, in response to all this, a kind of Christian scepticism, in face of every political form and promise.
    Still it should be said that of the political left, we expect something better. And correctly. We put more trust in those who show a measure of compassion. We agree, conditionally but instinctively, with those who denounce the hideous social arrangements which make war inevitable and human want omnipresent; which foster corporate selfishness, pander to appetites and disorder, waste the earth.
    â€” Daniel Berrigan , from The Nightmare of God: The Book of Revelation , 1983

Arundhati Roy
    â€œ We Brought You
the Promise
of the Future,
but Our Tongue
Stammered
and Barked . . . ”

John Cusack
    Things That
    Can and Cannot
    Be Said
    (Continued)

Over the next week or so, the logistics had to be planned. It was short notice and a bit of a mad scramble. Roy made her own arrangements, but I had in mind Dan Ellsberg’s history as a nuclear weapons planner for America’s retaliation to a possible Soviet first strike. In other words, he had only spent a few years of his life planning the physical obliteration of the Soviet Union. Nuclear secrets, domino theory— he was in those rooms. Then there were the 85-plus arrests for civil disobedience, one of those in Russia on the Sirius , the

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