March Musings

I once thought it would be easy to post twice a week to my blog, but then I had just broken my ankle and I could not move with any facility at all. Sitting in the chair I had so many thoughts and ambitions. Alas, I healed, and my intentions, honest and good, were abandoned. I note that I have placed that last sentence in the passive, as if I didn’t have to take responsibility for the abandonment. But it was me; it still is.

I have developed a greater respect for newspaper columnists who, even without broken limbs, regularly produce columns for actual deadlines. I don’t always like what they say, but I respect their ability to have said it on time.

Saw Lives of Others last evening, the German film about the last years of East Germany, and the horrible repression under which the citizenry suffered. Interesting that the title seems to me so ironic: as Wiesler, the secret police officer responsible for surveillance of the suspect population for evidence of subversive activities, studied the lives of others, and specifically Christina and Georg, the repression of his own life became evident to him. I am not sure that he discovered anything really about the lives of others—except the subversive activities for which he was looking—but he did discover the emptiness of his own life which had become dedicated to spying on the lives of others. The lives of Georg and Christina, on which he eavesdrops, complex and messy as lives should be, filled as they are with joys and sorrows, exposes the flatness of his own existence. Finally, it is his action which saves the writer, Georg, but in that action, the actress, Christina, is destroyed. This brave act on Wiesler’s part exposes the fragility of loyalties in the German Democratic Republic, and points out the alienation everyone in that society experiences. Films such as this remind me how valuable our freedoms are, and how fragile they remain. People like George Bush, whose actions are monarch like, threaten our democracy, though their rhetoric argues that these actions are necessary to preserve it. Like destroying the village in order to save it. I don’t believe it. I didn’t then.

I think I’m going to try to post more regularly. For both of you readers.