Irritatingly I had very little time to read yesterday, and still less time to blog. meal out in the evening, went to see Cloud Atlas, which was very (over) long, so I didn't write yesterday and missed out on one day. This is two days combined, so I'll start with an indulgent rant. The BBC headline today is "Britons among ballon dead", as a hot air balloon has crashed in Egypt. What do we learn from this? That the BBC believes its audience, above all else, is concerned with British deaths only, and these only if they have occurred in slightly bizarre or holiday situations. It's another riff on the terrible dangers of going abroad, of not staying safely at home.
The Hare with Amber Eye author is walking around the Ringstrasse, marveling at the opulence and the architecture, mulling over the swelling Jewish population, (1863, 8000 to 145,000 by 1899), cognizant from his researches that Hitler painted all the buildings when he was a painting and architecture student. (The Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian empire gave civic equality to the Jews in 1867, many fled pogroms in other countries.). But the undercurrents of antisemitism are still strong. The flats hide behind the ornate facades, the richer Jews 'disappear' behind assimilation, says the author, of the feeling of the time.
Then I come across this in a short story I was reading ( Uncertainty, by Kristine Kathyrn Rusch in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine), which is a timeshift story about the attempts of a group in the future to turn aside the use of nuclear weapons by either assassinating or saving Heisenberg (vis Heisenberg and Bohr's strong friendship, working together before Fascism the protagonists in Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen that attempts to dramatise their meeting). The question is whether Heisenberg deliberately hindered or helped the Nazi bomb research. But in the time conundrum story our protagonist meets another time meddler who comes from the other side, a Nazi sympathiser And this was the part that struck me with its relevance to Austria, now, everywhere, every time. Our heroine is simply incredulous that someone of her time could actually believe and espouse Nazy ideology. How can it happen? I feel the same - maybe in the ignorance of years gone by, but now, with access to all the knowledge and history we have how are people Nazis, fundamentalists, Jehovah's witnesses - I realise now that the list could go on and on. People believe what they feel like believing, and often that isn't very nice. The banal understatement of the century. Britons among the balloon dead, jesus fucking wept, that is the level we're at in our main news channel, what hope is there?
No comments:
Post a Comment