WE ARE THE LANDSCAPE

April 1, 2015

Interesting the things that sew you into the fabric of a place. I’m in the waiting room of the dermatological surgery unit of Siena Hospital where Joel is undergoing surgery to remove a skin cancer from his shin; a spot that has stubbornly refused to leave via topical medication will now exit via the blade. Everyday we slough off dead cells; tiny particles of self, falling to the ground un-saluted. And all these little pieces of us become part of the landscape.

Here, in Italy, English is not a second language, so at breakfast we write a list of questions to ask the doctor; another adventure in what is now our second language, the specificity of which is a daily struggle. This search for specificity that accompanies one in a foreign tongue is both a constraint and a liberation. The liberation has to do with being free from the quest for perfection, as we know that we will never speak like a native. As a result, for me anyway, the hunt inherent in every sentence is an imaginative adventure in which I get on at the beginning of a sentence and go along for the ride. The constraint, perhaps especially if one is a writer, is the inability to express oneself with the richness and ease of one’s own language.

Yet this constraint is its own gift, as one must reduce that which one is trying to communicate down to its essential, simple truth. Without the ability to embroider, one is left with the clear knowledge of the difference between fact and fiction. Which brings me to Monica Lewinsky and Colin Powell.

I recently watch the TED talk Ms. Lewinsky gave in Vancouver. (See end of post for link). I watched because I was interested to see who she has become some 17 years after she was globally judged and shamed as a bimbo and a slut. Now 41, yet still showing the vulnerability of young girl, she talked about what it was like to have made the common mistake, at the age of 22, of falling in love with her boss; only in this case her boss was POTUS. She spoke of what it was like to sit before a panel of men led by Kenneth Starr, as she and they listened to 20 hours of secretly taped conversation between her and someone she had thought was a friend. She owned her negative qualities and conveyed the shame of having to listen to the worst of herself. And then the tapes were made public via the media and the Internet, which although Facebook and Twitter had not yet arrived, still had the capacity via emails and online tabloid media, to shame her globally.

Monica Lewinsky Ted Talk

As she shifted from the personal to the universal, she talked of the culture of shame in which we now live. Shame, she said, has become a commodity and every time we click on this crap we put money in the tills of the spurious. It’s time, she said, to click for compassion.

I thought how incredibly courageous she was to speak out like this, especially knowing that the audience would include many men who where there to ogle the chick who gave Clinton a blowjob. And indeed, when the camera panned the audience, women could be seen wiping away their tears, while the majority of men sat rigidly still, or squirmed in their seats. Courage indeed. Which made me think of Colin Powell.

Just five years after Lewinsky had been hung out to dry, General Powell had a golden opportunity to be the courageous soldier. Instead, for reasons I can only guess, he lied to the entire world about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; this at a moment in time when he had the respect of the nation as a man of integrity. In that moment, if he had told the truth he would have emboldened the public to believe what they knew deep down was the truth: that there were no weapons of mass destruction and that the argument for invading Iraq was based on fear and arrogance, not to mention the possible need for Bush the Junior to prove he had bigger balls than Bush the Senior.

These duel acts of fear and manipulation of the part of the Government and cowardice on the part of the military enabled the population to sink into apathy and denial. As a result, thousands of innocent Iraqi’s were slaughtered and thousands of young soldiers killed or maimed physically and psychologically, not to mention the ongoing mayhem that war has caused in the entire region.

What we say, in any moment, in any language holds the power to switch energy from positive to negative and vice versa. What we choose to reveal or hide has lasting impact. Just as every flake of skin once it leaves our bodies changes the chemistry of the earth.

The nurse has just come to tell me the procedure has gone well and the doctor is nearly finished. Soon I will take my Joely home, slightly reduced but fee of cancer. You could say that Monica Lewinsky, once reduced, has worked for years to find her courage and in so doing is now free of shame, while poor Powell will forever be shamefully reduced by the dis-ease he helped spread upon the earth.

Monica Lewinsky: The price of shame | Talk Video | TED.com

https://www.ted.com/talks/monica_lewinsky_the_price_of_shame?language...