Pop 89: A Grisly Consolation
By Madonna Hamel
Ever since I moved to Val Marie, where darkness and silence make for deep sleeps and where unfettered winds and storms make for wild dreams, I’ve been waking with a phrase running through my head. Often the phrase is a piece of nonsense, or so I think, initially. But if it’s remarkable and curious, I’m willing to let it sit in my brain for a while. I keep a list of such phrases in the back of my notebook with the intention of using them in a story or a conversation or in one of these columns.
Last night the phrase that kept jolting and bumping around in my brain, tossed about as if by the very winds howling outside, was: A Grisly Consolation. What does that mean, and where did it come from, I asked the mysterious dream-deliverers? And how do I use it in a sentence?
In the days previous to my dream, I was reticent to engage in conversations with my sister about Ukraine. But, listening, I learned about the Russian leader of the opposition and his return from the States to Russia - even though he knew though his life was in danger, having been poisoned twice in the past. I watched an interview with his wife, who tried to explain how she stood by her husband’s decision to stand by and with his own people.
At the end of the interview, the interviewer, an American, said, “take care, my friend.” I rankled at the use of the term “friend” and how, in my opinion, it didn’t really fit a journalist’s job description. Perhaps he was trying to suddenly show some kind of camaraderie for the Russian, but in my opinion, he couldn’t possibly have any. Because, despite any blow-back this interviewer may have had in the past with uncivil or even sociopathic guests, he was undoubtedly safer and more well-off than the Russian and, for that matter, his fellow Americans.
I took a false consolation from the fact that this American interviewer was out of touch with reality at home, let alone abroad. I justified my lack of knowledge about the situation in Russia and Ukraine with the conclusion that, unlike the days when foreign correspondents relayed the news of war from the ground, today’s journalists report from local bureaus or even their own homes. And how can that guarantee a transmission of facts?
Who can I believe? I ask, when the days of newscasting anchors are gone, and we are left with news shows? When, if you don’t warm to the personality of one news personality, you can switch to another and get your suspicions and views bolstered and confirmed by them. In some cases, the dissemination of news resembles the monologues of late-night talk show hosts, loaded with opinion, ridicule, more opinion and rounded off with prediction. In either case, the assumption is people are not capable of processing the facts for themselves; we need pundits and pop culture icons behind desks to do it for us. And so I dismiss the events of the day with a wave of my hand. I abstain from doing the hard work to find the truth, choosing disappointment, posing as indignation instead.
Then I saw a slide show on youtube. Nobody spoke, nobody opined. It was just one grisly image after another of dead bodies—arms like logs after a campfire. Faces grey and black with only an eye left, staring open, staring at what? What did that eye see just before its face was incinerated? Bodies piled in impossible arrangements, arms facing in the wrong direction, feet blown off.
And then I watched a movie about a leaked document supposedly released to Neville Chamberlain outlining Hitler’s plans to take over all of Europe. Chamberlain dismissed the document the way we dismiss the media. Perhaps it just feels better to throw up our hands and swear: Oh, who can you trust? But what’s grisly about that kind of consolation is it makes us guilty bystanders; it makes us complicit in letting the likes of Hitler rise up and take positions of power.
I cannot afford to take consolation in my own acceptance of uncertainty. I should still try to hear the vocational journalists still questing after facts in the hopes of getting to the truth. Consider the Source was always a rule of thumb when reporting. There have always been reliable and unreliable sources in the history of news and reporting. In the course of researching my novel set in the 19th century, during the rise of the newspaper, I learned that no paper was nonpartisan, nor claimed to be.
When I lose sense of my conscience prodding me to seek out the truth, to reach a thorough understanding of grave situations in the world, I turn to the speeches and sermons of Martin Luther King Jr. I recall a phrase from his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail”: “Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
Today I read King’s CBC lectures entitled “The Trumpet of Conscience,” broadcast on CBC Radio in 1967. In one, he quotes Victor Hugo: “If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed.” He goes on to say that the sinner is also the one who “caused the darkness.” Either way, it is no consolation to walk away from the grizzly acts of violence and destruction happening in the world simply because it is too hard to discern the facts. The effort of discernment is the least we owe our brothers and sisters on this planet. If for shallow or specious or partisan reasons, we give up listening, if we don’t try to hear the truth when it breaks above the noise, if I take smug consolation in the quiet and safety of the wild prairie, the truth will fall dead, the first and last and grisly casualty of war.
Madonna can be reached at madonnahamel@hotmail.com