2011.04.18 — A Payback and a "Nikita" Fushigi* or two. Finished 2011.04.16

If you were ever under the notion — I was going to say delusion — that the world travels in a straight line from birth to death, here is a fushigi, a totally bizarre one. Again, it originates from

Margaret Atwood

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

Toronto: House of Anansi Press 2008

ISBN 9780887848100

[And here are the links to the other Payback blogs:
2011.03.20; 2011.02.13; 2009.08.09; 2009.08.03.]

Oh! And before I could post this blog, I also finished Payback. And the second reading was well worthwhile, as the book has become considerably better than after the first reading. And I even like the ending better than I did after the first reading.

Addenda:

On 2011.04.20 Piers Morgan extended the fushigi-nature of Payback and this blog.

And then this morning, 2011.04.21, so did Atwood in Oryx and Crake, which I've recently begun reading.

A well deserved ☆☆☆☆☆ out of ☆☆☆☆☆.

Maggie Q

This fushigi is very strange because what begins in a serious philosophical book on the metaphysical meanings and nature of "payback" of debt and justice corresponds and completes in an American TV-series I watch called "Nikita", starring Maggie Q. Although, in the broader picture, maybe not so strange because Nikita's mission is to bring to an evil organization its just destruction — except that this particular episode made specific manifestation of what Atwood wrote.

So, to begin means starting with Atwood's description of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Nelson Mandala saw instituted in South Africa in a serious

Nelson Mandela

attempt to heal not only himself but a fractured society. With, it would appear from far away and with inadequate news coverage, some success. (And that capital 'L' life was able to lead me to creating a blog linking Nelson Mandela, who spent years in a prison, to an actress in a series that takes ex-cons and imprisons them for years in order to create assassins is, well, peculiar.)

Anyway, here's Atwood:

THERE ARE TWO antidotes to the endless chain reaction of revenge and

counter-revenge. One is through the courts of law, which are supposed to settle questions of the weighing and measuring and resolving of debtor/creditor issues in a fair and equitable way. Whether they always do so is of course open to a lot of questions, but in theory that is their function.

The other antidote is more radical. It is told of Nelson Mandela that, after much persecution, and when he was finally freed from the prison where he'd been put by the apartheid government in South Africa, he said to himself that he had to forgive all those who had wronged him by the time he reached the prison gates or he would never be free of them. Why? Because he'd be bound to them by the chains of vengeance. They and he would still be twin Shadow figures, joined at the hip. In other words, the antidote to revenge is not justice but forgiveness. How many times must you forgive? someone asked Jesus of Nazareth. Seventy times seven, or as many times as it takes, was the answer. So [Shakespeare's] Portia was right in principle, although she herself could not follow through [because in the end she was not able to proffer forgiveness to Shylock for his unbending desire to seek revenge against the so-called Christian trader who had unendingly harassed and humiliated him. Note: Atwood's examination of The Merchant of Venice within Payback was sharp and by itself would have made the book worth its cover price.]

Muslim religious law allows the family members of a murdered person to participate in the sentencing of the murderer: they can choose clemency if they wish, and it is recognized that this choice is a noble one, and will free them from their anger and sense of victimization. There are many other cultural examples in which a life is not taken in exchange for a life. A Native North American group presented a Proclamation of Forgiveness to the United States as recently as 2005¹, for instance—if they listed all the things to be forgiven I expect it was rather long—and I need hardly mention the astonishing Truth and Reconciliation process that has gone on in South Africa since the end of apartheid. You may think that all of this forgiveness stuff is watery-eyed idealism of the clap-if-you-believe-in-fairies variety, but if the forgiveness is sincerely given and sincerely received—both parts are admittedly difficult—it does appear to have a liberating effect. As we've noted, the, desire for revenge is a heavy chain, and revenge itself leads to a chain reaction. Forgiveness cuts the chain.

Now take a deep breath, close your eyes, and try the following exercise in historical revisionism. It's the eleventh of September 2001. After two planes have flown into them, the Twin Towers have collapsed in billows of smoke and fire.

Vengeful messages have been disseminated by al-Qaeda. The president of the United States goes on international television and says,

We have suffered a grievous loss — a blow has been struck at us that was motivated by a obsessive desire to harm us. We realize that this was the work of a small group of fanatics. Other nations might bomb the stuffing out of the civilian population where those fanatics are at present located, but we recognize the futility of such an action. Nor will we accuse any bystander nation of having been involved. We realize that acts of vengeance recoil upon the heads of the inventors, and we do not wish to perpetuate a chain reaction of revenge. Therefore we will forgive.

Just imagine the impact of taking such a position, not that there was a snowball's chance in Hell of this ever happening. Now imagine how much different the world would have been today if that position had in fact been taken. No ongoing Iraq war. No impasse in Afghanistan. And above all, no ballooning and ruinous and nation-weakening and out-of-control big fat American debt.

Where will it all end? you are doubtless asking yourself. That depends on what you mean by "all." As for this book, it will end with the next and last chapter, which will attempt to examine what happens when the debit and credit balances get even further out of control. This last chapter is called "Payback." I looked this word up on the Web and, in addition to several movies of that name, I found a site called ThePayback.com, which bills itself as "your home for all of your revenge needs." You can order anything over the Internet now, it seems, including "dead fish," "prank packages," and "rude lottery tickets."

But my final chapter will not be about sending a box of wilted roses to your detested ex-lover. It's more on the order of the mills of the gods, which grind very slowly, though they grind exceeding small (159-61).

And this is actually very challenging, this idea of forgiveness. And so I was thinking about this, from a personal perspective and on how it has a connection to the Dog Whisperer, who repeatedly avers that dogs are always ready to begin anew by living now and leaving the past behind, forgiving the past by being completely in the moment.

Nothing too interesting until I watched on Thursday night (2011.04.14) the latest episode [Season 1, Episode 18 - Into the Dark] of a rather corny and inconsistently written American series called 'Nikita'. I've always been a bit of a sucker for shows with the underdog fighting the good fight against all odds, and this one is doing a generally good job of it. Anyway... what made this a fushigi is that the episode ends with one of the rogue assassins (Owen), who was crazy for revenge in this episode, experiencing a change of heart, and announcing his need to forgive the evil he has done and that has been done to him. It was an amazingly tight fushigi.

Notes:
1. To be a bit Chomsky, it is interesting that I do not remember the news talking about a 'Proclamation of Forgiveness to the United States' from the Native Americans. (Nor does my wife recall this, and she watches a lot of news and has a good memory.) I am curious: do you remember reading or hearing of this document?

Fushigi addenda:
2011.04.20
Tonight I was slightly less than half listening to "Piers Morgan Tonight" while doing something else. (I'm not a fan, but am stuck with my wife turning to it.)

But this time something the second guest, Stacey Lannert, said caught my ear. Until tonight I did not know of her existence or story, which is that as a young woman she was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for having killed her father.

She has since been given clemency by the Governor in recognition of the extenuating circumstance of her shooting her father — prolonged sexual abuse since childhood — and because of her having made the best of being in prison and becoming a model citizen.

Anyway, what caught my ear was when Morgan questioned her about blaming those who hadn't believed her story before, during, and after the trial. Her response was pure fushigi: paraphrased from memory, Lannert said that if she were to continue to blame them anger and hate would ruin her life. So, once again, the 'Truth and Reconciliation Commission' rears its head.

As I was writing this addendum I thought about the clip of the interview that Morgan's producers chose to web-cast. And it struck me as being a particularly American choice in that it focused on the child sexual abuse part of the story. Which is important to the story, of course. But what is far more important than that is her demonstrated power of choice after consequences: choosing to be alive and big hearted in prison, choosing to forgive those who had failed her childhood and who had failed her trial.

When I did my research, I discovered that Lannert had been a guest on Oprah. And, I here thank Oprah and her producers, for putting the real actual transcript on the web page! From that transcript, Lannert says:

"I finally have been able to fuse [my father and the abuser]. I had to in order to forgive myself for the action that I took, because there were moments that I missed my father," she says. "I had to forgive him in order to be able to forgive myself, but there's a difference between forgiving and forgetting."

Stacey says she forgave her father because she didn't want to face the alternative. "If I don't forgive him, then I'm in prison—it might not be a physical prison, but it's a psychological prison. You know, I was incarcerated and I was free in my heart. The rest was geography."

2011.04.21
This morning, on a sleep in day, I picked up Oryx and Crake while waiting for my wife to wake. I opened it to my book marked page, and read:

Not that Snowman passes judgment. He knows how these things go, or used to go. He's a grown up now, with much worse things on his conscience. So who is he to blame them?

(He blames them.) (p.79-80)

Life is interesting.