It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
We want justice: The renewed struggle for safety and freedom for women in India (plus Reclaim the Night and Win the Day: The battle for gender justice)
The horrific rape and murder of a 31-year-old postgraduate trainee doctor in Kolkata's RG Kar Medical College and Hospital has triggered a massive people's assertion in West Bengal powered by a remarkable women’s initiative called 'Reclaim the Night' – derived from an international movement - on the eve of Independence Day. This August 15, the focus was turned on the crucial question of women's freedom, women's safety and women's inalienable right to a dignified and democratic life in today's India. The fact that a young doctor was killed and brutalised in her own hospital after completing a strenuous 36-hour-shift became a shocking symbol of the utter lack of safety of women in their workplaces. The idea of small protests planned in select spots of Kolkata soon grew into an unprecedented statewide assertion by women. Students, doctors and concerned citizens across the country too were quick to come out on the streets in solidarity with the West Bengal movement.
In some ways, India is reliving moments of the 2012 anti-rape upsurge which had followed the Nirbhaya case - the rape and murder of a 22-year-old physiotherapy intern in a private bus. Back then it had led to not just countrywide powerful protests but also the setting up of a judicial committee, holding of extensive consultations with women's organisations and activists and major updatings of the criminal law to make it more effective in dealing with sexual harassment and violence. The six men involved in the crime had all been arrested: one died in custody, four have been executed by hanging on 20 March 2020, and the juvenile offender has served his sentence.
The anti-rape movement in 2012-13 had rightly focused on the question of justice in cases of sexual harassment and violence and making it easier to file cases, quickening the process of investigation and increasing the rate of conviction of the perpetrators. This time too the central chant that rent the air across West Bengal and beyond was ‘we want justice’. It was to ensure that justice was done that the people of West Bengal came out on the streets promptly and strongly to foil every perceived attempt to cover up the heinous act and shield anybody guilty or complicit in this ghastly crime. The ’Reclaim the Night’ call emerged precisely against the crude victim-blaming statement by the principal of the RG Kar Medical College (RGKMC). When the same principal was entrusted with the charge of another medical college in the city just hours after he was forced to resign from the post of principal of RGKMC, the anger of the people understandably spread like wild fire.
The inaction of the police in the face of vandalism in the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital - on the very night when tens of thousands of people were out on Kolkata streets in the 'Reclaim the Night' assemblies and marches - only added to the anger and resolve of the people. As did the farcical exercise in which Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee staged a 'protest march' demanding the hanging of the lone accused arrested so far in the case, rather than acknowledging her own responsibility not just as Chief Minister but also being in charge of both health and law and order ministries of the state government.
In another remarkable show of solidarity and protest, the state government's move to cancel a football match between traditional rival clubs Mohun Bagan and East Bengal provoked a united march of football lovers of the top three football clubs of the city - Mohun Bagan, East Bengal and Mohammedan Sporting. Theatre workers, lawyers, and people cutting across all professions and walks of life are continuing with their daily protests demanding justice.
At the recommendation of the Kolkata High Court the investigation has meanwhile been handed over to the CBI. The Supreme Court too has taken suo moto cognizance of the case, asking both the State government and the CBI to submit updates. While appealing to the doctors to end their strike and resume duties, the Supreme Court has announced its decision to form a national task force to decide on measures to strengthen workplace security for medical professionals and health workers. It has also asked the West Bengal government to respect the people's right to organise peaceful protests and not try and violate it by applying force. The pressure mounted by the powerful protest movement has clearly put not just the state government on the defensive but also forced the Supreme Court to respond in a proactive manner. This pressure must have to be kept up to secure some real justice and positive change.
The issue here is clearly not limited to the security of just medical professionals but the right of all women to safety and dignity in workplaces and public spaces as well as in the domestic sphere of homes and families. The very night women were occupying the streets across West Bengal to reclaim their rights, a young Adivasi woman, Priyanka Hansda, was brutally killed in Shaktigarh of Bardhaman district. Around the same time as the horrific RG Kar incident, brutal cases of sexual violence have been reported from several states in India including the rape and murder of a nurse in Uttarakhand, rape and murder of a 14-year-old Dalit girl in Bihar's Muzaffarpur district, and shocking sexual assault on girl students in a renowned school in Badlapur near Mumbai. And just the day before the Supreme Court heard the RG Kar case, the Kerala government released the report submitted by a committee headed by Justice K Hema on pervasive sexual harassment and deeply entrenched misogyny in the Malayalam film industry.
Indeed, there have been any number of horrific rape and murder cases since the 2012 Nirbhaya case - from Kathua in Jammu to Hathras in UP to the shocking incidents in Manipur - that have never really got due attention from the apex court in the country. The Vishaka guidelines instituted by the Supreme Court in 1997 to prevent sexual harassment in workplaces and the updated 2013 Act are still observed more by way of violation. Convicted rapists and rape-accused politicians are routinely rewarded and appeased by the BJP, and as was highlighted by Mamata Banerjee's farcical 'protest' in the RG Kar case, the question of justice is sought to be replaced by most parties by frenzied calls for capital punishment.
The fact that, in spite of the Nirbhaya case where as many as four convicts were executed by hanging, rape still remains such a pervasive crime in India clearly tells us that capital punishment is no deterrent. Institutional measures to ensure a safe environment for women in all spheres, prompt and assured delivery of justice and a strong social awakening and mobilisation against rape culture and patriarchy are the crying needs of the hour. Let the 'we want justice' roar triggered by the RG Kar horror take India firmly forward in this direction.
Reclaim the Night and Win the Day: The battle for gender justice
On the early morning of 9th August, a horrifying crime shocked the state of West Bengal. A young post-graduate trainee doctor was brutally raped and murdered at her workplace in the Chest Medicine Department of R G Kar Medical College & Hospital in Kolkata. This atrocity not only shattered the medical community but also exposed the deep-seated patriarchal violence and corruption permeated in our country.
The response from the RG Kar Medical College administration exacerbated the tragedy. The principal, Mr. Sandip Ghosh, summoned the grieving parents of the victim, only to make them wait for three agonizing hours before they could see their daughter's lifeless body. Ghosh while informing the parents about the incident allgedly tried to pass it off as suicide! According to reports, despite the visible and gruesome injuries pointing towards a criminal offence, there was procedural delay in filing the FIR. The crime was detected in the early hours of the morning and no FIR was filed until late at night. The Supreme Court hearing the case of August 22 raised serious questions on handling of case by Kolkata police and observed, “this is very surprising, post-mortem precedes registration of the UD [unnatural death] case!
On August 10th, the prime suspect, Sanjay Roy, was arrested. However, the arrest did little to quell the growing anger among the public as the hospital and police administrations actions (rather, inaction) pointed towards several glaring shortcomings. The incident had already brought to light the long-standing corruption within public hospitals and raised serious questions about the principal's role in potentially covering up the crime. Mr. Ghosh's shocking and insensitive remark that it was irresponsible for the victim to be alone at night further inflamed further public fury. His words were emblematic of the pervasive rape culture that continues to plague cases of sexual violence in India. On the other hand, instead of taking the accountability of such system level failure, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee who is also in charge of the Health department, tried to channelize the collective grief, anger and rage towards the demand of hanging of the accused!
In response to the shameless victim-blaming and efforts to cover up the brutal rape and murder, a powerful movement began to take shape. Women, trans, and queer people from all walks of life—across class, caste, sexuality, and religion—came together to Reclaim the Night on the eve of Independence Day. It is metaphorically significant that, two years ago on the same Independence Day, Bilkis Bano’s rapists were acquitted by Gujrat high court and welcomed with garlands by BJP workers, highlighting a crisis in the equality and autonomy of women and gender minorities. In stark contrast, two years later, the mass upsurge of women and gender minorities under the banner of Reclaim the Night powerfully reasserted the right to gender justice, freedom & safety raising slogans for uprooting the brahmanical patriarchal system. Lakhs of women, trans, and queer individuals along with healthcare workers, civil society members and students-youth organisations across West Bengal gathered in protest against sexual violence. The battle for justice soon spread over other cities of India including Mumbai, Patna and Delhi, to claim the night and ensure women’s freedom. It demonstrated how feminist movements are spaces for celebrating difference and diversity. For example, Mid-day meal workers organized a Reclaim the Night event in Howrah and North 24 Parganas, while trans and queer school students organized a similar event in Chakda, Nadia district. This movement sought to challenge brahmanical patriarchal norms that restrict women's freedom and safety in public spaces and their right to a dignified and democratic life. The call for justice was not just for the young doctor but for every individual who faces rape culture on an everyday basis.
As the movement gained momentum, on the same night of Reclaim the Night, RG Kar and NRS hospitals saw protesting students and doctors being met with vandalism and brutality by certain groups in an attempt to divert the public attention and weakness the movement for justice. The night also witnessed another horrific crime: an Adivasi woman was brutally murdered in Shaktigarh, Bardhaman. The violence did not stop there. On August 15th, several trans women were assaulted by the Railway Protection Force (RPF) at Rabindra Sadan, followed by the naked parade of a woman by BJP activists in Nandigram. Many women and gender minorities took to social media to share their traumatic experiences during the Reclaim the Night gatherings, where they were abused and heckled. This underscores that reclamation cannot remain a mere symbolic protest; the widely spread masses need sensitization, orientation and a feminist vision to culminate in a movement that can truly reshape public discourse, allowing women, trans, and queer communities to reclaim the world without fear of abuse and humiliation. Despite these setbacks, the determination of the movement has only grown stronger. On August 17th, a rally with over 3,000 participants was organized to march to RG Kar in solidarity with the protesting students and doctors. While the unprecedented uprising of the masses has struck fear in the hearts of the ruling TMC government, it has also drawn the attention of fascist forces like the RSS and BJP. These groups, which have historically enabled rape culture and suppressed voices demanding gender justice, are now attempting to co-opt dissenting voices for their own vested interests. It is crucial to remember that the brutal rape and murder of the medical student at RG Kar is not an isolated incident but a reflection of the patriarchal power structures perpetuated by those in power, regardless of the political regime.
It is important for us to look back at the Nirbhaya movement which had ignited nationwide protests in India’s socio-political landscape, profoundly impacting the discourse on women's safety and autonomy in workplaces particularly concerning prevention of sexual harassment at workplaces, both formal and informal sector. The movement's impact led to the establishment of Justice Verma Commission and the introduction of the Prevention of Sexual Harassment (POSH) Law. Women, students, citizen’s organisations including AIPWA and AISA were instrumental in catalyzing substantial changes in the legal and institutional framework governing women's safety and agency, particularly in the context of the workplace. The Prevention of Sexual Harassment at Workplace (POSH) Act, 2013, was enacted to create safer workplaces for women, recognizing sexual harassment as a direct violation of women’s fundamental rights to life and dignity. It acknowledges the inherent power imbalances in workplaces that often place women in subordinate positions. Covering both organized and unorganized sectors, the POSH Act mandates the formation of Internal Complaints Committees (ICCs) within organizations and Local Committees under district administrations to address complaints from women in the unorganized sector. The Justice Verma Commission's recommendations also emphasized the need for Gender Sensitization Committees Against Sexual Harassment (GSCASH) to oversee the effective implementation of the POSH Act in educational institutions and workplaces. A decade later, the incident at RG Kar Medical College highlights the urgent need to reassess the effectiveness of the POSH Act and the functionality of its mechanisms. The dysfunction of the Internal Complaints Committee (ICC) at RG Kar is particularly concerning, especially since Mr. Sandip Ghosh, the accused principal in the cover-up, was a member of the ICC. The issue stems from the ICC being chosen rather than elected, contrary to what the Justice Verma Commission advised. This situation highlights that without regular monitoring by stakeholders from legal, feminist, and citizen spaces, addressing the power imbalances in workplaces remains unattainable.
In this context, the West Bengal government's 17-point circular, feels like a rushed attempt to silence the ongoing efforts rather than genuinely address the issues that the Reclaim the Night movement has raised. The proposed measures, such as reducing night duties for women, are a step backward, directly contradicting to the demands of ensuring structural measures for autonomy of women as championed by the movement. Steps such as deploying police security, surveillance at workplaces promotes control over women and marginalized communities, rather than addressing the root causes of gender based violence. For example, the space where the RG Kar incident took place was covered by CCTV yet the crime couldn’t be stopped, which raised question that what does safe spaces mean for women and gender minorities. The lack of practical implementation plans, such as the vague suggestions for restroom construction, only further highlights the disconnect between the state’s proposals and the demands raised by the movement. In response to the state’s efforts to surveil and limit women’s autonomy, a call was made on August 19th under the slogan 'Solidarity, Not Surveillance; Liberation, Not Protection.' This call was celebrated at 30 locations across the state of West Bengal, where women, trans, and queer individuals organized human chains to spread the message.
Along with demanding a fast and transparent CBI investigation into the brutal murder and rape of the PTG doctor at RG Kar and thorough investigation and punishment for all those responsible for the vandalism and targeted attack at RG Kar on the night of August 14th, including the administrative and police officers on duty that night; it is high time that we leverage on the mass outrage to strengthen the demands for structural changes to ensure rights of women and gender minorities to reclaim our space as equal citizens of the state which have been far too neglected by governments, judiciary and people in power. We need to raise voice for systemic changes like reconstitution of ICCs and LCCs with elected representatives, construction of public toilets at every 1 km distance, 24-hour public transport, creches for working women, and hostels for those working late hours. The services must be available at free or subsidized rate. Enacting these measures will ensure that women and gender minorities can truly access the public space and practice autonomy. Most importantly, there must be a comprehensive review of the enactment of POSH act, and the status of ICCs and LCCs across India, by establishing a special commission.
The Reclaim the Night movement is a powerful reminder that the fight against patriarchal violence is far from over. It is a call to action for all those who believe in justice, equality, and the right to live without fear. We must remember that the fight is not just against the individuals who commit these crimes but against the entire system that allows such atrocities to happen. We must be determined to continue this struggle until justice is secured for all women, trans, and queer people, and until we create a society where everyone can live and work in safety and dignity.
Sunday, September 08, 2024
PATRIARCHY IS MISOGYNY & FEMICIDE
How I escaped ‘trad wife’ hell: Abuse survivor hopes other victims find her book and run
Sheila Flynn Sun 8 September 2024
THE INDEPENDENT UK Tia Levings spent nearly 15 years in a marriage with an abusive Christian fundamentalist spouse before escaping with her children at the age of 33
(Tia Levings / Hannah Joy Photography)
There was something frighteningly different about the violent energy that night – the way her husband abruptly left the house, the forces she felt telling her to run – that made Tia Levings finally bundle her four kids into the car and flee a man who hid abuse under the cloak of strict religion.
It was only as she passed her husband’s vehicle, his headlights pointing in the opposite direction – back towards the family home they’d just fled – that she realized he’d left to get the gun stored in his office.
“I was still driving; it was the middle of the night,” Tia tells The Independent, recalling with knife-edge clarity “the adrenaline of knowing that we just narrowly escaped the murder-suicide that I’d always feared.”
It was 2007, and Tia had lived for nearly 15 years in an increasingly fundamental Christian marriage. By the time she worked up the courage to escape, they were living in an unheated, isolated urban homestead in Tennessee – and her controlling spouse was forcing her to obey orders while calling him “my lord.”
Fast-forward a little more than a decade and a half, and Tia, now 50, is telling her story in a bone-chilling book – while simultaneously watching, with great concern, the continued glorification of the “trad-wife” lifestyle on social media and in pop culture.
Tia Levings, 50, spent from ages 19 to 33 in a fundamental Christian marriage, eventually escaping with her four surviving children (Hannah Joy Photography)
She knows firsthand that the back-to-basics idyll being sold far too often hides a dark and dangerous reality. And she hopes her book, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy – which began as a journal to help Tia process her trauma – is getting into the hands of those women still trapped in the same types of life-threatening, open-air prisons.
“I [wrote] it for the woman in her kitchen who is washing dishes endlessly and doesn’t get to go to a bookstore and needs a book like mine, but she’s going to have to throw it in her cart at Target,” she says. “So I knew I needed a certain publishing path in order to reach her. I knew I needed a big publisher.”
She says readers are also helping. “They’re putting my book without its jacket in the little libraries that are around, and they are donating it, and they are sharing it reader-to-reader,” Tia says. “The story is getting out; it is spreading. And I think that there is so much power in that – you never know where it’s going to land.”
The story began far more benignly, with Tia and her parents joining a megachurch in Florida when she was an adolescent. There she was introduced to families following the Gothard movement, a fundamentalist ideology and way of living that was the brainchild of American minister Bill Gothard. The increasing number of Gothard families within her First Baptist congregation promoted homeschooling and could be spotted because the “women dressed like prairie wives, always pregnant and holding a baby,” she writes in her book.
Tia attended church six times a week and, after high school, was told the congregation only helped males advance to further education. So she instead prayed desperately for a husband and, when she met a sailor with a skull tattoo whom she calls Allan in the book, married him a year later – ignoring abusive and controlling red flags and even the advice of a church counselor who warned the couple of their total incompatibility.
Tia and her husband, who is called “Allan” in the book, welcomed five children, though they tragically lost a daughter born with a heart defect shortly after birth (Courtesy of Tia Levings)
Tia gave birth to five children – including baby Clara, who was born with a heart defect and survived just weeks – as Allan moved the family to more and more conservative congregations. Many fellow congregants were adherents of the quiverfull theology, which encourages large families and forbids any type of birth control or family planning.
On the outside, Tia attempted to project a happy family life, even running a successful website in the heyday of the mommy blog – discovering in herself a knack for writing and online content creation. Behind closed doors, Allan was threatening to kill her, leering that he’d take the kids “forever,” calling her a Jezebel and terrorizing Tia physically, mentally and emotionally.
It got worse as she began earning money and accolades for her blog work; Allan began drinking and doubling down on the abusive, patriarchal behavior. Tia tried to shield her children, but his insidious influence crept in as they aged; he traumatized their oldest by making him kill animals, and the same son struck Tia in a scuffle just hours before the then-33-year-old determined to leave – for her kids’ sake and her own.
She sought the help of a new, more progressive church – an Eastern Orthodox congregation they’d recently joined – and even went into hiding with her children until it was established that Allan was no longer a threat to them.
Her parents were also supportive; she’d hid from them for years how bad things were at home. Tia knows just how deceiving outward appearances can be, particularly when it comes to families projecting pious, traditional households – like those flooding social media as “trad wife” influencers.
“I see the trap,” she tells The Independent. “I see the lifestyle that is so all-encompassing that you can’t get out of it. I see the systematized denial of agency and options so that you might wake up one day and want to be out of it, but you’ve closed door after door after door so that there’s no one there to help you. There’s not a bank account to turn to. There’s no agency to just start asking questions or to change your life, if you decide you want something different.
“And that really underscores why this is not just an alternative lifestyle choice,” she says. “It is part of a movement.”
The family were living in a home they called the Blue House in rural Tennessee in 2007 when Tia finally worked up the courage to bundle her four kids into the car and flee the dangerous situation after years of ‘church-sanctioned’ abuse (Courtesy of Tia Levings)
It’s a movement that’s deliberate and strategic, dating back decades and beyond, and she says it’s chilling to hear echoes of proclamations made from pulpits during her childhood in the words of influential politicians today – “especially when JD Vance opens his mouth,” she says.
“He floats the ideas of women not voting; he floats the ideas of no-fault divorce … even though we know that having access to divorce has reduced suicides and domestic violence deaths,” she says. “He floats all of those agendas that are part of Project 2025, which is not anything new.”
The talking points are all there, Tia says. “They are often divorced from the theology that fed them, and I think that’s for a mass audience – but that’s also a good opportunity for someone who comes from that background to say, I know why they are teaching that, and I know what they intend to accomplish with it.”
She’s been hearing it since childhood, when ministers preached regularly against Democratic leaders like Bill Clinton and Al Gore.
“They were pretty open about this when I was growing up – preached it every Sunday,” she says. “We sat in sermons and they said, ‘This election might not go our way … but we have a strategy in place to take over the Supreme Court, and we’re going to get the justices in place, and we’re going to pick God’s man.”
She points to the many US lawmakers and politicians raised “in that viewpoint: That America is a Christian nation, and that we are supposed to have Christianity as a dominant faith and a dominant religion across the globe, and the leadership looks like a patriarchal white male – and women stay at home and raise children and they don’t have access to health care or contraception or equality or employment.”
Tia sees the appeal of the lifestyle on paper, however, as Americans, and particularly mothers, grapple with the multifaceted demands of daily life.
“When we’re exhausted, we turn to very simplified solutions, where fundamentalism can step in and say, Oh, are you tired? It’s because you’re working too hard. And the two-income family really doesn’t work, and women need to stay home,” she says.
Following her high school graduation, Tia inquired about getting financial help to attend a religious college but was told by a church leader: ‘We don’t spare that money for girls' (Courtesy of Tia Levings)
“And at the same time, that system is not advertising the outcome. They shut down the evidence, the testimonies, the science, everything that would say, This isn’t actually a good way to live. We’ve actually lived this way before.”
“That’s where a survivor can come in,” she says.
While she watched the mass popularity grow of reality shows featuring families like the Duggars, where she recognized tell-tale Gothard fingerprints, Tia was caught off-guard by the latest pop culture fad across TikTok and Instagram.
“I really did not see the trad wife social media movement happening, because there have been so many advances for women’s liberation,” she says. “The closest thing [that came] before was the mommy bloggers movement, which I was part of – so I thought we had kind of evolved past it. I was very surprised.”
The glossy content plugs into “this idea that there’s something better out there; life is hard,” Tia says.
“Maybe it speaks to … the very clear binaries of the gender roles, easy answers, the simple formulas,” she tells The Independent. “Sometimes it can just be comforting to watch, because we like process videos and we like pretty aesthetics, and we can tend to think it’s benign and that it’s not part of something greater.
“And some creators are not very plugged into the wider movement. They don’t understand how their work is contributing to this conversation … It’s easier to hold your phone and watch somebody make gentle cheese crackers with a smile on their face and unplug from society a little bit and hearken to what we think is a simpler time.
“They’re not representing the complexity of that age, either,” she says. “They’re showing one dimension of it.”
The current cascade of content can not only be personally triggering for Tia – though she consumes and deconstructs it for her work, writing and speaking about the ills of fundamentalism – but also sparks a range of other emotions.
“I do get angry when I see it celebrated, because it’s glorified abuse – and that’s angering, because there’s victims involved, and they’re usually voiceless victims, like children,” she says.
Tia says she’s written her book not only to tell her story but to encourage others to leave the situation -- as she speaks about and fights for equal rights (Courtesy of Tia Levings)
She’s well aware that, had technology evolved earlier, she could have been one of the aforementioned influencers herself.
“If I’d had social media, I would have been a trad wife social creator,” Tia admits. “I was good at blogging, and I was there when the movement was new. And complicity is something that everyone in recovery has to look at.
“Patriarchy needs women to perpetuate it, so it grooms our participation, and then it holds us there with the guilt of our complicity, and then we become perpetrators. So it’s like the cycle that just keeps going.
“And I had to definitely sit with the complicity of my mask, because I wasn’t presenting the truth of the situation either, not even to myself.”
Now, instead, she’s sharing her story with searing honesty – not just for the woman it might save at Target but for wider members of the community.
“I always call this the cult without walls, and the members are really used to being isolated in plain sight – so they will be your neighbors or someone you see at the grocery store or the park, and they feel alone and separate,” she says, “Try to connect, try to engage in conversation … because if they can trust you, you might be the one they ask for help when it’s time to get out.”
Saturday, September 07, 2024
PATRIARCHY IS MISOGYNY & FEMICIDE
Rebecca Cheptegei: Uganda athlete dies, days after boyfriend set her on fire
Athletics - World Athletics Championship - Women's Marathon - National Athletics Centre, Budapest, Hungary - Aug 26, 2023 Uganda's Rebecca Cheptegei in action during the women's marathon final.
September 05, 2024
NAIROBI — Ugandan Olympic marathon runner Rebecca Cheptegei died on Thursday (Sept 5), four days after she was doused in petrol and set on fire by her boyfriend in Kenya, in the latest attack on a female athlete in the country.
Cheptegei, 33, who competed in the Paris Olympics, suffered burns to more than 75 per cent of her body in Sunday's attack, Kenyan and Ugandan media reported.
She is the third prominent sportswoman to be killed in Kenya since October 2021.
"We have learnt of the sad passing on of our Olympic athlete Rebecca Cheptegei... following a vicious attack by her boyfriend," Donald Rukare, president of Uganda Olympics Committee, said in a post on X.
"May her gentle soul rest in peace and we strongly condemn violence against women," he said.
The runner, who finished 44th in Paris, was admitted to a hospital in the Kenyan Rift Valley city of Eldoret after the attack.
Cheptegei "passed today morning at 5.30 am after her organs failed," Owen Menach, senior director of clinical services at Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital, told Reuters, adding that a full report regarding the circumstances of her death would be released on Thursday afternoon.
Kenyan newspaper The Standard said her attacker also sustained injuries in the incident and was admitted to the intensive care unit with 30 per cent burns, citing doctors at the same hospital.
Kenyan Sports Minister Kipchumba Murkomen described Cheptegei's death as a loss "to the entire region".
"This tragedy is a stark reminder that we must do more to combat gender-based violence in our society, which in recent years has reared its ugly head in elite sporting circles," he said in a statement.
Uganda's athletics federation called for justice for Cheptegei.
The athlete's father, Joseph Cheptegei, told reporters in Eldoret that he was asking the government to protect her children and properties "so that no one will get into her home and take anything."
"The land... has brought problems," he said, following local media reports that the mother of two and her boyfriend had been fighting over property in the days leading up to the attack.
Peter Ogwang, Uganda's minister of state for sports, said Kenyan authorities were investigating the killing, which has shone a spotlight on violence experienced by women in the East African nation.
Nearly 34 per cent of Kenyan girls and women aged 15-49 years have suffered physical violence, according to government data from 2022, with married women at particular risk.
The 2022 survey found that 41 per cent of married women had faced violence.
A report by UN Women and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime said that in 2022, African countries collectively recorded the largest number of killings of women, both in absolute terms and relative to the size of the continent's female population.
In October 2021, Olympian runner Agnes Tirop, a rising star in Kenya's highly competitive athletics scene, was found dead in her home in the town of Iten, with multiple stab wounds to the neck.
Ibrahim Rotich, her husband, was charged with her murder and has pleaded not guilty. The case is ongoing.
The 25-year-old's killing shocked Kenya, with current and former athletes setting up 'Tirop's Angels' in 2022 to combat domestic violence.
Joan Chelimo, one of the founders of the non-profit, told Reuters that female athletes were at high risk of exploitation and violence at the hands of men drawn to their money.
"They get into these traps of predators who pose in their lives as lovers," she said.
Man Charged With Homicide in Killing of Gymnastics Champion Kara Welsh By The Associated Press September 7, 2024 University of Wisconsin-Whitewater student Kara Welsh. (University of Wisconsin-Whitewater via AP)
WHITEWATER, Wis.—A 23-year-old man has been charged with first-degree intentional homicide in the fatal shooting of a national gymnastics champion in his apartment near the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater campus.
Chad Richards made an initial appearance Friday via video in Walworth County Court.
Kara Welsh, 21, suffered multiple gunshot wounds following an altercation Aug. 30, according to a criminal complaint.
She was found in a pool of blood after Richards called 911. He told investigators that the two were arguing when he said Welsh grabbed his gun from a nightstand. Richards said he wrestled the gun away and shot Welsh because he “feared for his life,” the complaint continued.
Police found a handgun and shell casings on the apartment floor. Richards later was arrested. He told investigators that Welsh was his girlfriend.
The Associated Press left a message Friday afternoon seeking comment from Richards’s attorney, Gibson Hatch.
Richards was being held on a $1 million bond. His preliminary hearing is scheduled for Oct. 28.
Richards, of Loves Park, Illinois, was listed on the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater 2021–22 wrestling team roster.
Welsh, who was from Plainfield, Illinois, was majoring in management in the school’s College of Business and Economics. She was a member of the Warhawk gymnastics team and last year took the individual national title on vault at the NCAA Division III championships.
The University of Wisconsin-Whitewater campus is about 50 miles west of Milwaukee.
Thursday, September 05, 2024
PATRIARCHY IS FEMICIDE
Horrific death of Uganda Olympic runner’s is the latest in violence against Kenya female athletes
Hellen Obiri, Rosemary Monica Wanjiru and Agnes Jebet Tirop, from left to right, all of Kenya, compete in the women’s 10,000 meter race during the World Athletics Championships in Doha, Qatar, Saturday, Sept. 28, 2019.
(AP Photo/Martin Meissner, File)
By Gerald Imray - Associated Press - Thursday, September 5, 2024
Olympic runner Rebecca Cheptegei’s horrific death after being doused with petrol and set on fire by her boyfriend has again brought to the fore Kenya’s harrowing history of domestic violence against female athletes.
Her killing follows the deaths of at least two other high-profile female runners in cases of domestic violence in the last three years in a region that has produced dozens of Olympic and world champions.
Cheptegei, who was from Uganda, died on Thursday at age 33. Police say Cheptegei’s boyfriend poured a can of petrol over her and set her on fire during a dispute on Sunday. She suffered 80% burns on her body and died in a hospital in the town of Eldoret four days later.
The boyfriend was also burned in the attack and is being treated at the same hospital. No criminal charges have yet been announced against him.
Cheptegei competed in the women’s marathon at the Paris Olympics less than a month ago, finishing in 44th place. She lived in western Kenya’s famous high-altitude training region that draws the best distance runners from across the world and had recently built a house there to be close to the training centers.
The brutal slaying of Kenyan star runner Tirop in the same region in 2021 led to an outpouring of anger from fellow athletes and prompted the East African country’s athletics authorities to acknowledge the scourge of domestic abuse as a major problem.
Tirop was one of Kenya’s brightest talents when she was stabbed to death at her home in Iten, the other world-renowned distance-running training town in Kenya, alongside Eldoret. Her husband, who was on the run, was arrested days after the killing and has been charged with murder. His court case is still underway.
Like Cheptegei, the 25-year-old Tirop had just competed at an Olympics - the 2021 Tokyo Games - and had set a new world record in the 10-kilometer road race in another competition a month before she was killed. Her body was found with stab wounds to the stomach and neck, as well as blunt trauma injury to her head.
In the weeks after Tirop’s death, current and former male and female athletes, spoke out over what they said was a long-running problem of domestic abuse against female athletes in the region. Some marched through the streets of Iten to demand better protection for female athletes and stricter laws against abusers.
Other Kenyan athletes like Ruth Bosibori, a former African champion in the steeplechase, and Joan Chelimo, a marathon runner, said Tirop’s killing had emboldened them to talk about their own abusive relationships.
Both said they had escaped violent partners that made them fear for their lives.
Just six months after Tirop, another runner was killed. Kenyan-born Muthee, who competed for Bahrain, was found dead in a house in Iten after being strangled. Her decomposing body had been there for days before it was found, authorities said at the time.
A male Ethiopian runner with whom she was in a relationship was charged with murder. Muthee, who was 28, had a young child from another relationship.
The cases of domestic abuse in Kenya’s running community are set against the country’s overriding high rates of violence against women, which has prompted marches by ordinary citizens in towns and cities this year.
Tuesday, September 03, 2024
“Intellectual Hick”: Sorting Out Our Complex Identities
by Robert Jensen / September 3rd, 2024
I am from rural America, sort of. I’m an intellectual, sort of. I’m certainly on the political left, but some comrades believe I’ve turned conservative.
Like many people, I don’t fit easily into conventional labels used in today’s polarized political debates. To understand me—and anyone else—takes some sorting out. Here’s how I sort myself out.
I was born in North Dakota and grew up mostly in the big city of Fargo (well, it’s the largest city in the state). I never lived in a rural area, but I was a part of a larger rural culture, in which most everyone had some connection to the countryside through family, friends, or business. After living in several big cities during my professional life, I now live in northern New Mexico outside the small town of Taos, in a county with a smaller population than the university where I used to teach. Recent imports like me live alongside farmers and ranchers, interacting regularly through the acequia irrigation system.
I’m not rural, but I like to think I understand rural.
I started my professional life as a newspaper journalist before earning a PhD and becoming a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. But once I secured the guaranteed employment that comes with tenure, I walked away from the scholarly world of academic journals and conferences. I continued to teach but wrote for a general audience, immersing myself in a variety of community organizing projects.
I was an intellectual by profession, but I never really wanted to be part of formal intellectual life.
I’ve met intellectuals who assume rural life is bereft of intellectual activity. And I’ve met rural people who assume that intellectuals are condescending and annoying. There’s a kernel of truth in both assumptions. Since moving to a rural area, I have fewer opportunities for certain kinds of intellectual engagement; I don’t go to as many scholarly lectures as I did in Austin. At the same time, I don’t find myself wishing I was back in a faculty meeting and dealing with academic status-seeking. But I’ve met too many smart rural people and too many wonderful professors to fall back on stereotypes.
As I explain in It’s Debatable: Talking Authentically about Tricky Topics, perhaps most important to my identity is that I’m a radical. My politics are based on a critique of systems and structures of power that create impediments to meaningful social justice and real ecological sustainability: patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, First-World domination, and the worship of high-energy/high-technology gadgets in an industrial worldview. But how I apply these analyses make me both a part of the left and alienated from the left.
Let’s start with patriarchy. I was first politicized by the radical feminist movement to challenge the sexual-exploitation industries (pornography, prostitution, stripping—the ways men buy and sell objectified female bodies for sexual pleasure). That form of radical politics goes to the heart of systems and structures of male power. I also embraced what is typically called a radical analysis of racism, economic inequality, and imperialism. I thought that this kind of consistent critique—going to the root of problems by focusing on systems of power—was what it meant to be on the left, but over time I realized that most of my left comrades didn’t much care for radical feminism. Over time, more and more leftists not only rejected the critique of the sexual-exploitation industries but celebrated “sex work,” sometimes even portraying it as liberating.
When I started offering a critique of the ideology of the transgender movement, an analysis rooted in that radical feminism, I found myself not only disagreeing with left comrades but effectively being banished from left organizing groups. I learned quickly, starting in 2014, that a radical feminist critique of trans politics was unacceptable, even seen as a sign of closet conservativism.
But that shunning didn’t mean I wanted to find a home on the right. Conservatives weren’t much interested in a feminist critique of male domination—many on the right see patriarchy as the “natural” state of human societies. Conservatives might share a concern about the sexual-exploitation industries and transgender ideology, but for very different reasons than feminists.
Meanwhile, my focus on ecology and a deepening critique of technological fundamentalism—the belief that more technology can solve all ecological problems, including those created by previous technologies—has put me at odds with both right and left. Those who believe in the miracle of the market usually dismiss any talk of ecological collapse because free enterprise will save us. My left friends take environmental degradation and climate change more seriously but routinely argue that a more participatory democracy in a more socialist economy will save us.
Across the political spectrum, it’s hard to find anyone who agrees that a sustainable human future requires us to put dramatic limits on our consumption of energy and material resources, while we also dramatically reduce the human population. Conservatives often believe that is what leftists are secretly planning for, but I meet very few leftists who advocate those goals. The majority of left environmentalists I meet believe that renewable energy, combined with amazing yet-to-be-invented inventions, will allow us to dodge collapse.
I think I am making consistent and coherent arguments. But many of my left friends think I have abandoned left politics, even though we still agree on many issues. Conservatives will accept my political positions that seem in line with their own, though typically they aren’t interested in the radical analysis behind those positions.
I have changed my mind about specific policy proposals over the past four decades—as new information and insights emerge, reasonable people should adapt. But my analytical framework remains unchanged. I focus not merely on individual choices but on how systems work, and I don’t ignore the data that suggests collapse is all but inevitable on our current trajectory.
This leaves me largely in agreement with left comrades, but dealing with uncomfortable tensions when we disagree. Meanwhile, I’m at odds with right opponents most of the time, and when there is apparent agreement on policy there is an uncomfortable tension underneath.
How do I sort out all these political tensions, and sort out myself? To friends, I have started describing myself as an “intellectual hick.” I have no problem defending my intellectual contributions but also am happy to be living at a healthy distance from official intellectual spaces. Even with neighbors who don’t agree with my politics, our shared interest in caring for the land and water creates deep bonds.
How I label myself is less important than realizing that we all would benefit from sorting out ourselves. Once we critically self-reflect about our identities and ideas, it’s a lot easier talking with others about how they have sorted themselves out.
In a purposefully detailed judgment on the grant of bail to a citizen accused under the draconian Prevention of Money Laundering Act, the Supreme Court last week placed the issue in a context fundamental to any evaluation of what defines constitutional democracy.
In upholding the doctrine that bail is the norm and jail the exception even under special laws like PMLA, the court for the first time made an elaboration that goes to the heart of the principle of fundamental rights.
Cutting through the detail, the court underlined that Article 21 of the Constitution which lays down that ‘no citizen shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty” except on the basis of procedures laid down in the law, is the “higher right” and as a constitutional provision supersedes any statutory laws that make the grant of bail difficult to well-nigh impossible.
The judgment explicates the constitutional conditions that must be satisfied before authorities make any claim that section 45 of the PMLA is allegedly open and shut about denying bail to the accused unless they can show that they are innocent.
In characterising “personal liberty” as indispensable to any understanding of democracy, the Supreme Court has elevated the principle of “liberty” to the theoretical pedestal that was first envisaged by John Stuart Mill in his watershed essay of 1859, titled ‘On Liberty.’
The judgement thus recalls the historical fact that “liberty” was the sacrosanct principle in people’s struggles against tyrannical forms of government that seek to subjugate the citizen to autocracy even when such an autocracy be an elected one.
This surely provides an occasion for thinking people to once again visit histories left behind in Europe and elsewhere, even as those histories are sought to be revived by ambitious autocrats under the garb of democracy.
I have often been asked as to what it is that makes the United States of America a democracy, given that great residues of racism and patriarchy mar its social life, and unconscionably predatory inequalities of wealth define its economic life, with political power concentrated in just one man essentially, namely the President.
My answer to that is the absolute right that American citizens have to free expression, unfettered by hurt sentiments, just so long as such free expression is not accompanied by violence or is not instigative of violence.
The prowess of American state institutions to hold state authorities to account with the sort of independence and grit we saw during Trump’s tantrums about the election results of 2020 remains contingent on the reciprocal freedom of citizens to voice views, articulate grievances, challenge iniquities, verbally or in any form of writing, without fear of being punished for free articulation, however inimical to powers-that-be.
Even as Indian citizens and civil society organisation that work to uphold liberty take heart from the Supreme Court’s pronouncement on the PMLA case cited above, it is to be hoped that a day will come when the restrictive stipulations of Article 19(2) on the right to free speech not tainted by violence will likewise come in for a watershed rethink by the top court.
Nothing would help both restore and put on a lasting basis the substance and credibility of Indian democracy as that.
If it is agreed that a citizen unshackled of an undue fear of arbitrary authority and of crony institutional practices alone is the first bedrock of the promise of democracy, then the reform sought here to Article 19(2) may not seem so anti-national.
Badri Raina Badri Raina is a well-known commentator on politics, culture and society. His columns on the Znet have a global following. Raina taught English literature at the University of Delhi for over four decades and is the author of the much acclaimed Dickens and the Dialectic of Growth. He has several collections of poems and translations. His writings have appeared in nearly all major English dailies and journals in India.
I was at university when I first heard the Doors. It was springtime, coming on summer. I was living on campus, my first year, and I was eighteen. I was in a housemate’s room, waiting for him to get back for some reason I don’t recall now. The building we lived in was a little run down, the rooms were shabby, but I remember that day – the sunshine streaming through the windows, the dust embers in the air glinting and dancing. Our campus was situated in the lap of a large valley, and in the distance, I could see the green of the hills. Maybe it was late morning or early afternoon; knowing my habits at that point in my life, I probably hadn’t been up all that long. I was sleepy and a little bored so I began to thumb through my housemate’s CD collection.
I took out a CD, ‘The Best of the Doors’. It’s the one with a black and white cover, the lead singer Jim Morrison, his arms extended sideways like some sort of rock and roll Jesus, the shaggy mane tumbling down from the sides to frame a face which is statuesque and perfect, eyes vacant and yet melancholy somehow too. But I only glanced at the cover, dismissing it. I pretty much figured it was music from the 60s. I knew music from the 60s; growing up my father had record and CD collections spread around the house, and when he’d get drunk he’d pelt them full blast keeping everyone awake.
I liked some of that stuff though. I liked the cheeriness of rock and roll rhythms and the sentimentality of some of those old crooning love songs. They seemed of another time. A self-contained world that had none of the sophistication or irony of modern music, music which tended to reflect darker and more fitful realities. These were the vague prejudices I felt, rather than thought upon.
But for some reason – perhaps it was that boredom again – I ended up putting on that first Doors CD. I went to a random song and pressed play. And listened while the sunlight streamed in and I could hear the vague chatter from people passing outside. And then it just … melted away. There are certain times in one’s life when you have an existential aesthetic experience, something which feels almost life-changing, and yet it is wholly accidental. Flicking TV channels late at night, coming to rest sleepily on a film, and eventually finding yourself drawn in, gripped and awakened, only to remember that film for the rest of your days. This was a little like that.
The song was ‘The Crystal Ship’. Whatever I had been expecting it wasn’t anything like what I heard. I had thought of 60s music as being old-fashioned, but this seemed much more modern. Only modern is not the right word. Timeless. The first few words of the song are acapella, this voice intoning in the dark – ‘Before … you … slip …’ and then it is joined by what I can only describe as fairground music. A faint shimmering symbol, a fluttering rhythm which gives way before the gentle but steady piping of a distant organ, and that voice continues, diaphanous and hypnotic – ‘Before you slip …. into unconsciousness … I would like another kiss, another flashing chance at bliss … another kiss’
As that carousel music flows onward in the background, that voice continues to intone. That voice. I’d never heard anything like it. It was so perfect as to be almost hollow, so fine as to be almost toneless. There was something inhuman about it, ethereal; more like a Platonic Form – a shimmering transcendental archetype – than something living and breathing; and yet, in the same moment, it carried such human loneliness, such longing – ‘the days are bright and filled with pain … enclose me in your gentle rain.’ It was haunting. It was hurting. I imagine that if a ghost had a voice – a spirit imbued with all the regrets of a life now gone – it might sound something like that. It might sound the way Jim Morrison sounded to me that day, in that room, all those years ago.
And perhaps that is the fundamental miracle of music. It is, more than anything, an activity of ghosts. Someone has lived a life, and at some point along the line, they poured that life into words and music. Eventually, that life must be lost to time. And yet, the medium preserves the sound – the record, the cassette, the CD, the MP3 – it allows what once was to play out again, to call out across time – as a plea, a lament – bridging one existence with another, the past with the future, the living with the dead.
I have never experienced that aspect of music – the sense of its ghostly eternity – with the intensity and power with which his voice stole over me that early afternoon. Neither before nor since. I replayed the ‘The Crystal Ship’ over and again, marveling at its ephemeral beauty, feeling a physical sense of loss when that voice died out. When my friend returned, I asked him if I could borrow the CD (we were not particularly close) and I recall the anxiety that shot through me at the thought of being parted from the sound if only for a few hours. He was, however, kind enough to lend me the collection, and later that evening I smuggled it into my room like contraband, like something otherworldly, something precious.
The late comic and rather wonderful human being Robin Williams once said ‘I used to think that the worst thing in life was to end up alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone.’ I like this quote because it hits on something deeper, something that is a fundamental part of modern existence. The sense that loneliness isn’t simply about separation but also about togetherness.
Many of us live in cities populated by millions, some of us live in tenement blocks or towers, hundreds of people are packed together in these great concrete fortifications, and yet we rarely ever speak to, or even know the names of, our closest neighbors. In modern life, the individual existence unfurls in the midst of the crowd and yet this sometimes serves to emphasize the crystalline quality of loneliness all the more sharply.
At university, I felt like that. My evenings were often busy and filled with people – having done various awful part-time jobs to pay the bills, I eventually resorted to selling weed, which was more fun, despite the nocturnal hours. But I felt a distance from the people around me.
The students I knew on campus were often public school boys or international students. The public-school boys fascinated me, they had an affected drollness, they would all address one another by their second names, as if they were practiced professionals conducting business scenarios in a board meeting or gentleman’s club – the ridiculousness of their affectations betrayed only by a twinkling, knowing smile.
They would banter ostentatiously, with wry grins, and their humor was droll in a wink-wink, nod-nod type of way. And they would drink like medieval aristocrats – and though their politics were as awful as you might expect – they could be very funny, taking each other down ruthlessly, and yet with the underlying affection that comes from the recognition of another member of your same tribe. What I remember most was how at home they were in the world, how comfortable they seemed in their own skins.
The international students were different again; beautiful boys and girls with olive skins and honeyed eyes, young men and women from Greece, Spain, Italy and France whose rooms smelt faintly of incense and coffee, of olive oil and pot, and who would spend nights under a candle-lit glow holding forth on politics and philosophy, passionate and amused. Even their conversation was impossibly continental and exotic; magical names floated across the air like incantations, names I had never heard before – ‘Foucault’, ‘Derrida’, ‘Deleuze’ ‘Levinas’ – mysterious and enigmatic figures whose esoteric thoughts and theories it seemed to me these students had at their fingertips.
They seemed so knowledgeable and in the ease with which they moved through life, so casually sophisticated and supremely adult. And this they shared with their public-school brethren – a sense of being entirely at home in the world.
I did not feel at home in the world. I don’t think I ever have. And in the summers, the public-school boys would take to the snowcapped mountains of Switzerland and France for skiing holidays and the international students would decamp for a summer spent island hopping around the Mediterranean, and I would return home to do factory work or spend the summer pushing trolleys in Tesco feeling vaguely that life was leaving me behind.
And in the nights, I’d drink whiskey and smoke and listen to the Doors. Their music seemed to speak to me of loneliness in that hauntingly modern way. When one listens to a song like ‘People Are Strange’ it is paradoxical. On the one hand, it has that carnivalesque sound; when the song reaches its chorus, the music is jaunty almost cheerful – ‘When you’re strange … faces come out of the rain’. It has the rhythmic tempo of a New Orleans marching band, it is rousing, upbeat, and you want to clap along with it. But this is offset by the otherworldliness of that distant voice and the lyrics themselves which provide a masterclass in the poetry of alienation: ‘When you’re strange, faces come out of the rain … When you’re strange, no one remembers your name …. When you’re strange, when you’re strange …’
This is the loneliness of modernity; a loneliness which is filtered through other people, only they are not other people at all, but apparitions – those ‘faces’ which ‘come out of the rain’ are as specters materializing from the nighttime mist. It is the loneliness of the streets where there is an insuperable divide between one’s inner life and thoughts, and the people you encounter in the darkness. ‘People Are Strange’ provides a ribald, Gothic-esque carnival, blending the excitement of the city at night and all those unimagined lives with the infinite distance that opens up between each and every one.
Such music – encompassing both the stark alienation of urban realities along with the gothic sound of an eerie and ghostly carnival – offers a tissue of contradictions; the upbeat works in tandem as a musical refrain with an underlying pulse of despair, the baroque plays out alongside the contemporary, isolation and anomie is refined in and through the noise of the crowd. As the author Melissa Ursula Dawn Goldsmith comments on ‘People Are Strange’, the song employs an ‘expressionist’ sense of ‘alienation and distanciation’ in order to express the positive aspect of social life as something ‘strange’.[1]
‘Alabama Song’ – perhaps one of the best peons to getting drunk ever penned – operates in a similar fashion; that ‘Show me the way to the next whiskey bar … Oh show me the way to the next whiskey bar!’ again works in terms of a marching rhythm, a call to action, the need to seek out Dionysian excess, to drive the pleasure principle to its apex but of course such ‘positivity’ eventually yields a chaos and a senselessness and a lack of meaning – ‘oh don’t ask why’. The antinomies of pleasure and pain, of joy and hopelessness that are the syncopated rhythms driving the soundtrack to the existence of every alcoholic, every drug abuser, are – in Morrisons’s hands – rendered as vivid and raw as the train tracks that streak down a heroine addict’s arm.
As is well documented, Jim Morrison was both an alcoholic and a drug addict, though toward the end of his brief existence, the former mostly outweighed the latter. That Jim Morrison should have indulged in booze and drugs is hardly surprising; indeed it would have been more shocking had a young man of his age and time been a teetotaller, especially given the relationship drugs and drink played in the context of a social rebellion that saw conservative mores challenged not simply by direct action and political protest but also by a cultural revolution.
In their comprehensive, insightful and well-written biography of Jim Morrison, authors Jeffery Hopkins and Danny Sugerman describe how the teenage Morrison was drawn into the burgeoning counterculture of the 1950s, how he was able to escape the stifling small-town conservatism of Alameda – where the family was based – by hopping on a bus and making for North Beach. North Beach was a neighborhood in San Francisco that had become a beacon for counterculture through the new breed of literature and records which were beginning to describe the adolescent experience as it tore itself away from the expectations of the ‘greatest generation’. Expectations which had been marked by a certain unremarked stoicism, a silent duty to the family and the state and perhaps also a quiet desperation; all aspects of a way of life whose insularity and conservatism had grown out of the trauma of war and the memory of economic depression.
But if that generation had played out the events of its life in a monochrome black and white, then the generation of the 1950s was the first to explode into technicolor. As the teenage Morrison strolled down North Beach Broadway, he’d encounter a hectic clutter of bright, neon-lit shops whose contents gave voice to the new spirit of youth and self-expression starting to emerge from the grey fug of small-town suburbia, for here, among other things, was the ‘world headquarters for the beatniks’.[2] Morrison would frequent the ‘City Lights Book Store’ with its alluring promise of ‘Banned Books’, and he would pore over the work of the beatnik poets – ‘Ferlinghetti was one of Jim’s favorites, along with Kenneth Rexroth and Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg made the greatest impact’.[3]
But the most potent influence on the teenage Morrison and his sense of self came in the form of the great bohemian, beatnik novel On the Road, the nomadic flavor of its wandering freedoms and most of all, its invocation of the character of the wild and free-spirited Dean Moriarty and its blurring of the lines between freedom and madness – ‘He was one of Kerouac’s “mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn burn burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars’.[4] Indeed the teenage Morrison was so enamored by the fictional character that ‘he began to copy Moriarty right down to his “hee-hee-hee-hee” laugh.’[5]
It was unsurprising, then, that the adolescent Jim Morrison would get drunk and dabble with pot, not just because these things provide goofy and fun experiences for many a teenager, but on a more profound level, they were part and parcel of the cultural milieu and the kind of archetype of youthful freedom and rebellion that Morrison was intuitively and aesthetically drawn toward. For the same reason, it is no coincidence that this developing cultural consciousness, the rituals of drinking and getting high, and the exploration of the counter-culture aesthetic through beatnik literature would also coincide with Morrison’s first forays into writing himself:
Jim was becoming a writer. He had begun to keep journals, spiral notebooks that he would fill with his daily observations and thoughts … and as he entered his senior year, more and more poetry. The romantic notion of poetry was taking hold: the “Rimbaud legend,” the predestined tragedy, were impressed on his consciousness, the homosexuality of Ginsberg and Whitman and Rimbaud himself; the alcoholism of Baudelaire, Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan; the madness and addiction of so many more in whom the pain married with the visions. The pages became a mirror in which Jim saw his reflection.[6]
The connection between alcohol and creativity has a seasoned lineage. In ancient Greek times, the grape was not just a symbol of Hellenic identity in the same way as the olive vine, nor just a richly traded commodity and mere object of consumption, but moreover something which had a significant aesthetic and religious usage in its form as alcohol. The Greek word Pneuma (πνεῦμα) translates into ‘spirit’ – but it also has the meaning ‘breathed’; it was conceived that the ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ was something ‘breathed’ into the individual from a divine source, and that inebriation was a way of opening up the spirit to its origins, to bringing oneself into contact with the infinite once more.
And, as the late Christopher Hitchens pointed out, ‘the very word “spirit”’ also preserves an intuition of the ‘“inspired” that was detected by the Greeks when they hit upon fermentation’[7] and used its results in their creative endeavors, not least of which was the production of music and art. The counterculture movement of the 50s and 60s revived this notion and deepened it; the idea that alcohol and drugs could provide a gateway to a deeper essence, the conscious-altering-means which could provide a sublime encounter with the transcendental reality. Whilst at UCLA, Morrison became fascinated by the ancient Greek world, particularly in and through his readings of the eloquent and savage reactionary philosopher Fredrich Nietzsche.
In particular, Morrison would come to identify with the figure of ‘the long-suffering Dionysius’, for in the ancient Greek god, Morrison found something more primordial, an archetype that hinted at a buried and elemental reality through the experience of both suffering and excess. Dionysius, in Nietzsche’s philosophy of art, became a symbol for the darker, unrestrained and irrational impulses that lurk just below the depths of the psyche and come to power that aspect of aesthetic creation which is chaotic, instinctive and unconscious.
Morrison combined this sense of art, with a broader philosophical vision; the poet’s suffering, the poet’s creativity – heightened by the use of alcohol and drugs – could work toward an ‘ecstatic dissolution of personal consciousness’.[8] If this was achieved – if personal consciousness with all its distortions and peccadillos was somehow transcended – then true reality could be glimpsed in its eternal and elemental guise; or as the great religious poet William Blake put it, ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.’[9]
This type of philosophy precipitated an artistic journey, the use of drink, drugs and aesthetic activity in combination to seek out the ‘infinite reality’, the ‘primordial nature of the universe’, or as Jim Morrison and his college friends would come to call it, ‘the universal mind’.[10] This intuitive, emotional and sometimes frenzied quest would bleed into other intellectual trends and cultural preoccupations; both psychology and shamanism became key moments defining the focus of Jim Morrison’s poetry and eventually the music of the Doors.
Jung was a key fit, for instance; his theory of primeval archetypes tessellated nicely with the idea of a ‘universal mind’ which was veiled by the paraphernalia of the empirical and everyday, while shamanism, provoking altered states of consciousness often through hallucinogens as a way of transitioning into the invisible realm of spirits and ghosts, conceived of reality in the same dualistic fashion; a physical world behind which lay a more fundamental spiritual essence which could be encountered given the correct intellectual strategies and spiritual activities.
A note of caution should be sounded. These intellectual trends easily shade into the worst forms of cod philosophy and trite spiritualism; who hasn’t had to endure that bore at a party describing an experience of taking mushrooms in the Amazon and touching a dolphin in order to become ‘one’ with nature, or Gary from Peckham off his nut on a ‘vision quest’ having snorted a good bump of crystal?
And the idea that there is any hard and fast connection between aesthetic creativity and the use of drugs and alcohol is a treacherous one to say the least. As a functioning alcoholic, I can say that a moderate amount of drinking certainly can grease the wheels and allow for a more unincumbered creative flow. At the same time, I’ve gone over the next day some of the stuff I’ve written while fully flushed (stuff I thought was brilliant in the moment) and it’s nearly always read wincingly self-indulgent and all-over-the-place in the sober light of day.
I suppose what I want to say is that although people rightfully laud the explosion of political and aesthetic creativity provided by the counterculture that emerged in the 50s and 60s, it did have its distortions and deficits. Many of the rambling stream-of-consciousness poems unleashed by those beatniks who thought they were harmonizing with infinite realities were simply onanistic, annoying, and completely meaningless.
And the hippy movement, which many of the beatniks would flow into, was problematic. The hippies of the early 1960s famously played an important and effective role in the anti-war movement in their capacity as flower-power-promoting pacifists, but in terms of the possibilities of challenging the status quo and the political forms of exploitation back home, it is important to remember that there was a streak of conspicuous individualism which ran through much of the movement, and made it resistant to radical social change. As Devon Van Houten Maldonado observes, the hippies were in the ‘majority white, middle-class group of young people’ whose wealthy backgrounds most often meant that they had ‘had less at stake than those fighting for civil rights’.[11]
The material luxury many of the hippies enjoyed set the basis for a cultural indulgence; on the one hand, they loathed the militarism and the straight-laced conservatism of their parent’s generation, and yet, the solution to many of the political problems of the age for them became the expansion of the mind through drugs and the adoption – in crude outline – of various tenets of mysticism and eastern religions such as Buddhism or Hinduism.
But the search for nirvana or brahman was also the movement of the isolated and private consciousness as it turned in on itself; the great social and political problems of the age faded before one’s own spiritual journey of individual discovery. This kind of esoteric spiritualism – so attractive to many a hippy – allowed the individual in question to feel as though they were posing a radical affront to the status quo, that their higher consciousness had transcended the material and base imperatives of a capitalist economy such as consumerism and the never-ending drive toward accumulation and profit, and yet, in the same moment, such an isolated and aloof spiritual purview left intact the social structures and forms of capitalist organization and oppression which set the stage for the ‘consumerist’ society in the first place.
For the struggle for ‘nirvana’ would never necessitate the joining of the trade union, or the radical organization, or the revolutionary party; it would never require the one who sought it to siphon their efforts into the practical transformation of society at the socio-economic level in and through collective action – through strikes and committees. For this reason, the ‘rebels’ could ‘rebel’ against their parents’ generation – against their concern with material goods, their unquestioning fidelity to the government and country, the conservatism of a conventional bourgeois existence more broadly – while at the same time their own basis in a substantial degree of material privilege which sustained such a ‘rebellion’ was left wholly undisturbed.
As a consequence, hippies could often ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ in a way that would never have been feasible for civil rights activists and besieged radicals such as the Black Panthers, for the struggle of the latter was most often an ‘existential’ one – i.e. they could not afford to ‘drop out’ as their politics flowed from the fight for their very existence. And in this way, the hippy movement was always inclined toward an aspect of trite and superficial spirituality, a cultural luxuriant that overlaid a more fundamental accommodation of the status quo. As a long-deceased journalist once opined, scratch the surface of a hippy, and you will nearly always glimpse a conservative on the inside.
How much of the music of the Doors was infused with this hippy-esque sense of saccharine spirituality, camouflaging a more conventional and conservative mindset? While Jim Morrison shared much of the hallucinatory ‘LSD’ culture which hoped to cleanse ‘the doors of perception’ and allow the user to gaze into the infinite beyond (the name of the band was lifted from Blake’s phrase siphoned through Huxley), there were also important points at which Morrison eschewed the hippy ethic and reacted against it.
The song ‘Five To One’, for instance, seems to draw attention to the futility of the hippy lifestyle: ‘Night is drawing near/Shadows of the evening crawl across the years. You walk across the floor with a flower in your hand. Trying to tell me no one understands’. The ‘flower in your hand’ hints at that flower-power generation which is increasingly unmoored from the political realities as time creeps on – ‘shadows of the evening’. The conclusion? Morrison seems to suggest that radicalism will eventually and inevitably be traded for renumeration – ‘Trade in your hours for a handful of dimes.’[12]; the youthful hippy protestor will eventually morph into a figure of comfortable middle-class entitlement.
In an interview from 1970, Jim Morrison was more explicit in his antipathy to the hippy movement – ‘The hippie lifestyle is really a middle-class phenomenon … and it could not exist in any other society except ours, where there’s this incredible surfeit of goods, products, and leisure time.’[13] In another interview given that same ‘[u]n year, he was even more vehement, describing how the young hippies at Woodstock had ‘seemed like a bunch of young parasites, being kind of spoon-fed this three or four days of … well, you know what I mean.’[14]
Hopkins and Sugerman also emphasize Morrison’s spiritual and intellectual distance from the hippy movement, ‘[un]like the prototypical “hippy”, Jim thought astrology was a pseudoscience, rejected the concept of the totally integrated personality, and expressed a distaste for vegetarianism because of the religious fervor often attached to the diet. It was, he said, dogma, and he had no use for that.’[15] And, as Christopher Crenshaw argues, the Doors were ‘not part of the “love generation.” … were not influenced by folk-rock, and Jim Morrison’s lyrics did not often encourage listeners to “feel good.” Listeners were more likely to call them “evil” than look to them for peace and love.’[16]
For Crenshaw, the Doors embodied another aspect of the sixties counter-culture revolution, a ‘side of the resistance experience, a side fascinated with self-expression, darkness and release, sex and death.’[17] The music journalist Max Bell, writing for Classic Rock magazine expresses a similar sentiment, writing that ‘Morrison’s neo Gothic croon and Manzarek’s ghostly, cathedral-like organ spoke of murkier climes than those offered by the Beatles’ brand of polychromatic pop.’[18] For Bell, the music of the Doors was the darker palliative to much of the happy-go-lucky music of the 60s, ‘the symphonic high art’ of the Beatles for instance; for Bell, the Doors ‘gave the lie to such positivism, drawing on the growing feeling of ‘us against them’ that pervaded a generation of young Americans in fear of the draft to Vietnam’.[19]
But perhaps the music has a deeper historical resonance still. As Hopkins and Sugerman write, one of the things which inoculated Morrison against some of the worst aspects of hippy-esque counterculture was the fact of his own background as a ‘college graduate instead of a dropout, a voracious reader with a highly catholic taste …[w]hether he liked it or not, he was the obvious product of a Southern upper-middle class family: charming, goal-orientated, and in many ways politically conservative.’[20]
Again there are deep and underlying contradictions here. From an early age, Morrison seems to have intuited the hypocrisy, the façade of respectability that cloaks the lives of the well-to-do – his mother Clara, an aspirant social climber, vividly exampled it. And she was keen to impress standards of respectability and decorum on her often wild and wayward eldest child, and when he failed to meet her expectations, she was not shy about letting him know. Jim’s father was a navy man, away living on distant bases for most of his childhood, so Jim saw him infrequently. The times he did, however, were turned into significant occasions as when Jim was invited to visit a ship carrier his father had recently been promoted to run.
By this point, Jim Morrison was a young man, a college student who had a keen sense of his own developing identity, but this was something his mother could neither comprehend or respect, demanding instead that he cut his hair before the important visit: ‘There are three thousand men on that ship and your father has their respect, and he has that respect because he is a fine disciplinarian. How would it look if his son, his very own son, showed up looking like a beatnik?’[21]
Jim attended the event with his hair shorn as requested, but the bitterness over these kinds of incidents never really left him. A few years later, he would sever all links with his parents, brutally sudden, and he seems to have never looked back. From his earliest days when he used to torment his little brother, there was an aspect of cruelty, of coldness, about Jim Morrison – something that was on display in later life particularly in terms of the parade of women he scorned, mistreated and sometimes even brutalized. His parents, despite their faults, clearly loved him, and put a lot of effort into trying to raise him, albeit according to their parochial and conservative values. The manner in which he suddenly and abruptly discards them does seem unnecessarily cold and cruel, however on another level, it also makes a certain sense.
For the spiritual and political distance that opened up between them was immense. Clara, for Jim, represented something more than the stifling, shaming probations enforced by a parent on her child. She became more generally an emblem of the lower-middle-class world; the faux sense of respectability that thinly disguised the calculating aspiration and the snobbish superiority which lay underneath.
And if his mother was the prim package in which the values of the lower-middle class were decorated, then his father represented a more direct archetype – the distant disciplinarian with a military gait, someone in whom words and self-expression were always subordinate to the unthinking and unquestioning devotion to duty, a figure in which the state and the status quo could locate a steadfast guardian, someone of the lower orders who had thoroughly imbibed the tonic of patriotism and hierarchy, whose whole being was sheened red, white and blue, and would devote his existence to the shoring up of American military power and the project of globalism and mass murder which that entailed.
I believe that, for Jim Morrison, his parents became more than just figures whose authority he resented as part and parcel of adolescent rebellion; they were emblems, personifications almost, of aspects of the decadence and decay of the American society in the late twentieth century, the point at which historical development was reaching its twilight.
It is well-chronicled that Morrison claimed his earliest memory to be from when he was four years old, and he was traveling with his parents on the highway from Santa Fe. The scene is recreated in the film The Doors, directed by Oliver Stone, the dusty highway, the expanse of desert and mountain, the arid heat but with the greys and purples of storm clouds brewing in the background. The family passes an overturned truck and the young boy glimpses the injured and dying Pueblo Indians who have been thrown from the vehicle and onto the asphalt by the force of the accident. The child, witnessing the horror, exclaims ‘I want to help, I want to help … They’re dying! They’re dying!’ to which his father responds in a comforting murmur, ‘It was a dream, Jimmy, it didn’t really happen, it was a dream.’[22]
In later years, his parents’ account of the incident differed from Morrison’s own. With no small dose of imagination and some hyperbole, Jim Morrison probably exaggerated the details of the accident, the number of victims, even going as far as to say that he had, as a four-year-old child, felt the soul of one of the dead Indians pass into his body. But whatever embellishments Morrison gave to the incident in retrospect, it is clear what happened was something that left an indelible mark on who he was, who he became – he would later describe it as ‘the most important moment of my life’.[23]
And this is significant on several levels. In the most immediate sense, it was a traumatic, unsettling and harrowing experience for any small child. But it also became, I think, a philosophical allegory of a broader political and social vision. The victims of the accident were native Americans – the ingenious people whose displacement, ethnic cleansing and murder on a vast scale constituted perhaps the nation’s ‘original sin’ (it preceded the transatlantic slave trade in this respect). It is not altogether insignificant that Morrison’s father was a military man, someone who rose high in the ranks of the same power which oversaw much of the ethnic cleansing that had been interwoven with the nation-building project of the past. And that whisper – ‘it was a dream … it didn’t really happen’ – isn’t that the refrain of every white conservative in the political establishment seeking to diminish or disappear historical memory?
The idea of the US as a long smooth highway, a journey of sleek, technological progress and civilization, an untrammeled and unproblematic voyage into the future that works to disguise the wreckage of persecution, slavery and mass-murder which one glimpses momentarily through a window as those details rapidly recede into the rearview of the past; this acts as a potent metaphor for history, for society, for the family unit. I think the veneer of respectability that overlaid the often spiteful, ruthless and acquisitive values of the lower-middle class suburban existence became blurred in Jim Morrison’s aesthetic consciousness with broader social and historical horizons, the modern nation – its values of liberty, fraternity and equality – papering over the deeper primeval darkness at work beneath the surface of respectability and decorum.
I think too this is why he came to despise his parents so absolutely; not only did they sense in him the antithesis of their own respectability and accommodation to the status quo, but he located in them – unconsciously, indirectly perhaps – the ciphers of a broader system, a system which despite its claims to progress had yielded repression and apartheid and naked children running through streets in lands far away, skins burnt off by napalm. His parents, of course, couldn’t be held responsible in some purely personal capacity for the scope and entirety of these broader historical trends, but they could be held responsible for turning away, they could be held responsible for denial, for psychological repression, for the same social amnesia exhibited by an entire generation of older conservatives who papered up the cracks of darker realities by retreating into religious tradition and the parochial values of the ‘decent Christian family’.
In one of his most controversial works, Sigmund Freud extended his theory of the ‘Oedipus complex’ to the historical plane; in Totem and Taboo he argued that the latent desire of the son to kill the father provided the motive force for the transition from the rural world of tribes and gens to the earliest emissions of cities and modern civilisations. The young men whose hungers and freedoms had been suppressed by rigid hierarchy of the ‘totemic’ clan would eventually coalesce as a repressed group which, in turn, would enact a terrible revenge on the ancient patriarchy: ‘the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde. United, they had the courage to do and succeeded in doing what would have been impossible for them individually.’[24]
To be blunt, Freud’s analysis doesn’t have a leg to stand on in terms of providing a persuasive or even vaguely accurate description of the way in which the first civilizations came into being, historically speaking. But what is interesting about it is the way it explicitly equates the destruction of a family unit by the unleashing of Oedipal tendencies on an individual scale with the destruction of a whole social order. In perhaps the most disturbing verse of all, in possibly the Doors’ most evocative and starkly poetic song, Jim Morrison gives full credence to Freudian sensibilities and the Oedipal Complex in a sinister meditation on the ancient and the repressed, on sex and death:
The killer awoke before dawn He put his boots on He took a face from the ancient gallery And he walked on down the hall He went into the room where his sister lived, and then he Paid a visit to his brother, and then he He walked on down the hall, and And he came to a door And he looked inside “Father?” “Yes, son?” “I want to kill you” “Mother? I want to… “
This verse is about the half-way point in the song which, in its finalized form, is almost eleven minutes long. Naturally, this section caused deep controversy – in the live performances, Morrison sometimes erased the ambiguity of that final truncated sentence by concluding with visceral intent – ‘Mother? I want to … fuck you!’. But over time, the outrage has melted, and, for some, what remains is simply the sense of a band being shocking for the sake of shock, the Freudian aspect smuggled in as a way to be fashionably intellectual and visibly subversive. And yet … I would have to demur. For the song itself reveals much deeper layers and complexities.
The ‘killer’ who awakes before dawn is strangely anonymous – an archetype rather than a person, someone who conforms to the primitive, primeval image selected from the ‘the ancient gallery’ that the Jungian collective consciousness encompasses. At the same time, the killer has a contemporary bent, he puts ‘his boots on’ – one can imagine he is a serial killer – that dark and sadistic symptom of modern anomie and a staple of American culture in the 60s and the 70s from the Manson murders to the Zodiac. The damage this killer inflicts on his family is explicitly Freudian, but Morrison is not addressing his own family in the verse but rather the more universal example they had set – for they had become an emblem of the respectability of an American dream which overlaid an American nightmare, a crisis of civilization drawn out through global war and authoritarian repression, a crisis which was reaching its apex in the 1960s.
And so, when Jim Morrison ‘kills’ his father and ‘fucks’ his mother, what he is really alluding to is not just the destruction of a family, but the destruction of a civilization – a civilization which has inculcated the very death drive that seeks to obliterate it. ‘The End’ is, at its core, a song about the end of an epoch, a collapse, and its form is modernist and fragmented for precisely this reason. Like Elliot’s The Wasteland we seem to be hearing fragments of different voices at different times. In the beginning, for instance, the song opens up with the most beautiful, aching melancholy … ‘This is the end. Beautiful friend. This is the end, my only friend, the end. Of our elaborate plans, the end. Of everything that stands, the end. No safety or surprise, the end. I’ll never look into your eyes again’. Its apocalyptic but also intimate – someone addressing a lover before they unclasp hands for the final time. Soft, gentle, and so painfully beautiful.
Another voice, however, speaks in a colder way, a soulless way, almost as though someone is speaking through him. It invokes the aspect of the shaman, of the ancient peoples who lived on the land and who propitiated their animal gods long before they were displaced by Europeans brandishing crosses – ‘Ride the snake, ride the snake to the lake, the ancient lake … He’s old and his skin is cold’. This sense of ancientness is pronounced in another section, this time in the form of a madness which has fallen upon a modern culture – ‘Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain. And all the children are insane’. And joining these, is the voice of the preacher of the prairies with his promise of rapture and millennialism – ‘Can you picture what will be? So limitless and free’.
And then there is our serial killer, of course, who takes a face from the ‘ancient gallery’, and here one can’t help but wonder whether such a disguise – such a mask – might also represent the uniform so many young men were forced to don when they were sent off to kill in Vietnam at the behest of their parents’ generation. And finally, all these competing voices die down in favour of just the one, again that haunting refrain, ‘this is the end ….’
This achingly beautiful poem/song gives voice to various images of repressed and maddened presences that exist below the surface of ‘Americana’ in some kind of primordial and chaotic state of flux that ultimately suggest the collapse of civilisation itself. When I listen to ‘The End’ I think it is much more than just a rambling stream of consciousness by a beat poet and hippy-transcendentalist. Rather it has its roots in the dark terminus of all empires, that seed of degeneration which was present from the beginning, that speck of decay and death which great powers carry with them unbeknownst, the dark shadow at the edges that was so potently diagnosed by the playwrights of the past such as Aeschylus who used his play ‘The Persians’ as a prophetic allegory, the ominous portent which would herald the destruction of Athens at the hands of Sparta, or the poet Shelley as he poignantly referenced the tragedy of the great Ozymandias, that colossal wreck gradually sinking into the sands of time.
In the American context, we might call to mind the work of the artist Thomas Cole and his ‘The Course of Empire’, a set of five paintings which portrays the rise and fall of civilization. It depicts the origins of humanity in the forms of the early hunter-gatherers who eventually grow into an innocent and pastoral way of life where human beings live in a gentle harmony with nature.
The third painting shows how civilisation itself has succeeded these earlier moments, it renders a resplendent harbour overlooked by ivory palaces and pantheons. The civilisation – though it certainly has Roman and Greek trappings – is glorious but also generic, it is a placeholder for a concept of empire more generally, as the copper tinted water is festooned with glorious golden ships of war on the verge of departing for battle. Inevitably, the final paintings in the quintuple describe the apocalyptic downfall of the civilisation and the return to nature once more, shattered ruins overwhelmed by creeping vines and sprouting trees as nature reclaims the landscape.
In a song such as ‘Yes, the River Knows’, the Doors bring across that early stage of pastoral innocence, of people communing with nature; the river itself is personified in an animist tradition – ‘the river told me, very softly’. The river represents the very heart of being, and yet at the same time it is also ephemeral, like the flow of time itself: ‘Free fall flow, river flow’. The song describes that early arcadia, the spontaneous and immediate unity with nature which was the province of our most ancient ancestors – ‘breathe underwater to the end’ – and yet time is always at work, ‘On and on it goes’. It is a gentle poetic meditation, with just the slightest hint of foreshadowing, and in this way it has a similar aesthetic effect to those early paintings of Cole, the sense that innocence in its very essence is something that must inevitably be lost, that history will always find a way of turning the page.
And that sense of loss is also so much a part of ‘The End’, on a personal level in terms of the lover or ‘beautiful friend’ who is being addressed, but also at the level of a whole historical epoch. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that Francis Ford Coppola used the song to such eerie and crepuscular effect in the opening to Apocalypse Now. We begin with the sinister whirring of helicopter blads which then elides into that famous intro – ‘This is the end, my only friend the end. Of our elaborate plans, the end. Of everything that stands, the end’.
While this is going on, we see the thickets and trees of a great jungle, the shadow of a helicopter motors by, and then everything is engulfed by great plumes of flame. From that fire materialises the image of a soldier’s shell-shocked face as he gazes up into the ceiling while in the background the inferno continues to rage, punctuated only by the sleek skeletal shadows of burnt-out trees. It is one of the most powerful introductions to any film I think, not only because of the aesthetic and technical merits of the camera work, but because the music and the images have a real historical resonance, the logic of empire driven to its demented and insensible peak, that heart of darkness which is the engine of great war and cataclysmic collapse.
Morrison and Coppola were of a similar age, cut from the cloth of the same generation, they even attended the same film school. They were brilliant, quizzical, troubled bright lights of a generation whose lives played out against a backdrop of empire and abuse of power that yielded an epoch-changing war; they were not the type of prophets, Nostradamus-like, who used their art to predict the end of the world, rather – for their generation at that time – it seemed more like something they were actually living through. Ultimately ‘The End’ carries an intense sadness, the sadness of youth – of children not yet grown – thrust into the terminal freefall of an end of days, and the terrible knowledge which comes with it, a bitter, beautiful lament to innocence lost.
+++
… It is perhaps five or six years after that day, when I discovered the Doors for the first time in that light-riven campus dorm. It is perhaps only five or so years, but it already feels like a lifetime away. Now I am living in Latin America, in Ecuador, and I share a flat with a best friend. We both teach English at the local university. It is Friday night, and I am meeting her partner for the first time. It’s often awkward meeting the partner of a dear friend, for a kind of enforced proximity occurs, where you both, as strangers, have to frantically try and gel for the sake of her, so I am a little anxious.
But I shouldn’t be. Ruben is soft-spoken, gentle, with a brilliant but random and chaotic bent of mind that disappears down rabbit holes and roams across the stars. And, like me, he enjoys a drink or two. But the most wonderful thing of all is – as evening merges into night – I discover he is the biggest Doors fan I have ever met. From that moment on we are friends in our own right. And together we will savor their music on many more occasions, many more late nights spent drinking and indulging our obsession.
To paraphrase Tolstoy, one of the fundamental miracles of music is the way it expresses the soul of the musician and infects the soul of the listener. But the relationship isn’t a purely passive one. For just as the musician breathes color into the lives of future generations, the listener can use music to breathe life into the past too. I am middle-aged. I haven’t seen my friend Ruben for many years, and those people I knew at university are as shadows seen from a great distance now. But when I play the Doors, it brings me back so swiftly, so sweetly, to those moments in the past, to the memory of friends and laughter played out once more under faraway skies, and the ghost of a younger, long-lost self.
[13] Jim Morrison cited in Christopher Crenshaw, ‘Five to One: Rethinking the Doors and the Sixties Counterculture’, Music & Politics 8, Number 1 (Winter 2014), ISSN 1938-7687. Article DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mp.9460447.0008.101
[14] Ibid.
[15] Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, No One Here Gets Out Alive (Plexus Publishing, London: 2011) p.155
[16] Christopher Crenshaw, ‘Five to One: Rethinking the Doors and the Sixties Counterculture’, Music & Politics 8, Number 1 (Winter 2014), ISSN 1938-7687. Article DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mp.9460447.0008.101
