Word: mind
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Only a shadow of a doubt now remains that the massacre at My Lai was an atrocity, barbaric in execution. Yet almost as chilling to the American mind is the character of the alleged perpetrators. The deed was not performed by patently demented men. Instead, according to the ample testimony of their friends and relatives, the men of C Company who swept through My Lai were for the most part almost depressingly normal. They were Everymen, decent in their daily lives, who at home in Ohio or Vermont would regard it as unthinkable to maliciously strike a child, much less...
Another soldier in the group following Calley's was SP4 Varnado Simpson, 22. "Everyone who went into the village had in mind to kill," he says. "We had lost a lot of buddies and it was a V.C. stronghold. We considered them either V.C. or helping the V.C." His platoon approached from the left flank. "As I came up on [the village], there was a woman, a man and a child, running away from it toward some huts. So I told them in their language to stop, and then they didn't and I had orders to shoot them down...
That is undoubtedly part of it. "The price of eternal vigilance," says Marshall McLuhan, "is indifference." In the same way, the cost of constant excitement, of a persistent and violent rearrangement of one's sense of order, results in surfeit. The mind is overcome by a kind of compassion fatigue. The events of the '60s have profoundly disturbed the American sense of reality. The longest war in the nation's history, with the American combat dead and wounded last week passing 300,000, seems at once horribly strange and grimly familiar. All too accustomed to daily deaths...
...banality of evil. Hannah Arendt's trenchant comment on Jerusalem's Man in the Glass Booth springs easily to mind in contemplating the appalling horror of Pinkville...
...said, "the color starts to burn. My God, this white becomes the whitest white of my life. Now a bird ap pears in its midst. But then it begins to look like a volcano, ejecting bright colors." Perhaps significantly, the abstractionists in the experiment showed far more resistance to mind expansion. Action Painter K. H. Sonderborg displayed few discernible effects, though he reported seeing thousands of strange little animal figures that he found impossible to draw...