The "Beheading" of Sam

I'm just back from a week's vacation. It was good ... a mixture of guests and family who came to visit and some alone-time with M. Some welcome work contacts, too. When M, I and our kids began vacationing on the Eastern Shore of Virginia in 1979, communication was via two pay phones that we knew about. Vacationers would line up in the darkness to call whomever they needed to contact ... How did "ET phone home?" Seems like a lifetime, ago.

Nowadays, it takes work to find places where one cannot make connections. If my oldest Son is in the Far East? We can Facetime. If my two younger (though by no means any longer young) kids or grandkids want to send me a scholarly paper that they've read? "Beep-Beep" and the Cyber-Roadrunner delivers it immediately. Megabytes get uploaded in seconds. 

Colleagues and visitors to my office, alike, send stuff, too, while I'm on holiday. I can now be standing in the Surf ... no land masses between me and the White Cliffs of Dover ... and I can receive a page or 1000 pages of notes in the blinking of an eye! I was notified last week that Arnie had posted a note about the beheading of an archaeology scholar for not sharing the location of the places where ancient artifacts were being hidden from the invading ISIS forces who find those relics perfidious. Arnie, by the way, is a kindhearted and brilliant psychoanalyst in New York; two people had already responded to his posting ... or whatever thingies are called on Facebook. I don't know how Facebook works but occasionally I do press the right sequence of buttons and read some things that appear there. The responses expressed what I suspect most all of us feel. "Shit! A guy doing what he deeply believed was the right thing to do ... protecting the relics of our distant past in Mesopotamia ... being the Good Steward that this 100 year old Science (Archaeology, that took over from the grave-robbers of the 19th C. and before) requires of its practitioners ... and at 80 years old or something is barbarically put to death."

I responded, saying what I, too, thought was pretty obvious (I don't know how to find things on Facebook but I think this is pretty close to what my response was):

True, it is barbaric. But not Beyond the Pleasure Principle that has allowed so 

many to dispel their own anxieties by objectifying The Other ... the other? religiously 

in more or less all people's sacred stories ... the other? nationalistically 

so that after a few brief weeks of Basic Training we can kill the other ... 

the other in the way we betimes treat those who theoretically differ from 

us as alien and worthy of contempt and disfellowshipping.

"What a piece of work is Man."

Some seek blessing in Abraham smashing his Father's idols ... others 

praise the message of the Inquisition's Maleus Maleficarum ... we label our 

conquering Generals and our own Fallen as heroes ... those who die on the 

other side we refer to as Cowards. As Dylan would have it:

Even the Germans had God on their side.

"What a piece of work is man ... how ignoble in reason.

When I read Freud's several discussions on women's conscience (the Superego 

or uber-Ich) ... never quite neatly split between Reason and Maternal Feeling and 

Emotion, I wish for all my Children and Grandchildren ... oh! and Yes ... for 

all the Generals) such an emotion-bound conscience.

We ... I ... all of us ... are prone to forms of Narcissism in which the personhood of the Other is diminished ... at least, compared to our own. Sad. But back to me.

M and I arrived home. Good time on holiday ... a few brief moments where I was confronted by the everyday inhumanities of an angry parent on the beach ... a rude diner acting dismissively to a waitress. But most everything was good. We unpacked the car ... took my 1974 Raleigh International off the car and quickly brought it into safety with GuntherDog who was racing to get back to his digs and the pleasure of his usual backyard toilet. 

We looked at mail. Nothing urgent. Then, I went into the living room to pass through towards my office. Like Gunther, I needed to get back to my own space. Dam! It was a Pagan-awful mess. Had a robber broken in? No. Windows were all locked and unbroken. Things smashed ... lamp shades torn. Indeed, the more I looked, the more damage I could find. A Hungarian piece of ceramic was shattered (my Mom was Hungarian-born and I occasionally have bought Hungarian art ... a way of staying in touch with a long-dead Mother) ... Oak bowling pins strewn on the floor. Some old Indian Corn was in pieces.

Shazzam! It became clear. The top of a very old quilt hanging on the wall was slightly torn. A rug near the entrance door was .. yes ... it was chewed on. The doors were scratched. Aha! An animal  must have climbed the 60 foot Willow and taken a wrong step, fallen into the chimney, and ended up terrified and in a room from which there was "No Exit." I don't know that I was angry at the squirrel I soon found hiding out on the back of a book shelf. There was no reason for bad blood between me and the bushy-tailed rat! I did have some history with squirrels. Some have "squirrelled" their way into my attic from time to time. And it was just maybe three years ago that my Son-in-Law called me upstairs to see Max the Squirrel in one of the upstairs bedrooms. It took two PhD's and a long-handled fishing net maybe three hours to convince Max to leave through a window. All was well, that day.

Any case? I went for the net. M was to be at-ready to open the door and I was committed to not sharing my living room with this guy. Alas! Squirrels are better than people -- even Football's greatest running backs -- at avoiding being caught and Sammy turned out to be among the best. He flew from place to place ... I mean that ... he would propel himself through the air ... "with the greatest of ease" ... squealing with, I presume, terror ... though, I suppose, had things ended differently, I could have thought "maybe Sammy was squealing with delight at his little victories." But realistically? The fellow couldn't have weighed more than a pound to my nearly 200 ... something like me being chased by King Kong.  

Long story short? Things didn't end well for Sammy. Grabbing for him with the net ... trying to pop the net over him as he landed on another hanging rug, the frame of the net hit poor Sam on the head. 

Hear how I put all that in the passive voice ... "the frame of the net did it! Not me!" The truth is simpler than all that. I murdered Sammy the Squirrel ... Must've broken his little neck. Even if not premeditated, I hadn't given him time to find the no-kill trap that I had already baited with peanut butter. I apparently had been unwilling to give Sam time ... I didn't even open a window as Al and I had done with Max ... I assassinated him. I cut him down in his prime. 

It should be said: Sam was doing absolutely nothing unsquirrel-like ... his ancestors had lived in this neighborhood for Lord-knows how many generations ... certainly, long before my home was built as the Protestant Widows' Home in 1904 ... before my family emigrated to the New World less than 100 years ago and ages before I and my little tribe of human marauders colonized Sam's turf ... Long before all of that, Sam's Mom and Dad must have wished him a long and prosperous life and taught him how to be the best squirrel that he could be ... Sammy was cut down in his prime ... by me!

I have no interest in arguing with myself or others as to whether there is any moral equivalence between, on the one hand, taking a squirrel's life to protect my things from damage and, on the other, taking another human's life for offending one's sense of what is and what isn't Godly. But I cannot help but wonder. One of the signs that a youngster is at risk of growing up into a life of sociopathic disinterest in the needs of Others ... of becoming an acting-out Pathological Narcissist ... is the presence of cruelty to animals. How confusing it must be for such kids to grow up in a World in which our heroes ... our best ... kill each other in Wars over oil, doctrine, honor or territory ... hell! in which we slaughter, skin, and package parts of Brown-eyed Bovines ... a World in which our police kill over their own anxieties in stopping unarmed people for traffic violations and in which some people gun down Police as if they weren't children of Mothers, either ... How confusing, indeed, it must be to grow up to believe that still and all it's wrong to torture the cat or kick the dog.

And if some get it, this Old Guilt-ridden Man sitting in his Last Quarter doesn't get it. 

Indeed ... "What a piece of work is man."

Just sayin'.