History

The three most unlikely sentences of my life:

My father in law fought at Guadalcanal.
Fresh out of high school, my husband's uncle worked on the Manhattan Project.
As a child my mother in law used to play with Shirley Temple.

History isn't history - it's close and palpable.

By contrast my own history seems bleached, leached, and empty.

Is it the massive documentation of the Americans in WW2, the doccos, the movies, the books and doccos and movies about the development and invention of the atomic bomb (which is the final image of that war, not the bombing of London or Dresden, nor the piled and walking skeletons of the camps)?

Is this bleach of memory another facet of empire, anything local overwritten by the Cold War and its genesis at Almagordo, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the vivid nuclear nightmare of forty years - my own nightmare since the Korean War?

Is it the goddam silver screen, and our theatres bought and closed and replaced by chains and contracts for American films, American tv product dumped overseas, another massive cultural overwriting...

Or is this fading into white created by being far away, on the southern edge of the Pacific, never a major actor in the world's great events (disasters though they be), a colony of another, previous empire of dominant images, with a colonial past we don't dare remember?

Arundhati Roy Speaks of Our Fridge

The fridge died sometime Sunday afternoon. Stuff in the freezer was melting. There was no running sound.

This had happened several times over the life of this particular fridge. It was 8 years old when it died on January 15.

The life-span of a refrigerator used to be between 20 and 30 years. (Remember The Secret Life of Machines?)

Since this was Sunday afternoon and Green Bin Day wasn't till Tuesday, we had to throw out anything that might have been damaged wholly or partially by defrosting or wholly or partially by de-cooling. Between $200 and $400 dollars' worth of groceries. Between one and two thirds of a week's net income for the household. This had happened at least twice a year for 8 years, and after the 3rd year Amana refused to reimburse us for the losses.

We emptied the freezer first.

Frozen tacos, chicken-legs, ice-cream, ice-cream bonbons (for my birthday the night before); buffalo burgers, chicken legs, frozen sections of Italian loaves, & French baguettes (for toasting later), the ice-packs for strains & muscular treatments.

Then the fridge. Half and half, non-dairy hazelnut vanilla, butter, olives, artichoke hearts, salami, brie, cheddar jack, pancetta, bread, English muffins, tortillas, tomato sauce, Worcestershire sauce, chili sauce, vinaigrette, balsamic vinegar, peanut butter, almond butter, cranberry spread, pumpkin butter spread, English muffins, corn tortillas, flour tortillas, As the contents went down the sink or into the Green Bin I almost began to cry.

Greek olives, Italian salami and pancetta — all that work, growing them pickling them pimento-ing them transporting them, unpacking them stocking them storing them — all those ships across all those seas, all those trucks across all those mountains, along all those valleys — all that history and effort. The whole world was going down that drain.

The Amana: $1600. Around two weeks' gross income for the household.
The new Frigidaire: $1500. Around two weeks' gross income for the household.

Between them a month's gross income. This year we will donate a twelfth of our income to large corporations for products which have, in the first case, already proven to be — what, glossy rubbish? A waste of time, energy, steel, and oil, of the ships and the lives of all who made & moved the food, and all who bought it to prepare and cook it to eat.

And in order to enable the continuing production this glossy rubbish, civil wars are being fought in India, warlords are running slave-mines in Africa... And the question — whether corporations will permit any mindset but their own to survive — goes on walking through the Adivati resistance movements of India, and the loss of habitat everywhere.

Walking with the Comrades, Arundhati Roy, Penguin Books, New York, 2012