Ordinary World: Fallout

[i_am_your_spy]

Ordinary World: Fallout

“I like President Truman, the way Dad would of wanted me to. He dropped the atom bomb on Japan and saved millions of lives because if he hadn’t of, then there would of been a lot more war than there was and more people would of been killed.” - Walter Kovacs, age 11
Dawn again. Rorschach is asleep, still wearing his rumpled

Comments

[fivemisosoup]

I'm a naughty Watchmen reader who...well, didn't read all of the in between stuff. So I was just glancing through (looking for the awkward handshake I hadn't noticed on my first read through) and stopped on the stuff from Walter's case file. I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed the odd hypocrisy between Hiroshima being okay and what Veidt did being horrible.

Although, in Rorschach's mind it might simply be that one city is okay but multiple cities isn't, but I like that you sort of took it (I think) as a loyalty to his city.

[i_am_your_spy]

I take it as both loyalty to his city, loyalty to his country, and also just normal human hypocrisy.

I had a history teacher once who justified the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in pretty much exactly the same way. But the guy was a decent human being (if my complete political opposite!) and reading Watchmen made me wonder how he would have reacted.

re: Fallout

[hohaiyee]

He tells himself that Veidt has to be right because the alternative is even more depressing.

Yanno, some victims of date rape would continue to date the rapist in order to sugarcoat the rape away. Then there was that merry little tradition in Italy where a girl was expected to marry her rapist and make it alright.

I've been thinking that Veidt is like that guy who thinks that he's entitled to you after buying dinner, but on a mass scale, because he has power, because he's smart, because he's privileged (how well would Veidt's smarts had done him, if, growing up, if his parents had beaten it out of him?), Veidt thinks he has the right to fuck people however he wants.

Re: Fallout

[i_am_your_spy]

It's interesting reading your comments on this because I'm living in a city that just experienced a minor calamity (no one killed, but definitely violence and massive breaches of trust), and many people seem to have an instinct to want to excuse people in power. Because it's worse to imagine that it's all for nothing.

Re: Fallout

[hohaiyee]

Desperately imposing meaning eh?

Well, you could tell them, in whatever way that would move them, it's better for there to have been no meaning than "to be stupid your whole damn life", that was a quote from Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1993), what the wife told the mistress, that it might have been too late for the wife, but not for the mistress.

In that movie, there was the wife who doesn't leave her stupid cheating abusive husband, and two cops were talking about why, and one told the other about another man, the one in the desert, still mining for treasures for decades. Decades of mining the desert and he doesn't stop, couldn't anymore, because if he stop now, he'll have to admit to himself he had wasted decades, then if he just, keep going, year + year + year.