It Is the Best of Times, It Is the Worst of Times

 

I recently read and taught A Tale of Two Cities for the first time. My only knowledge of the book before I started reading it was the infamous opening sentence: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” (Of course that is the 3.14 version of that opening sentence that goes on to make at least 6 more paradoxical comparisons). With my limited knowledge of the book, I was not expecting it to be as bloody and barbaric as it is. (Which is stupid because it’s about the French Revolution, aptly referred to as the “bloody revolution”). There were actually some sections of the book where I found myself feeling queasy at Dickens’ descriptions of the punishments and executions that were carried out. And having to explain to a room full of 14-15-year-old girls (whose school mascot is the teddy bear) what it means to disembowel and quarter someone is not exactly enjoyable.

What struck me the most about the violence in the book was the barbaric perpetrators of these punishments, and the blood-thirsty crowd who showed up to watch the executions for their own amusement. While a major character accused of treason stands on trial, Dickens describes the crowd of spectators in the courtroom as their “eager faces strained [a]round pillars and corners, to get a sight of him...[with] the sort of interest…[that] was not a sort that elevated humanity.” Most of the spectators in the court room were there to be entertained, whether they would admit to it or not. “Had he stood in peril of a less horrible sentence—had there been a chance of any one of its savage details being spared—by just so much would he have lost in his fascination. The form that was to be doomed to be so shamefully mangled [hanged, beheaded, and quartered]…yielded the sensation…The interest was, at the root of it, Ogreish.” The spectators are there with a sick fascination and when Darnay is acquitted, their disappointment is apparent. Dickens compares the spectators to flies and their “loud buzz swept into the street as if the baffled blue-flies were dispersing in search of other carrion.”

There are many other instances in the book when Dickens refers to the spectators as blood thirsty, especially after the birth of the guillotine. At one point, one of the revolutionaries describes his excitement at seeing another one of the main characters beheaded in the public square: “’She has a fine head for it…I have seen blue eyes and golden hair there, and they looked charming when Samson [the executioner] held them [the severed heads] up…and we seldom have a child there. It is a pretty sight.” Again, Dickens refers to these spectators as “ogres” and their excitement for gore is unsettling and disgusting.

Just as I was self-righteously congratulating myself for living in a more civilized world and when I was in the middle of teaching this novel, the Boston Marathon Bombing happened. Since it was such a highly-televised event and since technological advancements have put a handheld camera into the pockets and purses of the majority of the marathons attendees, there is extensive live footage of the carnage accessible for anyone with a wireless connection.  People can see exactly what happened in the comfort and privacy of their own homes.  The fact that people can sit on their couches with decorative pillows while eating a granola bar and watch something so gory and horrific actually happen to actual people just seconds before scares the shit out of me

And yes, I do realize that it is because of these technological advancements that the bombers were found so quickly. But the juxtaposition of experiencing these tragedies in the comfort of our homes while we do laundry, sweep the floors, water the plants, eat dinner, or kick our feet up is so entirely disturbing. I worry that we are subconsciously associating these tragedies with the menial tasks of our day-to-day lives. The more of the carnage and gore that we see, the more desensitized we become.

And we are already so desensitized because of the violence that is wholly accepted by our society in the name of entertainment and pop culture (I watched large portions of Django Unchained from behind the slits in between my fingers, and I literally felt sick on my stomach when I left the theater). This brings me to another point. We see so many violent visuals through the entertainment medium on a daily basis. Television shows, movies, and video games push so many violent visuals into our faces that it seems virtually impossible to not become desensitized to them. 

I know that these “entertaining” (and I mean these quotations in the most un-self-righteous way possible) images of violence are not real, and I know that people were not actually hurt or killed when those images were made. But I think the line between reality and fiction is becoming blurrier every day, and our current news media is helping to erase that line. Because of media’s unsavory marriage to capitalism, the news has become a form of entertainment as well. People follow court cases like they are soap operas, and manhunts like they are a Bruce Willis movie. Because the actual news coverage is so similar to some of the plots that we see in movies and TV shows, I worry that we are subconsciously storing all of these images—real and fictional—in the same place in our brain. I worry that we are unknowingly allowing ourselves to become separate and unfeeling from actual human suffering because it is something that we are consuming at an alarming rate at the box office and from our couches. I worry that we subconsciously forget that while conflict and heartbreak makes stories interesting, they make life very difficult.

I am not trying to subtract from the value that video-recording software grants our society; I am aware of how invaluable it was in catching the Boston Bombers and many other criminals. I am just worried about the long-term effects that this technology, and our violent forms of entertainment are having on our society when they are consumed by the masses. (I think most of us would agree that it is a completely different thing to read about someone being disemboweled and beheaded than it would be to see it actually happen. Thank goodness the Jacquerie did not have video cameras during the 19th century). What are we doing to the way that we write and interact with history, or to our world views, and our cultures when we record and archive everything? (And that isn’t much of an overstatement actually). What are the effects of allowing the entire world to experience traumatic events in (almost) real time from a first person perspective?  And another frightening question, what is the purpose of it?

Charles Dickens was right: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, I was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the seasons of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

I guess I should take comfort knowing that Dickens wrote those prophetic words that still ring so true today over 150 years ago. Or should the relevance of that paragraph depress the hell out of me by proving the maxim “history repeats itself” true? The paradox continues.