Mommy DiLucchio Explains It All To You

Dreamed I was living in a railroad apartment with a bunch of art school girlies. One of the rooms in the apartment was this big, grassy hill covered in dog shit. Other girlies were quite peeved at me because evidently I was not doing my share of housework. So to worm my way back into their good graces, I volunteered to clean the Mountain of Dog Shit, and was standing there contemplating it in all its runny, stinky diarrhea splendor, thinking, "My God, what have I gotten myself into?" (instead of "Huh? Why is there a grassy knoll of canine fecal material under a fucking roof?") when I woke up.

Don't need Dr. Fraud to analyze that one.

In other news, at Robin's behest, we rented Schindler's List last night. I did not like the movie when it first came out( EXTREMELY TASTELESS & OFFENSIVE JOKE ALERT )

I liked it a bit better this time, and of course it's always interesting to watch history unfold through a twelve year old's eyes. Robin was obviously struggling with the context.

"All this is real," I told him. "All this happened less than ten years before I was born!"

You could read the thought balloon over his head: Whatever. To Robin, I may as well have been born at the end of the last Ice Age. All he really relates to is that it happened a Very Long Time ago which means we are insulated from reoccurences in the present tense.

"I mean, it couldn't happen now," he said.

"Well, in fact, it could," I said. "And more to the point. It does. It wasn't about religion, you see. It was about pseudospeciation."

"Pseudo-what?" Robin wrinkled his nose.

"It's a social theory," I said. "You know how gorilla bands hate other gorilla bands?"

"Uh huh –"

"It's an instinctual primate behavior. Same thing happens with human beings. A human group identifies another group as their rivals – for political reasons or maybe because the other group has more money – and then they decide that the other group is subhuman and that it's okay to destroy them."

Robin is still dubious. "But that doesn't happen any more."

"Sure, it does. What do you think is going on right now in Iraq between the Sunni's and the Shiites? Or when the Sunni's annihilated the Kurds?"

I could see Robin's eyes begin to glaze over.

"Twelve years ago in Rwanda, the two tribes that live there – the Hutus and the Tutsis – began to massacre each other. A million people massacred in the most brutal way possible – hacked to death with machetes."

"But that was in Africa!" Robin pointed out.

"So?"

"Well, I mean…" What he wanted to say was: But they weren't white!

"Do you think it matters what color people are?" I asked.

And he said, "No-o-oo." But I could see him struggling with the essential difference between his friend Nick – an African American – and the unpleasant fate of a faceless mass of people on a faraway continent.

"See, if it happens to one person, it happens to us all," I said. "It happens to you."

"No, it doesn't!" he said. He was quite grumpy about it.