Fools and Heroes

"If we can get this business of Fascism knocked off and get the world into some semblance of order and keep it there for a time, our son and his contemporaries will take over and make something really good out of it."
George Rarey, fighter pilot, 379th Fighter Squadron, Ninth Air Force

"Give me chaos, give me complete anarchy, but by Christ, it would be a hell of a lot better than in this world where we're organized to kill!"
Bob Harvey, conscientious objector

Topic: War heroes and pacifists: the story of my grandfathers during the second World War.

Both my grandfathers had been artists in Greenwich Village before the war. Bob Harvey refused to serve. George Rarey, the more gentle, warm-hearted of the two, did not volunteer, but when "Uncle Sam tapped him on the shoulder," he went. They made him a fighter pilot. Family and friends revered him, as a pilot, but most of all as a personality. He was always polite and unassuming to his subordinates, which in turn brought him high recognition. Even as a Captain, Rarey couldn't take military discipline seriously and retained his ironic, detached view of the world. His last words of advice to the son he never met were: "tell him to stick to his convictions, his eyes open, and keep a little foolish." The vibrancy of the entries in his cartoon war diaries has kept this spirit alive.

Harvey, on the other hand, threw most of his artwork out the window. We get no clear insight into his character from what remains, nor from the often contradictory opinions of former friends: to some he was moody to emotionally violent, to others artistically talented, companionable, and inspiring. More anarchist than pacifist, he was not part of any political organization, and first met other conscientious objectors in a work camp. Even in the Fine Arts Group which was organized at the camp, he avoided all group activities and was solely interested in his art, which continued to be most important to him. His anti-authoritarian attitude made the camp unbearable to him. He "walked out," and was sent to a high-security prison.

Which of them was the real hero? To declare one of them a hero automatically trivializes the sacrifices of the other, yet both sides of my family have been doing exactly this for as long as I can remember. Too much a product of two worlds to be able to come by answers so easily, I began making inquiries into my grandfathersâ real natures, to deconstruct my two neatly-packed heritages. I raided dusty boxes full of black and white photographs, drawings and paintings, and film footage. I raided the memories of people who seemed to have stopped evaluating them long ago: fighter pilots, conscientious objectors, relatives, and friends. It particularly fascinated me to compare these dusty treasures with the facial expressions of those still living today, to juxtapose them, revealing new truths. I felt compelled to ask them questions no one had asked for many years. Individual fates aquired political dimensions, which I longed to illustrate through the use of news reels and radio reports as well as journalistic photographs from the period.

In my own narration of the film, my contradictory feelings about my grandfathers tie varying experiences and fragments of memories together. Born in 1969, I could never understand the mythical glorification of war heroes and identified with the other grandfather as a pacifist. Such distinctions became blurred, however, through personal confrontation with those living today. Lack of clarity, convenience, and egotism revealed themselves in the quiet thoughtfulness of the conscientious objectors. The personalities of the pilots were often actually more convincing, despite their pragmatic attitude toward violence and incapacity for self-reflection in this respect.

Only a few C.O.s and pilots seemed able to question their former course of action. For me they were the real heroes. As for my grandfathers, a well-known poet in the Fine Arts Group, Bill Everson, aptly expressed what they might feel were they living today:

Whether or not we are heroes or fools
Is hardly the point,
Who have learned in this
That all achievement is only attained
By the thick sequence of forced beginnings,
Composing an act....

I hope I've shown what my grandfathers had in common: a passion not only for art, but for the art of living. Each of them was in the end a moving testament to humanity in a terribly inhuman time.

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