red and white

I was all set to unleash a pompous post on the pseudo-controversy surrounding red versus white poppies the other day, but in the end I abandoned the effort. Then last night I finally sat down to read The Last Town on Earth by Peter Mullen - a novel about an American town which closed itself off in an attempt to avoid being infected by the flu pandemic during the First World War.

The book deals with the dilemmas arising from how to deal with a couple of soldiers who came to the town for refuge. One of the most interesting characters was Rebecca, the wife of the mill-owner whose progressive ideas about workers' pay and conditions had led him to establish the town in the first place. She was something of a socialist, her sympathies were anti-war, she was excited by this new movement called feminism, and she muted her dislike of the idea of shutting off the town so as not to disagree with her husband in public. She didn't want the quarantine imposed since, as long as the town was healthy, she thought they could have contributed to the welfare of the rest of society, rather than excluding themselves, turning their backs on everyone else in order to preserve their own privileged position. Unfortunately she fades from view as the central character, her adopted son, ends up confiding in a new found girlfriend instead - someone whose heart was in the right place but who wasn't so ideologically interesting, I thought.

Anyway, the point of bringing up the book was to say how blurry the lines between good and bad can get when they're drawn at the level of nations and international violence. The town was regarded with the greatest of suspicion by its neighbours for consisting of 'rapscallions and reds,' and there's also a nasty description of the experience of a conscientious objector in one of the army's training camps, in spite of how these people's experiences and beliefs don't seem to me to be particularly outrageous or alien. I don't really know enough about World War I to decide how far the patriotism was justified, versus the perception of pointlessness, the perception that it was a 'rich man's war': I just know I got a bit depressed, and in the end I decided I really didn't care about the colour of your poppy. One version might make more of a statement about the undesirableness of violence and conflict and express more forcefully a determination to avoid it, but if the other version references the stark cost and suffering, it's not by way of celebration but to serve as a reminder. So, pomposity aside, if I'd gone for one rather than the other it wouldn't involve a principle, just a question of emphasis. I think.