![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
About Flight 91 and heroes
Sep. 11th, 2012 06:20 pmProbably the most important learning experience in my life took place when I was about eighteen. One part of it was a comics masterpiece, published just as I was falling back in love with comics. Chris Claremont, a man who has never since written anything remotely as good, indeed who has rarely written anything good at all, wrote one of the greatest comic-book stories ever published, the “Dark Phoenix epic” (Uncanny X-Men #125-138), in which the protagonist Jean Grey eventually committed suicide rather than become a monster. I read it chapter by chapter as it came out, and it pretty much dominated my eighteenth year.
This might in itself not have been so significant, but for the echo it raised in some very real and ugly events. This was also the time of rampant terrorism and mafia power in Italy, and only a short time earlier a particularly horrible crime had taken place. The Red Brigades – part of whose strategy was to become a sort of violent parallel trades union, taking the part of supposedly abused and endangered workers – abducted an industrial engineer called Giuseppe Taliercio, who managed a factory in which some industrial accidents had taken place. The terrorists tried to get him to support their ignorant, conspiracy-theory account of these accidents; Taliercio, knowing full well what expected him if he refused, still refused, and insisted on telling the story as he knew he had happened. So, after 46 days of hideous detention and torture, they murdered him. I read a stunning account of his last days in the left-wing weekly L’Espresso, which was followed by an infinitely moving letter of thanks from Taliercio’s sister, who thanked the journalists for their account of his courage, and concluded: “So long as one of us is left who is willing to die rather than lose his humanity, we are not finished yet.”
I don’t remember which I read first, the story of Jean Grey’s suicide or the letter from Taliercio’s sister. What I am clear about is that the letter, and in particular the unforgettable last line, made clear to me that, for all the mythological and science-fictional trappings, the story of Jean Grey’s choice to die rather than lose her humanity was about something very, very real - a choice that anyone might be called to make, that did not belong to fantasy characters and that had nothing to do with escapism, but which to the contrary dealt with the most serious and central issues of real human life.
And this is my quotation for the heroes of Flight 91: “As long as there is one of us left willing to die rather than lose his humanity, we are not finished yet.”
This might in itself not have been so significant, but for the echo it raised in some very real and ugly events. This was also the time of rampant terrorism and mafia power in Italy, and only a short time earlier a particularly horrible crime had taken place. The Red Brigades – part of whose strategy was to become a sort of violent parallel trades union, taking the part of supposedly abused and endangered workers – abducted an industrial engineer called Giuseppe Taliercio, who managed a factory in which some industrial accidents had taken place. The terrorists tried to get him to support their ignorant, conspiracy-theory account of these accidents; Taliercio, knowing full well what expected him if he refused, still refused, and insisted on telling the story as he knew he had happened. So, after 46 days of hideous detention and torture, they murdered him. I read a stunning account of his last days in the left-wing weekly L’Espresso, which was followed by an infinitely moving letter of thanks from Taliercio’s sister, who thanked the journalists for their account of his courage, and concluded: “So long as one of us is left who is willing to die rather than lose his humanity, we are not finished yet.”
I don’t remember which I read first, the story of Jean Grey’s suicide or the letter from Taliercio’s sister. What I am clear about is that the letter, and in particular the unforgettable last line, made clear to me that, for all the mythological and science-fictional trappings, the story of Jean Grey’s choice to die rather than lose her humanity was about something very, very real - a choice that anyone might be called to make, that did not belong to fantasy characters and that had nothing to do with escapism, but which to the contrary dealt with the most serious and central issues of real human life.
And this is my quotation for the heroes of Flight 91: “As long as there is one of us left willing to die rather than lose his humanity, we are not finished yet.”
