As the war in Iraq drags on, it becomes more and more apparent that this war will be fought1
to an end that is nowhere in sight. Part of the problem is an apathy on the part of the people. While I'm no military expert, it appears as though this war is being commanded more intelligently than Vietnam, but nonetheless there is a parallel between the two, as both are wars that have dragged on for far longer than they should. Vietnam sparked outrage, protesters flooded the streets, and there was a purely political reason for a president to end the war. A large part of this was the draft.2
During the Vietnam War, student protests were massive things that shut down whole colleges, got the National Guard sent out, and made the headlines, and this was on a near daily basis. Whereas now it is once every couple of months, with the government saying what can and can't be said, where people can and can't go. It reminds me of Malcolm X talking about the March on Washington, when he talked about it being "run by whites in front of a president.... who didn't like us when he was alive." It really doesn't do much when you ask to rebel. Who knows, perhaps these protests will go down in history as what stopped the war, but the protests are less intense to this war.3
The reason is the lack of a draft. If the war is fought by a person you don't know, it is easier to feel apathy, to ignore the problem. When there is a chance you or your brother will be the one shooting and being shot at, you take the issue more seriously. So the draft will definitely lead to protests, though perhaps due to the current desensitization of the country the effect would be lessened. Still, though it is callous to say that a draft would draw attention to an issue (as it would also cost lives), I support it as a means to bring about an end to the war.
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The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a ballad written by Oscar Wilde in the year 1898 (1-2). The literal subject of the poem is an inmate in prison recalling his experiences regarding another inmate. The other inmate carries a death sentence for the murder of his wife in a fit of rage.
The poem as an entire work is broken down into five separate parts, broken down on basis of the plot of the poem as it progresses chronologically. The first of these parts is sixteen stanzas, and is the part of the poem in which we learn of the murder. This is the origin of the most memorable (and my favorite) lines of the poem in verse seven: "Yet each man kills the thing he loves/ by each let this be heard./ Some do it with a bitter look,/ Some with a flattering word." If the poem is, as it seems, a defence of Wilde's own crimes, this could be taken in many interesting lights.
In the first view, these lines could be taken as Wilde's typical play with words. In this view, the lines are more aligned with Wilde's roots in aestheticism than of any defence of his character or his crime. The other interpretation is that in showing the prisoner as only as guilty as the rest of society, Wilde is proclaiming himself no more guilty than the rest of the populace. My personal view is that he is condemning his accusers, as evidenced in the following lines "the coward does it with a kiss." In all of my reading of Oscar Wilde, he shows a great ability for double entendres. This could be taken as saying the kiss is how the offender kills his love, but I see it as saying something akin to "The coward does this with a smile", not as what the action is done using, just as something the action is done while doing. What many scholars agree on, however, is that the poem is in part a defence of Wilde's actions.
One Wilde researcher, Robert Merle, evaluated the poem in a mostly psychological fashion. He is one of the leading scholars who cites this work as Wilde defending himself. His main contribution would be his answering of some serious questions challenging this idea. Foremost among these is the simple "why not just defend yourself directly?" While I view the answer as a simple "it wouldn't be in Oscar Wilde's character," Merle goes considerably further, demonstarting that "if [Wilde] had appealed to the public directly, and under his own name, in protest against his conviction, he would have been accused of trying to defend homosexuality." The world at the time was not prepared for that issue, and so Wilde was forced to defend himself through allegory. Still, people would make the connection, and if what Wilde did was a crime, evidence against him was quit concrete. Which makes it all the more revealing that Wilde doesn't say the man isn't guilty, but instead places an emphasis on all people being guilty, with the only more visible and punished, not any more culpable in wrongdoing than anyone else. This supports the poem as a defense of Wilde, "the emphasis placed on the idea that every man is guilty but not everyone has to pay... fits in with this autobiographical interpretation". Perhaps the best explanation of this phenomenon came from Wilde's An Ideal Husband: "Vulgarity is simply the conduct of other people... and falsehoods the truths of other people."()
Thus it is quite apparent that Wilde uses the poem as a vehicle for his self defense. Perhaps more interestingly is how this goes against the grain of Wilde's aesthetic roots, which typically have no basis in historical events, as "aesthticism emphasizes the absolute autonomy of works of art ... and their indepencdence of moral and social conditions,. Wilde breaks further from his typical style by making social commentary in the poem to the extent that some parts even Wilde has conceded their function to be that of propoganda(). This is understandable, Wilde's "bitter and humilating experience in prison sharpened his moral awareness and his capacity for suffering and sympathy, for human solidarity and justice."() But in the poem "imprisonment generally is a barbaric torture "(), as evidenced by the lines "It is only what is good in man / that wastes and withers there".
Thus The Ballad of Reading Gaol represents a significant break from Wilde's typical style of writing. Whereas he typically writes with very minimal emphasis on social conditions or personal experience, this poem is nothing but a defense of himself and an attack on the prison system. It can be seen as the end of Oscar Wilde's legacy, as it is the beginning of his writing on social conditions, which he died before writing too much more of. Ironically, tragically, in a gruesome way comedically, it is possible that bad health treatment in prison could have hastened Wilde's death, thus he was robbed of vitality, writing style, of his youth and possibly his life due to his pederastic impulses.
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