The Girl Who Was on Fire (20 page)

Memory triggers become less dangerous. A primrose can be planted as an intentional reminder, a memorial. Dandelions bloom where fire blackened everything. Good memories are like that, small and persistent. That’s why Katniss gives her attention to every act of goodness she has seen. She really is like the mockingjay. In the past she was an instrument, a weapon in a war, but life is finding a way forward in her. It’s a long way back, but in a safe place, with a few people who love her without demanding heroics, she is finally able to trust the world enough to have children and make the book that remembers all the things that should not be forgotten. She’s imagining a future. That takes more courage than being a girl on fire.

BLYTHE WOOLSTON
is the author of
The Freak Observer
, a novel about coping with PTSD (no, really, it’s about theoretical physics and grief ...). Her second book, which is about learning to live with the scars of a MRSA infection (no, really, it’s a buddy road-trip novel with lots of trout fishing ...) is scheduled for release by Carolrhoda Lab in February 2012. She lives mostly in Montana. She conducts her virtual existence at
BlytheWoolston.com
.

 

 

 

Reality television wasn’t the only inspiration for the Hunger Games. Television news during the War on Terror also played a role. And news coverage is something Sarah Darer Littman knows well. She isn’t just a YA writer; she’s also a newspaper columnist whose political column ran during the height of the war. Here, she uses her experiences to draw some alarming parallels between war in Panem and in our world that may change the way you think about not just Presidents Snow and Coin, but also Peeta, Gale, and even Katniss.

 

 

M
aybe it’s because of my political background, but when I read Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series the focus was never about Team Gale or Team Peeta the way it was for so many readers; the romance was a subplot. I majored in political science in college, and when I’m not writing books for teens, I’m a columnist for Hearst newspapers and a writer and blogger for various political websites, including CT News Junkie and My Left Nutmeg. To my mind, the Hunger Games trilogy was always more about “The System”—a political system that would not just allow but
require
children to fight to the death in televised games.

According to an interview in the
School Library Journal
, Collins said she drew her inspiration for the Hunger Games from imagining a cross between the war in Iraq and reality TV, after flipping through the channels one night and seeing the juxtaposition between the coverage of the war and reality TV programming. While I’ve never had the privilege of meeting Suzanne Collins and have no idea as to her political views, I don’t think that the uncanny similarity between the themes she took on in
Mockingjay
and the issues that we as a nation struggled with during the Bush administration’s War on Terror is an accident.

Reading
Mockingjay
, I relived through Katniss some of the helplessness, frustration, anger, and confusion that I felt during the eight years of the Bush administration—the same sense of looking at my country Through the Looking Glass that I continue to feel when I see certain religions and ethnic groups being demonized by politicians and media figures. I experienced that
same helplessness I felt when I read about American citizens being designated as “enemy combatants” and held for years without the right of
habeas corpus
. The same anger that coursed through my veins when I read that our government was using waterboarding, a recognized form of torture for which we prosecuted Japanese officers after World War II, yet using the Orwellian doublespeak of “
enhanced interrogation techniques
” in an attempt to desensitize us to this departure from both our national values and international law. Perhaps this is why this book has stuck with me and buzzed around my brain for months after reading it.

This dark period of our history has particular resonance for me because it was during the years when I was cutting my teeth as a regular political columnist for the
Greenwich Time
. I started in January 2003, on eve of the Iraq war. It was, perhaps, an inauspicious time to be a critic of the Bush administration in the predominantly Republican town of Greenwich, Connecticut, where George H.W. Bush had grown up and the Bush family still has roots. One of my early columns, entitled “Bush in a China Shop,” warned that the administration’s failure to secure broad-based support for the Iraq war didn’t bode well for any subsequent peace and quoted philosopher Bertrand Russell: “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so sure of themselves and wiser people so full of doubt.” In another column, “Wake up, America,” I urged readers to educate themselves about how the Patriot Act was eroding our civil liberties and warned that the United States was becoming like the parent who says, “do as I say, not as I do” when it came to human rights and liberties.

I received a lot of angry mail, in which I was called, among other things, an “America-hating terrorist lover,” a “communist” (even though I hadn’t even touched on economic policy in
the column), and my all-time favorite, someone who was “using the American Way of Life to destroy the American Way of Life and the Rest of Western Civilization in the process.” (I was strangely proud of that last one. All that power from one 700-word column, when I couldn’t even get my kids to put their clothes in the laundry basket! The pen really
is
mightier than the sword.)

There were common themes running through the angry letters I received: that I was unpatriotic—bordering on traitorous—for questioning government policy, and that anyone the government had deemed a terrorist suspect had no right to due process and deserved whatever treatment they got.

Let’s take a look at what I believe is a pivotal passage in
Mockingjay
, the one where we not only see some of the same ethical dilemmas being raised, but also where it became clear to me that Katniss could never end up with Gale. Katniss visits Beetee and Gale in the Special Defense area, where they are working on designs for new weapons, and recognizes Gale’s twitch-up snare from their times hunting for sustenance in the woods of District 12. Beetee and Gale are adapting the ideas behind Gale’s traps into weapons for use against humans. What disturbs Katniss most is the psychology behind the weapons—that they are talking about placing booby-trapped explosives near food and water supplies and, even worse, creating two-stage devices that result in greater destruction of life by playing on that most human of emotions: compassion. The first bomb goes off, and then when rescue workers come in to aid the wounded and dying, a secondary device explodes.

Katniss gives voice to her unease about this strategy:

Gale’s “they do it, so why shouldn’t we?” response reminded me of mail I got after a column I wrote following revelations of abuses by the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib prison. Several writers questioned why I was so concerned about those imprisoned at Abu Ghraib after what “they” did to us on 9/11. Never mind that in all likelihood the inhabitants of Abu Ghraib had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11, or that, according to an International Committee of the Red Cross report dated February 2004, military intelligence officers estimated that “between 70 to 90 percent of persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake.”

One writer asked me how I, as a Jew, could feel badly about what happened at Abu Ghraib, when Nicholas Berg, a Jewish contractor working in Iraq, had recently been beheaded. I found the question astonishing, because to me, it was a non sequitur. The murder of Nick Berg was horrifying in the extreme. I would have found it equally abhorrent had he been a Christian or a Muslim, a Sikh or a Hindu or an atheist. Like Katniss, I feel that there are certain absolutes, lines that cannot be crossed without giving up one’s own humanity. Although I hadn’t agreed with the invasion of Iraq in the first place, I’d wanted to believe President Bush when he said: “Iraq is free of rape rooms and torture chambers.” I honestly didn’t believe that when he said that, what he
really
meant was, “Iraq is free of
Saddam Hussein’s
torture chambers—ours, on the other hand, are now open.” To me, the murder of Nick Berg in no way excused the behavior of the
U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib, or the culture from the top of the Bush administration down, that enabled it. Torturing prisoners in response to a horrifying act doesn’t make us even. It just means that more horrifying acts have occurred.

As Katniss observes, there is no “rule book,” but across all faiths and creeds there is some version of “The Golden Rule”—“Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself.”

This principal of faith has also been codified into civil law. Our Founding Fathers wrote a prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment” into the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution. In modern times, in response to some of the worst atrocities in the first half of the twentieth century, the United Nations created a series of international laws and treaties in an attempt to prevent any recurrence. One of these is Common Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Convention, which prohibits ‘’violence to life and person,” in particular “mutilation, cruel treatment and torture,” and also prohibits “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.”

In 1984, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention Against Torture, which the United States signed in April 1988 and ratified in October 1994. This treaty prohibits extraditing or deporting any person to a country where they will face a significant risk of torture. Yet under the Bush administration, our government engaged in the practice of
extraordinary rendition
, sending detainees on secret flights to Egypt, Morocco, Syria, and Jordan, all of which have been known to condone torture within their borders and have been cited by our own State Department for human rights violations.

Many of my columns touched on such policies, questioning if they really contributed to our security (because real life is not like the TV series
24
, and moral issues aside, there is no scientific evidence to prove that torture is an effective method of obtaining
actionable intelligence) and further, if such policies were consistent with our values as Americans. No matter how we choose to phrase it, our government didn’t just break the Golden Rule; it broke U.S. and international law.

I believe that in order to support the use of torture one has to convince oneself, through hatred, that the person being tortured is subhuman, or else surrender a part of one’s own humanity. Otherwise, it would not be possible to inflict that kind of pain and suffering on another. As I wrote in the Abu Ghraib column back in 2004:

Following this, one woman actually wrote to me asking me how I could say waterboarding was torture since it left no physical scars—there were “no broken bones” and it was “just water.” And after all—these were
terrorists
we were talking about. The ends clearly justified the means for her, just as they do for Gale, Snow, and Coin.

Leaving aside the fact that waterboarding creates the sensation of drowning and therefore can hardly be considered “just water,” Peeta’s mental hijacking by the Capitol shows us that
psychological torture can be equally as damaging as physical torture, and the effects harder to “cure.” A 2007 ICRC study found that prisoners who had been tortured using techniques similar to waterboarding by the Chilean government under the dictatorship of General Pinochet still have persistent nightmares of drowning almost two decades later. Broken bones don’t last nearly as long.

Like the readers of my columns, Gale can’t understand why Katniss cares so much when she finds out that her prep team from the Capitol is being subjected to inhumane treatment by President Coin: