a resent message: ATT: JMS: Are You Disheartened? (SPOILERS THRU 4th SEASON)

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Subject: ATT: JMS: Are You Disheartened? (SPOILERS THRU 4th SEASON)

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From: Laura Appelbaum <l-appelbaum at usa.net>
Date: 21 Jun 1997 17:30:22 -0400
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This post touches on everything that has occured in B5 up through the
fourth season episode "Intersections in Real Time."  Spoiler space
follows:
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Dear jms,
Reading the posts on this newsgroup, and even talking to some of the
members of my Maryland Gathering in the last few weeks, have been
extremely disheartening for me, and I wonder if you share the sentiment.
Here is a group of self-selected individuals from all around the world
who have demonstrated an interest in making connections between the
events of your story and the moral, ethical, literary and historic
context in which it is placed.  And yet, lately, it seems as if none of
them "get it."

I'm an artist, and it's all reminding me of when I won an award for a
painting I entered in an art exhibition in North Carolina.  It is a
life-size watercolor portrait of myself, from the waist up, nude, arms
folded across my chest, paint brushes in hand, my face starring out
fiercely from the surface, entitled "Confronting Tradition: 
Self-Portrait of the Artist as the Nude."  When I was called up by the
President of the Art Association in question to receive my award (the
man himself allegedly being an artist), the question I was asked was NOT
"can you further explain what you are trying to say about the role of
the female body in art," or some other relevant question, but (I swear
this is true) "Why isn't a pretty girl like you SMILING in that
painting?"  This is how I feel reading the excited posts discussing the
need to exterminate all of the telepaths on Earth, or that Sheridan
wasn't REALLY tortured enough in "Intersections," and anyway, what's the
point, because Clark's government can just fake his image anyway?  I
want to reach across the internet, grab them by the throats and scream,
"how can you have watched this show for four years and POSSIBLY say
that?  Weren't you paying ANY attention?"

I find it extremely depressing, even frightening, that so many people on
this newsgroup have, effectively, bought the "logic" of who to me,
anyway, have seemed to be the obvious "bad guys" of the story.  Almost
every discussion of "Face of the Enemy," or "Intersections in Real
Time," seems to be centered around agreeing with Dr. Mengele, excuse me,
William Edgers, President Clark, Garibaldi's "friends," Bester, the Psi
Corps, the paranoid, the short-sighted, the logic of oppression and
genocide.  No one is pointing out that the one race WITHOUT telepaths
has spent the entire time since "The Gathering" trying to reobtain them,
or that the Minbari and Centauri, who have telepaths and no discernable
overseeing force like Psi Corps, have never seemed to have had any
problem with their situations at all.  No one is saying, "what can we
learn from them," they're all saying, "it's true, it IS going to boil
down to us versus them, and either we wipe out the telepaths or they're
gonna kill all of us."  No one seems to have learned anything from the
Shadow War -- that only by teaming up with those most different from
ourselves, setting aside our petty differences for a greater, unified
cause, can we succeed where thousands of previous generations have
failed.  When Sheridan came back from Za'ha'Dum, my fear was that no one
was sceptical enough of him, that people weren't still seeing him as a
man, one who could make mistakes as well as triumph over death.  Now I
see those fears were completely misplaced.  The majority of voices on
this newsgroup seem to think that Sheridan is nothing more than a Vorlon
dupe, who knows nothing about anything that counts.  And that's because
what counts with them is violence and destruction, not faith, hope,
compassion, justice, "one (wo)man's ability to change the universe."  I
guess I've sustained the fantasy that yes, the world we live in is a
pretty rotten place, but that at least if the average person from this
newsgroup were confronted with the choice of resisting ANOTHER
Holocaust, another Armenian genocide, another Bosnia, another Rwanda,
I'd know where they'd stand.  Well, I guess I do, I just find it's not
the place I would have thought at all.  Where's Valen when WE need him?

I'd really like to hear your perspective on this; in fact, I think I
kind of NEED to hear it.
LMA

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From: jmsatb5 at aol.com (Jms at B5)
Date: 23 Jun 1997 10:41:57 -0400
Lines: 45

I think that some people sometimes look in the wrong part of the picture,
or apply subjective opinions in ways that are offered as fact...and this
can sometimes get in the way of things.  

The person, for instance, who said that the story was botched because, at
the end, Sheridan saw that he was *not* going to die, and that the Drazi
wasn't dead, and thus never had to worry about being killed anymore, and
that this therefore, quid pro quo, rendered the whole thing toothless.  

See, I have relatives who were in Europe during WW II.  I'm basically only
about one-and-a-half generations American.  And there was this game the
Nazis used to like to play with prisoners...they'd take them out and have
them dig their own graves.  They'd stand there in the hot sun, and watch
as these prisoners dug the holes that would hold their own bodies.  Then,
when the holes were of sufficient size, they would stand behind the
prisoners, put guns to the backs of their heads, and pull the
triggers...on empty chambers...and laugh as the prisoners fainted.

Did that do anything to lessen the horror of the situation?

If anything, for that moment when Sheridan was about to die, or thought he
was, death was an escape, a release...so the end says to him that he will
not have an easy way out of here, that death is no escape, that he cannot
get away from here until he breaks...that they're going to keep doing this
to him again and and again and again until he breaks...and the Drazi being
there at the end didn't say "we won't kill him," it says "the conversion
you thought you got, the victory you thought you got, was meaningless."  

But because somebody thought that death was the worst thing you could do
to somebody, and that Sheridan thus knew they wouldn't (probably) kill
him, then they couldn't hope to break him.  Death would be a mercy.  To
stay alive under those conditions, that's what's hard.  But his opinion of
what he thinks is right became a criticism of my doing it *wrong*.

Anyway...a writer learns that people will respond with wide variations to
what he writes.  Some will like it, some will hate it, most will be
neutral, no matter what you do; and some will get it, some won't get it. 
You just get used to it.


 jms





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