It looks like two pigs fighting under a blanket

I need to watch every movie starring Olympia Dukakis.

I just watched Steel Magnolias for the first time since childhood. First of all, it stars Dolly Parton and I love her, big hair, face lift, boob job and all. And then, my husband's away at the coast, and Steel Magnolias is the sort of film you only ever watch when your husband is away at the coast and there's only the cats to see you cry buckets when Sally Field finally breaks down. The really surprising performance is by Daryl Hannah, who is hilarious in her various manifestations as nervous wallflower, reformed party girl and evangelical Christian. I didn't know she had comic chops like that! What an underrated performer.

But lest you think that I have lulled myself into a Thai takeout chick flick stupor, I'll have you know that I've been mulling over a very deep question for the last two days.

Does knowledge carry moral weight?

No, I'm not stoned. Seriously: is knowledge morally relative; for example, does that fact that NASA recruited Nazi scientists (aka war criminals) to get us to the moon before the Russians somehow devalue the achievement? Should we have left humanity's feet firmly on earth rather than use our least heavenly brothers to reach celestial heights?

This is a good question, I think, especially given the recent and well-publicized prosecution of John Demjanjuk, an 89-year old alleged concentration camp guard now being held in Germany on murder charges. I'm of two minds about this situation. On the one hand, if he's guilty then he should spend the rest of his life in jail. He's lucky to have lived a happy, safe life after denying the same to thousands of innocent victims and it's time to pay the Piper. On the other hand, what's the point? At 89 he's probably repressed or rationalized his involvement in the Holocaust. Either he feels remorse or he does not, but packing his wrinkly butt in prison will only inspire self-pity and put the burden for his care on the German tax payer. Besides, it's hypocritical of the US to aid in the prosecution of octogenarians 50 years after recruiting their colleagues for the air and space program. Are these arrests the result of residual guilt? A tacit acknowledgement of the failure of the space program to establish whatever world stability and happy American hegemony the original Cold War ideologues thought it would?

Thank you for your time and energies, Herr Nazi. You bad boy, you.

I'm sure that the Nazis' contributions to academia weren't limited to rocket science. What about Mengele's medical experiments, how have they impacted modern medicine? Are we morally obligated to eschew this material; or, are we morally obligated to embrace this material as a means for saving future lives? What about Mercedes Benz and Volkswagen's and Doc Martins? Are ideas and items eternally innocent? And, a related question, when does responsibility for the Holocaust end? Will we hunt and prosecute every last member of the 3rd Reich so that we can people the German jails with incontinent Aryans and wipe from our consciences the shame of sending boats of refugees back to Germany?

...

I try not to dwell on the Holocaust. My application essay for the seminary (yes, I have a graduate degree in modern Jewish history...so how is it that I have just learned about NASA?!) was about relinquishing our hold on a traumatic past that does nothing to strengthen modern commitment to Jewish community and culture. I care very deeply about not defining Judaism by what has been done to Jews. Yet, learning that our trip to the moon was the end result of Nazi experimentation, and enslavement, and the careful erasure of war records, tarnishes an act I've always idealized a bit. And this idealization has been aided by an American educational policy to not teach students about the Cold War and to interpret all technological progress as inherently good and ethically neutral. When you separate "one small step for man" from the USA's and the USSR's petty rat race for universal domination it is an amazing triumph. Looked at within its socio-political context, Armstrong's moonwalk was a colossal pissing contest between two countries desperate to do anything besides examine their own moral failings.


So how did I get from Steel Magnolias to Wernher von Braun? It would trivialize both to reduce each to a lesson about life and death, or the impact of independent decisions on a community. Is science like art, heavy with history and continual meaning? Should it be studied for its nuances, for its dalliances with the emotive--something we try very hard to excise from our laboratories and science funding?

Surely yes?