"We cut 'em in half with a machine gun and give 'em a Band-Aid. It was a lie and the more I saw them, the more I hated lies."- Willard

Apocalypse Now shows the justification and humanitarian effort behind the Vietnam War for lies. Calling murder humane and indifference justice is clearly mad, but telling a lie seems better seeing the madness. Lies abound in the river and pile up like mud at the delta, which is as far from the darkness as the river allows. Captain Willard becomes fascinated with the river's dark end and his fascination leads him to the heart of darkness. The truth, the darkness, captures him. Here he sees the clarity and madness-the truth.

"She talked about weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways, till, upon my word, she made me quite uncomfortable. I ventured to hint that the company was run for profit."

Marlowe hints at the truth before he even reaches Kurtz. Obviously he hates the lies too and can hint at the truth. Marlowe, with his hatred for lies, is drawn up the river away from the civilizing and toward the demoralizing. At the river's end, Marlowe can see the truth-madness and clarity.

Marlowe and Willard both evince the dive into true human nature. Both characters hate the lies and become fascinated by darkness. Darkness, in both Apocalypse Now and "Heart of Darkness," is the truth. Both works show the dark truth behind what humans beleive is a better nature. "Heart of Darkness" shows that Imperialism wasn't about civilizing, but in truth was about stealing. Apocalypse Now shows that Vietnam wasn't about freedom but, was about control. Both expose the lies and the vanity in civility that the lies shine from. The vanity to think oneself more righteous than any other. The vanity that gives one the right to kill without murdering, take without stealing, and speak without saying. The vanity that makes civility the savagery.

In my opinion Learning to be Dead by Italo Calvino is the most complex story we have read. Without any active plot or characters, Calvino expresses the incommunicatable task that is learning to be dead. Calvino, with a didactic tone and theme, explores the immensely complex relationship humans have with our being and this includes our being dead. Death is an essential state which Calvino explains by saying "You must not confuse being dead with not being. Learning to be Dead resists all interpretation in the story, seeing its stunning sparseness, but it is interpreted in its application to life. There are no symbols only thoughts, which naturally have to be interpreted in the mind.The structure, lacking plot, active characters, and objective action is deceptively simple, but the implications for being have a complexity hardly covered on paper. Why must one learn to be dead? Calvino explains the difficulty in the task, but the unanswerable question is: Death is innately incommunicable so how do we learn to be dead? The dead's reluctant and smug smile expresses the irresponsibility no living being can assume. There is no variety to interpretation available with the title. The title Learning to be Dead offers only the interpretation to the story that we are all learning to be dead because one day we will all be dead.

Othello

Iago must be pure evil seeing how he damns everyone around him for no other reason than fun. He says it himself that his deceit is "out of sport." He values the whole cast of Othello no more than he values a game designed for self for jealous gloating. In the end he gets nothing, not even the money stolen from Roderigo,but he still shows no remorse or regret. In fact he must take his sport a step further and kill his own wife! A truly remarkable and deplorable character, there is something in Iago' careless villainy we must admire. His plans can't fail because they have no objective, he lies by telling the truth, and he revels in the "Divinity of Hell." His soul must lack all love and honor or else how could he be jealous of something he already had. However one sided Iago's soul may be though, he himself has a definite duality. "I am not that which I am", he is a devil and the right hand man. Iago shows that pure evil has two sides as no other character, except the devil himself, can. So, if hell is the pit set aflame by the devil as it was described during Catholic mass, Iago is some kind of major pyro. If he weren't a pyro how else could he understand how fires look cool and burn hot?

After reading Oedipus Rex, I walked away with an unmistakable feeling of serious catharsis that only comes from great tragedy. I felt sad but releived in a way that is really undescribable. Even though the message of Oedipus is were all doomed, it didn't make me feel empty or doubtful about anything. This makes sense because doubts are empty-they shy away from feeling and let oneself retreat to ignorance.

In case you were wondering he's on an atom bomb and furthermore if you were wondering watch Dr. Strangelove.

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"I will bury you...this manifest destiny." -Fear
This is a quote from the song Foreign Policy by the band Fear. It sounds more ominous than what I really mean for it to say, but the "I will bury you" part is very appropriate for my pen-name.