I A COMMENT ON COURAGE Tim Braun " . . . the artist simply fasted on and on, as he had once dreamed of doing, and it was no trouble to him, just as he had always foretold, but no one counted the days... Franz Kafka, The Hunger Artist Among the famous historical monuments in Washington, D.C. situated in Potomac Park was a squalid little cage made of bamboo. It was crude and rickety, the bamboo almost black it was so weather-beaten. It was part of an exhibit set up by some veterans of the Vietnam War, still dressed in their ragged combat fatigues, who wanted to remind visitors to the park not to forget the soldiers who had never returned from Southeast Asia. The cage was an exact replica of the kind of enclosure that many Americans had been confined to by their captors during the war. It was a miniature prison, every bit as crude and humiliating as the long war. It was difficult to imagine a grown man could actually fit inside such a small enclosure. And sometimes, trying to convince themselves this was so, visitors to the park would picture themselves inside the cage, with their knees gathered inside their arms and their backs bent, though the cage scarcely seemed large enough to hold any one of the dogs that roamed the park. It was a hideous thing, confining its occupant to the darkest corner of the black heart of isolation and fear. One of the young revolutionaries in Andre Malraux’s novel Man ’s Fate is asked, “What do you call dignity?” and he replies, “The opposite of humiliation.” Clearly, one of the worst things one person can do to another is to humiliate him; it isthecruelest of cruelties, capable of denying someone his very dignity as a person. There was, to be sure, no dignity to be found inside the bamboo cage in Potomac Park, only the ignominy of incarceration. Inside a cage one is inevitable diminished, held up to ridicule, deprived of the respect he can demand from others and owes to himself. Inside one grows smaller and smaller, threatening to disappear as he blends in with the shadows of the surrounding bars. J U stonishingly, a Marine veteran of * A t h e Vietnam War, by the name of Casanova, confined himself to a similar bamboo cage alongside a country road in the state of Washington. It is hard to comprehend why anyone would intentionally submit himself to such humiliation. People put other people into prison By T.R. Healy Illustration by Jack McLarty cells all the time, but rational people do not put themselves into prison. Casanova, as it turned out, intended to maintain a fast for 61 days inside his cage, one day for each Washington state serviceman missing in action in Southeast Asia. His aim was similar to that of the veterans who had built the cage in Potomac Park. He wanted to make people aware of the plight of those veterans who had not returned from the war. During the course of his fast he gained considerable attention across the country, receiving journalists and photographers who had ignored him when he had returned home from the jungles of Vietnam but who now treated him like a national celebrity. He ended his fast after 51 days when he received a telephone call from President Reagan assuring him of the adm inistration’s determination to account for the missing American servicemen. He had lost 45 pounds during his ordeal, seriously impairing his health. Surely, many people regarded the action of this veteran as ridiculous and wasteful, but his supporters, who witnessed him inside his roadside cage and saw his bones slowly shining through his skin, felt a searing admiration. They envied his resolve, his conviction, some even wished they could sit beside him inside his cage. His fast recalled the Irish revolutionary Bobby Sands who, a few years earlier, had conducted a hunger strike inside his prison cell to protest the policies of the British government in Northern Ireland and starved to death after 66 days. Sands, plainly, did not take his life then. Rather he gave his life.
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