Because one of the panels I’m on in the poetry festival next week is about a writer in the holocaust, I’ve been reading a lot about holocaust porno – and the comparison is inevitable – the way everybody becomes evil in this situation, even the victims.  That point has to remain central in all our minds all the time in times like these.

But I was thinking of something else today.  The doctor who was supposed to be fixing something in my skin kept me waiting for an hour, even though I had been injected with something to dull the pain two hours before.  But when he arrived, and began to work on me, he could not be his usual charming self.  Instead he had to talk about how young men had to have drastic plastic surgery and how much of a waste it was.  I realized how he had been working on some soldier whose face had been blown up and my silly little mark had no significance to him.  or to me either anymore.