P.S., I am not a racist.

In high school, I took a course on social intolerance. Among many convoluted papers and oral presentations I had to give, I actually learned a thing or two. The class watched parts of Birth of a Nation and read an autobiographical piece written by George Takei about his life growing up in a Japanese internment camp in California during World War II. The details of his time there are fuzzy, but I keenly recall that the title of the article was "Home Was a Horse Stall", named so because the facility to which his family (and several others) was assigned was a converted horse stable.

The class dealt with some pretty unsettling stuff.

Particularly, I recall one day in class when the teacher read aloud excerpts from a document that she'd obtained from a white supremacy website. It was somewhere between 1995 and 1997, so "website" is a generous term meaning "somebody figured out how to use Netscape Composer and upload it to their dialup ISP's ~user hosting account". I don't remember the actual site, but given the list we went through, they all had "storm" somewhere in the title, like "Stormfront", "Frontstorm", "Firestorm", "Storm of the Century", "Stormstorm", and so on. I'm afraid skinheads aren't the most creative of folks.

The piece she read was a howto, something that runs a chill down your spine to realize that somebody wrote this thinking "Hey. We have to get our act together or else we'll never exterminate those inferior races." It outlined the process one would need to undergo in order to prepare to execute orders from Der Kommissar, or the Grand Wizard, or whomever. Much like how the military trains recruits to turn off the logical part of their minds in order to do whatever Uncle Sam says they should do — sometimes at great personal risk to the soldier — this document my teacher read went into depth discussing how you have to put aside your feelings and do what your race asks of you with, and this is a phrase I have never forgotten, "clinical detachment". From there it went on to compare the need for a zen-like state of focus to that of a surgeon performing an operation.

It bothered me then, and it bothers me now. Not just the white supremacy article, mind you, but also the fact that the surgical profession demands its members turn off the part of their brain that should normally be saying things like "Oh my God, this is a person you're operating on. He has a wife and a family, and you're cutting into his guts with a scalpel, what the fuck?!" Surgeons, of course, are usually trying to heal people, not build a master race. Still, the idea of having such focus intrigues me. It's a little like playing with fire: at what point do we detach from what makes us human? Is it safe or wise to do such a thing? I didn't think it was possible to develop a clinical detachment from something I cared about, for much the same reason as surgeons don't operate on their own family members.

I bring all of this up because I emptied out my Drobo and put all the old ex-girlfriend pictures into an encrypted partition. This was not an easy thing to do, since it's pretty hard to handle pictures without looking at them. Some would even say it's impossible. Nonetheless, I put the thoughts out of my head as they percolated up and went forward with the task at hand. As McCartney says, "When you've got a job to do, you've got to do it well." Once I've convinced myself there's nothing left on the Drobo, I'll burn the collection to a DVD-R and put it in the pile with all of the photos that I removed from their picture frames tonight. I'm not sure what to do with a bunch of empty picture frames, but I'm sure I'll think of something. When Monk gets back, I'll entrust the bundle of memories to him and consider the matter closed. He's pretty good about archiving these kinds of things. After all, he's one of my top men.

Top. Men.